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In this year's CRN Channel Champions Survey, Seagate Technology ran away with the title in the high capacity hard drives category on a variety of factors—showing that it takes having more than bigger or faster or cheaper drives to make believers out of channel partners.
Seagate was the top vendor across the board, getting the solution provider thumbs-up in technical criteria, program and support criteria and financial criteria. Seagate scored a 75.9 overall rating, solidly beating No. 2 Western Digital's 75.3 and far ahead of No. 3 Storage Technologies with a 70.6.
In technical criteria, Seagate, Scotts Valley, Calif., was beat out by No. 2 Western Digital Corp., Lake Forest, Calif., in functionality, availability and price for performance. But its wins in the product quality and reliability criterion, where it scored a 108.2, well ahead of Western Digital's 105.8, as well as interoperability and scalability, gave the vendor a satisfaction rating of 94.2, a .9 point lead over Western Digital.
Seagate's presales support score of 64.3, a full 2.3 point lead over its closest rival, led its win in the program and support criteria. Efforts to manage channel conflict was also a strong area for Seagate, which is especially important in a year when it was digesting Maxtor, post-acquisition.
In financial criteria, VARs also gave Seagate the highest grades for next year's projected sales increase—there the vendor had a 2.7 point lead over Western Digital. Seagate also won the services attach rate criterion—a factor that is of ever-increasing importance to the channel.
"Seagate has relationships far beyond, from the laptop to the enterprise level," said Ron Robinson, CEO of IT Data Storage, a Kennesaw, Ga.-based solution provider. "They have 15 or 20 products—online, disk-based storage, storage for transaction-based applications."
To add to Seagate's fortune, he said, is timing. With a push toward server consolidation and virtualization, many companies are taking the opportunity to upgrade storage hardware—putting Seagate into a solid position.
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