UPSes: APC

No surprise here. APC won a decisive victory over competitors in both technical and channel-program areas to maintain its status as CRN’s Channel Champion in the UPS category.

APC’s overall rating of 80.4 was more than 10 points higher than that of Belkin (70.2) and Tripp Lite (70.1), which is a substantial lead in this solution provider satisfaction survey.

APC earned the highest ratings on every criterion in the survey, but was especially strong in technical areas. Its best showing was on the highly weighted criterion of product reliability, where it pulled 18.4 points ahead of runner-up Belkin.

“We recommend solutions based on what the implementation needs, but APC solutions have been stellar every time we’ve implemented one, and that definitely leads to growth,” said Gregory Malik, vice president of services and CTO of CPCS/Zones, Renton, Wash., and Wood Dale, Ill., which sells Tripp Lite, Powerware, Belkin and APC UPS solutions.

APC’s dominance in the UPS market goes beyond simply providing a reliable, affordable and channel-friendly product, said David Hope, vice president of sales for DSi, a Greensboro, N.C.-based division of Xcelecom.

“We selected APC several years ago as our leading partner for UPS solutions for a couple reasons: We believe APC is the market leader. They have very good name recognition, a large product selection, and they have developed technology offerings with companies like Cisco Systems,” Hope said.

On channel criteria, APC’s satisfaction rating of 72.2 was 7.8 points higher than Belkin and 7.9 points higher than Tripp Lite. Its best showing was for vendor support over the life cycle of a project, where it was 12.7 points ahead of the next closest vendor, Tripp Lite.

“They brought us many, many leads and their people help us close the deals,” Malik said. “They also give effective training to our sales force so they can better bring information to our customers about APC solutions.”

Hope said DSi has seen its sales increase drastically since the company began selling APC UPS solutions exclusively, and APC’s channel support makes the company easy to work with. “They have done a great job of evolving their partner program,” he said. “They’ve recently revamped their program, and we like what we see.”

As one of the more consistent CRN Channel Champions year after year, APC has proven once again that combining reliable products with strong support for partners is a tough combination to beat.