Hard Facts: October 7, 2002

Five of the 11 software vendors regularly featured in CRN's survey showed increases in overall satisfaction levels last month. Microsoft, Veritas and VeriSign led the way with particularly strong gains.

For each of these three vendors, the rise in overall satisfaction was fueled not only by an increase in the percentage of solution providers satisfied with the vendors' channel programs, but also by declines in the percentage of dissatisfied solution providers. In the case of Microsoft, 56 percent of solution providers expressed satisfaction with the vendor's channel programs in August, up from 49 percent in July. At the same time, the percentage of solution providers dissatisfied with Microsoft's programs fell from 22 percent to 17 percent.

These increases, however, were almost balanced out by sharp declines in overall channel satisfaction ratings for vendors such as Novell and BEA Systems. Other vendors such as Red Hat, Check Point Software Technologies, Computer Associates International and Vignette saw smaller declines.