ARC Methodology

VARBusiness' 2004 Annual Report Card (ARC) issue, now in its 19th year, assesses and analyzes solution providers' satisfaction with their vendor partners. This year's 2004 research spans 74 individual vendor programs and 18 product categories, with the addition of security appliances this year.

The ARC process begins in December/January with an extensive investigation of product categories, vendors and criteria to be included in this comprehensive survey. This year's research was conducted by VARBusiness with support from research consulting firms Bernett Research and Answers Research. VARBusiness first conducted qualitative editorial research using a select group of manufacturers and developers to identify this year's ARC categories. Next, vendors were chosen based on market-share data from industry analysts, including Gartner/ Dataquest, IDC and iSuppli-Stanford Resources. Each participating company submitted a list of its solution-provider partners to be surveyed. On the occasion where the minimum requirement was not available, a sample was acquired from VARBusiness' circulation database.

A total of 4,865 interviews were conducted from early June through mid-July via the Web and telephone. VARs qualified on the basis of recommending, reselling or supporting the vendor's product/service. VARs rated the importance of 15 criteria and then rated their satisfaction with their vendors for each of those criteria. VARs also rated each vendor on overall loyalty. Within the ARC categories, the criteria were weighted by their relative importance, while loyalty was weighted by its derived importance. This was calculated by a regression analysis, and combined to ascertain an overall winner.