Making The Grade

For the 37th year, CRN offered solution providers in North America the opportunity to grade the performance of their IT vendor partners with the CRN Annual Report Card.

The CRN ARC provides a look at which IT vendors are doing the best jobs – and which ones have work to do – in meeting their partners’ needs in terms of products, support, partner program resources and other critical criteria that determine the success or failure of a vendor-solution provider relationship.

The winners of this year’s ARC project are being announced in conjunction with the XChange August 2022 conference, being held this week in Denver, put on by The Channel Company, CRN’s parent company.

Solution providers scored vendors across 25 product technology categories. These include longtime channel technology mainstays such as industry standard servers, laptops and mobile devices, enterprise network storage hardware, and enterprise and SMB network security. It also includes newer technology areas such as hyperconverged infrastructure, hybrid cloud, SD-WAN and edge computing.

Partners graded IT vendors on a total of 21 criteria spanning four categories: product innovation, support, partnership, and managed and cloud services. Companies received average scores for each criteria category and an overall score for the technology category. Details can be found on the following slides.

Which IT companies are at the top of their game in the eyes of their channel partners? Read on to find out which vendors earned the highest marks this year.