The Chief Supporter

Of Little Help: Some Big-Name Vendors Come Up Short On Support

Two truths about the VARBusiness Annual Report Card (ARC): One, even the best vendors can always do a little better in the eyes of solution providers when it comes to providing presales, postsales and technical support. Two, solution providers say a lot of companies don't have the slightest clue about how to provide truly beneficial marketing support.

The 2006 ARC study shows that while solution providers will routinely reward vendors with scores in the 80s for things like Product Innovation, Loyalty and Partnership, the best Support scores top out in the 70s. On the entire list this year, only Intel's technical support scored in the 80s (84 points out of a possible 100, to be precise).

One inherent advantage that companies such as Cisco Systems have over others is an end-to-end product portfolio that lends itself to better support systems.

"Some vendors only have some of the products you work with, and you have to talk to different vendors for other products, so that can make getting support more complicated," says Louis Kek, CIO at Cellnet, an Atlanta-based solution provider.

Even so, there are plenty of vendors with end-to-end offerings that aren't providing as much support as they could--at least as far as solution providers are concerned. Among the companies that took it on the chin for their lack of Support were Check Point Software Technologies (55 points in Security Software), Symantec (60 points in both Security Software and Storage Management Software, and 61 in Security Appliances), CA (58 points in Security Software and 63 points in Storage Management Software), Oracle (53 in Data & Information Management Software, and 57 in both Business Software and Infrastructure & Integration Software), Sun Microsystems (53 in Network Storage), Sony (55 in Display Technologies), 3Com (55 in Business-Class Wireless LANs), Business Objects (52 in Business Software) and Hyperion (50 in Business Software).

Marketing support is the category in which solution providers clearly want more help. Vendors announce new channel-focused marketing initiatives all the time, but it's obvious that their execution is off--even the best marketing-support scores were underwhelming. Among the poorest marketers were Hyperion (45 points in Business Software), Sun (44 in Network Storage and 47 in Entry-Level Servers), 3Com (44 in VoIP/Voice Communications and 49 in Data Networking) and Juniper (49 in Data Networking). Many other vendors scored in the low 50s for marketing support, indicating that this is an industrywide problem.

Part of that may reflect the tension between vendors and solution providers. While the former say VARs should be doing more of their own lead generation, solution providers believe vendors should be giving them better selling tools. The answer probably lies somewhere in the middle, but in an IT industry obsessed with hype and self-promotion, it's shocking that so few companies really understand how to effectively execute channel-oriented marketing--at least to the satisfaction of their partners.