Report Card: Which Vendors Make The Grade?

Sun and EMC each earned grades of C . The report card rated 12 vendors on specific criteria including distribution programs, terms and conditions, profitability and channel innovation. Distributors were only allowed to rate those vendors with which they had a current relationship.

Five vendors,Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Oracle, Computer Associates International and Veritas Software,received overall grades of B-. IBM, Check Point Software Technologies and Symantec tied for the top spot, receiving the highest overall grade of B . Cisco Systems and Microsoft finished with overall grades of B.

"If you look at Sun and EMC, everything is guided by people that have not been in the channel," said Grady Crunk, executive vice president at Central Data, an 18-year-old solution provider in Titusville, Fla. "The people that are running Sun and EMC have not typically had a channel focus, and it shows from the top down."

Sun received C- grades in both terms and conditions and profitability. EMC, meanwhile, received a C and a C- in those categories, respectively.

Crunk said he had signed up for the EMC channel program but never completed the training because of moves such as the storage equipment maker's deal with direct marketer Dell Computer.

IBM offers the best of the currently available programs, and even the IBM program is not "ideal," said Crunk.

"We used to raise the banner and say we are an IBM partner or an EMC partner," said Crunk. "Now we don't do that because we never know when that flag is going to catch on fire. . . . We are now continually pushing our independence. . . . This is all driving us to the point that our solutions [are what is driving our business and what we are branding, not who we partner with."