Loyalty Makes All The Difference

For a business that was thought to be winding down, IBM's mid-range iSeries computers have demonstrated remarkable resiliency. In fact, sales of the company's midrange computing systems, which serve financial-services companies, retailers and manufacturing companies the world over, have held their own of late.

One reason for the success: loyal partners. In fact, in this year's VARBusiness Annual Report Card study, IBM's iSeries partners not only demonstrated the greatest loyalty for a particular product category, they also demonstrated the highest loyalty in our entire survey of 75 different vendor partner programs.

That loyalty helps explain why IBM won the midrange server category for the fifth consecutive year. HP's midrange server partners, in contrast, gave the Palo Alto, Calif.-based company the lowest loyalty score in the category.

Ironically, the iSeries' closest competition this year came from IBM's pSeries line of computers. (The iSeries is a true, midrange platform that once ran its own OS, while the pSeries grew out of RISC-based systems and Unix software.)

In addition to winning the loyalty subcategory, the iSeries swept our three other subcategories--product innovation, support and partnership--en route to its overall victory. IBM, which Gartner now ranks as the leading server vendor in the world based on recent second-quarter sales data, received particularly high marks from solution providers for product quality and reliability. That, of course, has been enhanced by the company's broad support of Linux and other open standards.

The iSeries line of servers is also getting a second look by customers and partners because it is playing a significant role in the company's on-demand strategy. Already, IBM has added to its line card new on-demand offerings, including the iSeries for Capacity BackUp and the iSeries for High Availability.

In addition to providing reliable technology, partners also gave IBM high marks for the quality of technical support it provides.

In contrast, IBM partners say their satisfaction with IBM's iSeries midrange servers came up short in just two areas. Solution providers don't think the company's partner portal is up to the standard of HP's, nor do they think the amount of marketing support they get matches what is provided to IBM's pSeries partners. Save for these areas, IBM received top marks in every other area.