2009 Channel Champs: Top 10 Tech Vendors
When you want the highest quality, most dependable technology, you have go-to vendors you can trust. Our Channel Champs survey rated 115 vendors across 24 product and service categories, and found those vendors you rely upon for products with superb technology. Solution providers rated vendors in a number of criteria, including product quality, price for performance and technical satisfaction.
Here now are the 10 vendors who performed the best in the Technical Criteria.
Score: 86.5
ViewSonic's scores in the Flat Panel category put the vendor in 10th place out of all surveyed vendors for Technical Criteria. Although it didn't capture a No. 1 ranking in any area of this subcategory, it did do very well in Product Quality, handily beating LG Electronics and NEC.
Score: 86.8
Hitachi GST's performance in the High-Capacity Hard Drives category earned it ninth place out of all vendors surveyed.
Within this product subcategory criteria, Hitachi earned no first-place ranks, and came in second only in Product Quality and Reliability. However, its scores in those criteria were sufficiently high to place them in the top 10 high scores for Technical satisfaction.
Score: 86.923
Lenovo's scores from the Notebooks category put it in eighth place out of all surveyed vendors.
Within the category, Lenovo was the Channel Champ for Technical factors. It did, however, finish third in the Price for Performance criterion, behind HP and Acer, which tied for first. Sony and HP finished first and second, respectively, in Screen Quality.
Lenovo's overall technical satisfaction rating was 86.9.
Score: 87.949
Cisco, in the SMB Networking HW category, had the seventh-highest score of all surveyed vendors for Technical Criteria.
Within this category, Cisco won four of the five criteria, coming in dead last in Price for Performance. However, its scores in the other criteria were so strong the vendor wound up Channel Champ of the Technical Satisfaction subcategory, beating its closest competitor, HP ProCurve. However, HP ProCurve did win the Overall Channel Champ crown, edging out Cisco by two-tenths of a point.
Score: 87.993
Cisco, in the SMB Wireless LANs category, placed sixth of all surveyed vendors for Technical Criteria.
In this survey, Cisco took a clean sweep of all five technical criteria. Its most impressive score was a 102.6 in Product Quality and Reliability -- beating its closest competitor SonicWall by more than eight points.
Cisco was Channel Champ in both this subcategory as well as Overall Channel Champ for SMB Wireless LANs.
Score: 88.557
Coming in fifth place of all surveyed vendors for Technical Criteria is Samsung.
In the Flat Panels category, Samsung came in first in all five criteria, with its highest Score in Product Quality -- a criterion in which it beat ViewSonic's excellent 100.2 score by more than two points.
Samsung earned the subcategory Channel Champ distinction for Flat Panels.
Score: 89.1
Fourth place of all surveyed vendors belongs to Xerox.
Xerox swept the Workgroup Color Printers category. Its overall score was more than five points greater than its nearest competitor, HP. The vendor did particularly well in product quality, with a score of 102.8.
Score: 89.1
APC's performance earned it third place in the Technical Criteria of all the vendors surveyed.
APC had a clean sweep of all the Technical Criteria in the Power Protection category. Its largest margin of victory came in Product Quality, where it scored a 108.4 -- more than eight points greater than second-place Liebert.
APC was the Channel Champ in the Power Protection category.
Score: 89.6
Of all vendors in the entire survey, Western Digital earned the second-highest score in the technical criteria. That, despite placing second in four out of five criteria within the subcategory. In the one remaining criteria, it tied with Seagate.
Score: 92.3
Seagate came in No. 1 among all the vendors in the survey. In fact, it had the highest Price for Performance score in the entire survey, followed closely by Western Digital. Hard-drive makers Seagate, Western Digital and Hitachi all fared well in the area of technology. Hitachi GST, for example, was fifth out of 115 vendors in Price Performance. Seagate also performed well in Quality: Its 104.5 score was second in the entire only to APC's 108.3. That's a marked contrast to the worst performer in quality, D-Link, in the Unified Communications/VoIP category, which scored a 77.9.