Surprise Winner Pulls Off Huge Upset

Alcatel pulled off the biggest upset victory of this year's VARBusiness Annual Report Card, unseating longtime champion Cisco in the category of communications networking solutions, which now includes Enterasys and Hewlett-Packard, in addition to Alcatel.

Alcatel edged out both Cisco and HP, which tied for second place by a single point. Chris Younger, president of Expanets, a leading Cisco IP telephony VAR, isn't surprised. While he doesn't resell Alcatel gear, he does see its products in his bids. "Alcatel has done some big deals and is undercutting prices everywhere," he says.

Younger is supportive of Cisco, though he does recognize its shortcomings. "Cisco is still evolving its channel model and realizes it has plenty more work to do," he says. "This isn't the same place as the router market, where they have the lion's share."

Although it didn't win any subcategories, Enterasys demonstrated it was a force to be reckoned with, garnering top scores in the areas of quality of technical support, solution-provider program and revenue/profit potential.

"Enterasys is much more channel-friendly, and with a lot of customers we lead with them," says networking VAR Sandy Cohn, of Albany, N.Y.-based ATEC Group, which also sells Cisco gear.

Notable in the 2003 ARC results was Nortel's lackluster performance.

It received low scores for the marketing support and solution-provider program criteria. In addition, the company posted sixth out of six places in most of the criteria judged for the awards.

Clearly, Nortel has its work cut out for it in the coming year.