2009 Channel Champs: 10 Big Bangs For The Buck
Wondering how your favorite vendor stacks up when it comes to helping your profits grow? The Channel Champs survey rated 115 vendors across 24 product and service categories. We asked solution providers to rate those vendors on a number of criteria, including financial factors. Interestingly, some vendors that perform well in the financial criteria do not fare as well in technical or support areas. Others do well across the board.
Here now are the 10 vendors who performed the best in these financial criteria: Competitive Pricing; Product Margins, SPIFs and Rebates; Dollars of Revenue for services for every dollar sold or recommended; and Expected Sales.
Those ratings culminated in an overall score indicating how well a vendor supports its VAR.
Score: 66.2
Acer's scores in the Notebooks category placed the vendor tenth out of all surveyed vendors for Financial Factors.
Its standout performance was in the Competitive Pricing criteria, compared with other Notebook vendors. However, although it was the Channel Champ in the Notebook category for Financial Factors, Acer earned mediocre scores (fourth out of seven vendors) in Product Margins and Expected Sales (a narrow third-place victory).
Score: 66.2
Hewlett-Packard's performance in the SMB Volume Servers category earned it ninth place out of all surveyed vendors for Financial Factors.
Within the SMB Volume Servers category, HP won the Competitive Pricing criteria, edging out Dell by a fraction of a point. Lenovo won a slim victory in Product Margins and a slightly more substantial one in Expected Sales, while Dell won handily in Dollars of Revenue.
Score: 66.4
Seagate's scores from the High-Capacity Hard Drives category put it in eighth place in the Financial Factors Criteria out of all vendors in the entire survey.
Within the category, Seagate finished second to Western Digital in Financial Factors. The vendor did, however, steal the Expected Sales criteria from WD by two points.
Score: 66.5
Samsung had the seventh-highest score in the Financial Factors Criteria of all vendors in the entire survey.
Within the Workgroup Color Printers category, Samsung played bridesmaid largely to Xerox. Its scores in Competitive Pricing (in which it lagged Xerox by roughly 2.5 points), helped it come in second place in the Financial Factors Criteria in the Workgroup Color Printers category.
Score: 66.5
The SMB External Storage category had a strong showing in the Financial Factors subcategory with all four vendors placing on this Top 10 list.
Despite some scores that were not stellar compared to vendors in the SMB External Storage category, Buffalo Tech did very well in Financial Factors when compared to all the vendors in all the categories of the survey.
Its best score in Financial Factors came in Expected Sales, beating Channel Champ Western Digital by nearly nine points.
Score: 66.9
Coming in fifth place out of all surveyed vendors in the Financial Factors Criteria, is Seagate.
In the SMB External Storage category, Seagate came in second to Western Digital in Competitive Pricing, third after WD and Hitachi GST in Product Margins; second to Hitachi in Dollars of Revenue and second to Buffalo Tech in Expected Sales.
Score: 67.1
Fourth place of all surveyed vendors in the Financial Factors Criteria belongs to WD.
Within the High-Capacity Hard Drives category, WD did particularly well in Competitive Pricing and Product Margins, beating out Overall Category Channel Champ Seagate. Although it slipped slightly in Dollars of Revenue and Expected Sales, WD took the Financial Factors criteria in the High-Capacity Drives category by a margin of less than one point.
Score: 67.9
Hitachi GST came in third of all vendors in the entire survey in the Financial Factors Criteria.
There's a lot of competition among vendors who make external storage devices for small and midsize businesses.
In Dollars of Revenue, the company came in first place in the SMB External Storage criteria, eight points ahead of Western Digital.
Score: 69.4
WD earned the second-highest score in the Financial Factors Criteria of all vendors in the entire survey.
Despite a low score in the Expected Sales Criteria, Western Digital did well due to its extremely strong score in Competitive Pricing. In that criteria, it beat its closest competitor in the product category, Seagate, by eight points. However, in Dollars of Revenue, it fared poorly compared with its product competitors, and avoided last place by a fraction of a point.
Score: 72.1
Xerox earned the highest score in the Financial Factors Criteria of all vendors in the entire survey.
Within the Workgroup Color Printers category, Xerox came out handily on top in three of the four criteria that make up the Financial Factors criteria. It lost Dollars of Revenue for services to Konica Minolta. Its most aggressive win was in Expected Sales, where it beat the closest competitor in Workgroup Color Printers -- Samsung -- by more than 10 points.
Xerox was the overall winner in the Workgroup Color Printers category, with a Channel Champs rating of 79.2.