VARBusiness Honors 17th Annual Report Card Award Winners

VARBusiness
View photos from the event

The ARC was sponsored by Lexmark, Novell, Seagate, Symantec and be Flat. Headline entertainment was provided by John Pinette, recently named the American Comedy Awards Stand-up Comic of the Year.

It was the perfect setting for an awards presentation honoring the highest-rated vendor programs in the channel. The ARC awards recognize outstanding performance in various areas, including product innovation, support and partnership potential. Over 4,500 solution providers in 15 product categories were surveyed about their level of satisfaction with their vendor partners. This year's exclusive research was conducted by VARBusiness with support from Bernett Research Services, a Boston-based data collection company and Answers Research, a Solana Beach, Calif.-based market research and consulting firm.

"The VARBusiness Annual Report Card is the most significant industry benchmark of vendor/partner relationships in the industry because winners are selected by their own solution providers," said Robert C. DeMarzo, editorial director of VARBusiness. "There is no better gauge of a company's success than the satisfaction of its customers. The VARBusiness ARC winners are true industry leaders who set the standards that their competitors must aspire to."

Top honors were bestowed upon the following vendors:

IBM (advanced desktops and workstations, midrange servers and database software)

Dell (entry level servers)

Cisco (voice and data networking)

HP (enterprise operating platforms and network storage)

Veritas (storage management software)

Symantec (security management software)

Macromedia (application development and deployment tools and web and Internet applications)

Western Digital (disk drives)

Xerox (network color printers)

NEC/Mitsubishi (display technology)

Sprint (IP and data services)

A number of other companies were recognized for outstanding performance in many of the ARC's subcategories. Additionally, at this year's award ceremony, vendors were honored in four special categories.

Allyson Seelinger, vice president of North American enterprise and consumer channels for Symantec was selected to receive VARBusiness' first-ever Channel Executive of the Year award. Seelinger was recognized for over 15 years of dynamic software industry performance at Symantec.

Rebounding in a soft economy, NEC/Mitsubishi was honored with a Comeback Player of the Year award for moving from last to first place in VARBusiness' ARC display technology category.

Avaya was presented with VARBusiness' prestigious, new VAR Loyalty award for garnering the highest loyalty score in the ARC survey.

And, as the last highlight of the 17th Annual Report Card award ceremony, IBM's iSeries was honored with a lifetime achievement award for placing first in the midrange server category for four consecutive years.

Congratulations to all the winners!