2007 CRN Channel Champions: Software

The battle was close, but Microsoft won out with a score of 73.9, thanks to high marks for its overall dominance in the software market and the resources it pours into supporting its channel. IBM came in second with a score of 70, while Oracle middleware trailed with a 65.6 score.

Microsoft partners say the company's .Net strategy has come into its own recently, with notably improved software and stronger market share.

"Five years ago, Microsoft bet their business on integration and made a wholehearted commitment to that," said Tim Marshall, vice president of technology at Neudesic, Irvine, Calif. "What we're seeing now is a lot of the benefits of the billions of dollars of investment that they've done to get their stack to this point."

Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration and data management software is a prime example of the company's growing strength in integration infrastructure. Partners say they're seeing booming activity: SharePoint is "becoming front and center to how companies are doing business," Marshall said.

InterKnowlogy, a Microsoft specialist in Carlsbad, Calif., started a dedicated SharePoint practice two years ago in response to customer interest and to its own evaluation of the software's usefulness. "In SharePoint 2003, you essentially needed a crowbar to make it do anything it didn't do out of the box," said Rodney Guzman, CTO of InterKnowlogy. "Now, you can truly call SharePoint 2007 an extensible platform."

While resellers are seeing some pushback against Microsoft's Vista client, the back-end technology powering Microsoft's full Vista-linked software portfolio gets strong reviews. Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), the new presentation platform underpinning Vista and backward-compatible with Windows XP, is a huge breakthrough that enables major advances in application development, partners say.

"WPF is going to do to desktop applications what Adobe Flash did to the Web," Guzman predicted. "We're finding that we need more design skills now than we've ever needed before. We're dealing with things in a much more artistic way."

—Stacy Cowley

VENDOR TECHNICAL PROGRAM & SUPPORT FINANCIAL OVERALL Microsoft 86.7 75.5 61.6 73.9 IBM 84.1 72.1 56.1 70.0 Oracle 78.3 67.0 53.5 65.6

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