
High Achievers
For the 36th 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.
Solution providers were asked to score vendors across 24 product technology categories. That includes long-time channel technology mainstays including enterprise network storage, laptops and mobile devices, printers, and enterprise and SMB network security. It also includes newer technology areas such as hyperconverged infrastructure, SD-WAN and edge computing.
Partners graded IT vendors on a total of 21 criteria spanning four subcategories: 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.
In some technology categories, a single vendor dominated the scoring, winning not just the top overall score, but also the top grades across all four subcategories and, in some cases, even sweeping all 21 criteria.
Other technology categories were more competitive with two or more vendors splitting the results with different vendors scoring highest for different subcategories – and even for specific criteria. (One vendor, for example, received the top score for product quality and reliability while another won for product marketability – both criteria within the product innovation subcategory.)
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.