In the small and midsize business NAS market, which is served by many "me-too" products and few really innovative products, the support and the cachet of a name-brand vendor is important to solution providers' success, IPED found.
Three factors which make up the Channel Affinity Index -- sales training sessions, cost and time to change or add vendors, and end customer brand preference -- were weighted as the most important to VARs in this product category, each garnering 11 percent of the total score.
At the opposite end, solution providers only gave access to a vendor's decision makers 2 percent of the total score, while relative profitability with a vendor only received 3 percent of the total score.
