2022 Annual Report Card Winners: Solution Providers Give Top Grades To Key Vendors

Annual Report Card Criteria And Scoring

Solution providers graded IT vendors according to 21 criteria across four categories:

Product innovation criteria: product quality and reliability, richness of product features and functionality, product technical innovation, product compatibility and ease of integration, marketability, and services opportunity.

Support criteria: pre-sales support, post-sales support, training, quality of field management, and marketing support.

Partnership criteria: solution provider programs, communication, managing channel conflict, revenue and profit potential, and ease of doing business.

Managed and cloud services criteria: consumption-based and subscription pricing, integration with services management tools, cloud-readiness of channel program, field teaming and channel compensation alignment, and profit margins and profit potential.

In some technology areas a single vendor dominated the scoring, winning not just the top overall score, but also the average grades across all four criteria categories and, in some cases, even sweeping all 21 criteria.

In other technology categories two or more vendors split the results with different vendors scoring highest for different criteria categories – and in some cases even splitting the highest scores within criteria categories.

In the highly competitive enterprise network storage management segment, for example, one vendor scored highest across all product innovation criteria. But in partnership criteria, one vendor received the top score for solution provider program, another scored highest in communication and managing channel conflict, and a third took top scores for revenue/profit potential and ease of doing business.