How we ranked the Channel Champions of 2008
The CRN Channel Champions survey has been put together to provide a definitive index of plotting channel satisfaction in the country.
 The main objective of the exercise is to lend a voice to channel perception and experience in dealing with the vendors who drive their business. At the same time, the survey aims to provide IT vendors an index to understand how well their channel policies and strategies are working.
The US edition of CRN has been conducting the survey for 18 years now. In India, this is the 8th year of the survey. While the basic methodology comes from CRN US, we have customized it to factor in local market dynamics and ground realities.
Last year we polled around 1,100 unique respondents across 55 cities. This time, we increased our coverage to include a larger number of active resellers across the country. We took the tally of unique respondents to nearly 1,400 across 160 cities through a combination of tele-research and online poll across 19 categories. However, three categories namely business applications, input devices and graphic cards were dropped as it failed to get adequate number of votes.
Each unique respondent was allowed to vote for a maximum of three categories, and for a maximum of two vendors in each category. We got a total of 4,844 vendor evaluations, which means that each respondent voted for roughly two product categories. Nearly 90 percent of the respondents polled online, while 20 percent polled through tele-survey.
Survey criteria
The research was conducted from December 1, 2008 to January 15, 2009. We polled participants to rate their satisfaction with particular vendors across the following six main criteria and 17 sub-criteria:
Price-performance: Included sub-criteria like product features and manageability, quality and reliability, and price. 
Product availability: Included parameters such as regular availability of products, and whether a product was over- or under-distributed. As vendors hone their distribution strategy to capitalize on the growth in smaller cities, availability becomes critical.
Marketing & branding: This consisted of the brand pull enjoyed by vendors among end-customers, local marketing and promotions to support the channel business, and market development funds provided to partners for business development and creating new markets.
Service & support: Included aspects such as pre-sales support (for enterprise products), warranty policy, RMA turnaround and escalation mechanism, and toll-free support.
Channel relationship: Under this criterion, we polled channels on their satisfaction regarding the relationship management of vendors. While issues are common between channels and vendors, what often makes a vendor more preferred is whether these issues are handled with fairness and transparency. The best test of any relationship is in times of distress. Respondents voted on parameters like channel policy and management, fairness and transparency of processes and people, and accessibility and responsiveness of managers.
Training & certification: Regular sales and technology training provided, online training resources, product-specific training, and the value and effectiveness of vendor certification.
 Scoring
Each respondent voted for the most preferred vendor on six key criteria and 17 sub-criteria. Vendors who polled less than 5 percent of the total votes in any category were not considered eligible and were taken off the final list. Within the finalists, we arrived at the positive association scores for each vendor for each criterion. Under each main criterion, the positive scores of the sub-criteria were added and averaged to arrive at overall criterion ranking. Based on the rankings of each vendor on all main criteria, we arrived at the winner.
We were ably helped by our knowledge partner, Nielsen, India's leading research agency, in slicing and dicing the survey data and providing deeper insights to arrive at the final rankings.
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