Converged Infrastructure: Dell

CEO: Michael Dell

Converged infrastructure is one of the hottest segments of the IT industry right now and, according to this year's Annual Report Card Scores, Dell is doing a better job with partners in this critical technology category. Dell scored 85.0 overall, an impressive gain from its 72.7 score last year (the first year this product category was included in the ARC survey).

Dell beat Cisco (overall score 79.7), last year's winner, as well as Hewlett-Packard (81.8) and IBM (58.6). Dell also had the highest scores in product innovation (93.1), support (80.3) and partnership (81.4). But HP did take top scores in a few specific criteria, including product technical innovation and pre-/post-sales support. Partners gave Cisco higher scores for managing channel conflict and ease of doing business.