Jerry Lumpkin, Vice President Of Channel Sales, Toshiba America Information Systems

Ask any vendor who has attempted something similar to describe progress, and you're likely to get some evasive answers. Not from Lumpkin, who can point to 30-percent year-over-year revenue growth for Toshiba, a healthy portion coming from the company's reinvigorated channel ecosystem.

Of course, it helps to have great products for partners--Toshiba's notebooks earned the vendor a VARBusiness Annual Report Card award for 2008--but Lumpkin-led initiatives designed to directly help channel partners were just as rewarding.

Over the past couple years, Lumpkin and Toshiba have added a dozens of account executives to the channel team. The vendor has delivered attractive rebate packages in that time, including 1.5 percent rebates for platinum preferred partners using Toshiba financial services leasing, 1.5 percent bonuses for all partners selling business notebooks to new customers, and double rebates during select times of the year.

Lumpkin's team keeps a close eye on margins each month to competitively fine-tune Toshiba's channel margin structure, and the vendor's onsite bid matrix offers instant discounts on quantity orders--all adding up to a stable, reinvigorated partner ecosystem for this computing giant.