| Methodology: Choosing the best |
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Here's how we chose the winners of the CRN Xcellence Awards 2010
CRN Network
Last fiscal, FY2009-10 was a testing year for IT channels. For the first time in over half-a-decade, the channel community had to confront a severe slowdown. The year brought back the memories of 2001, the post dot-com phase which saw IT spendings hit their bottom.
However, despite the global recession, the Indian economy did much better than the rest of the world. Although the IT spending in the enterprise sector fell, IT partners who nominated their companies this year seem to have done better than the previous fiscal. Many of them registered over 20 percent growth with a few even recording 50 plus percent.
The IT channel has matured considerably, and this was also a primary reason for many partners beating the recession. It was demonstrated by the fact that when hardware sales came down, partners focused on providing solutions and services.
In FY2009-10, infrastructure consolidation and virtualization has emerged as a key growth driver for partners. On the services side, several leading partners adopted automated remote managed services.
Most nominated partners used the slowdown to put their house into order and focused on improving bottomline, enhancing productivity, and aligning closely with the existing customers rather than looking for new ones.
It is but natural then that in FY2009-10, unlike in the last few years, winners have been judged primarily on their ability to withstand external market shocks by adapting to changing business environment, changing customer needs and finding growth opportunities.
In essence, the CRN Xcellence Awards 2010 are a reflection of the robustness, resilience and the enterprising spirit of the IT channel. As a wise man has said, the true test of an entrepreneur is in times of adversity.
Awards nomination process
Despite a tough year, we received more nominations than ever before. We received 360 valid nominations from across 60 cities as compared to 220 forms received in the previous year. Nominations were invited using a combination of tools. We sent direct electronic mailers to channels in our database inviting them to fill the nomination form online. We asked several channel associations to encourage their members to participate by filling up the awards nomination form. We wrote to vendors to request their leading partners to send their nominations.
Awards categories
Another unique aspect of the CRN Xcellence Awards is the categorization of various awards. To provide a level-playing field to channel companies from smaller cities, we divided the awards into two main sub-categories: Advanced markets, for resellers in metros and class-A cities, and Emerging markets, for resellers in smaller cities. We further divided the Advanced and Emerging categories region-wise, thus giving due weightage to the regional dynamics of the IT channel industry.
Broadly, the categories were:
- Systems Integrator
- Managed Services Provider
- Solutions Provider - Software
- Solutions Provider - Security
- Solutions Provider - Server and storage
- Solutions Provider - Networking
- Enterprise VAR
- Systems Builder
- Sub-distributor
- Retailer
- Change Agent
- Outstanding Channel Contribution
Awards parameters
What sets the CRN Channel Xcellence Awards apart from the several other channel awards is the fact that they lay emphasis not just on the size of the company but also on certain aspects that are integral to making a company a true leader.
We ranked each entry on:
- Quality of turnover growth and profitability
- Product and solutions mix
- Quality of HR
- Business systems
- Marketing and sales innovations
- Customer responsiveness
- Future growth strategies
- Choosing the finalist
Of the nominations received in each award category, the final five were selected by the CRN editorial team. The team scanned through each form to verify the information provided by the awards applications. Wherever required, we called up applicants to get more details about certain aspects of their business.
The final five contenders were selected primarily on the basis of the quality of information provided in the nomination form. Once shortlisted, all finalists were sent an e-mail requesting them to send any bit of information about their achievements and performance that would boost their chances of winning the award.
Jury process
After almost two months of work, we invited a jury panel consisting of eminent people with diverse experience in IT channels. This year too CRN had two jury boards—one to judge enterprise VAR categories, and the other to judge the sub-distributor and retail categories. While for the retail and sub-distributor categories we chose channel heads of vendors and distributors having a strong consumer IT focus, for the enterprise VAR category we got the chiefs of enterprise vendors and value-added distributors.
To provide jury members with enough time to score the nominations, the entire jury process was held online whereby each jury member was provided online access of the nomination forms of finalists for the categories they were scoring. Each member had to fill up scores for each award criterion on a scale of one to 10.
The jury was also asked to assign weights to the awards criteria for different categories.
For instance, in the case of solutions providers, the jury gave maximum weight to the solutions mix, business processes and systems, and skill-sets, whereas for sub-distributors the highest weight was given to branch coverage, the products mix, and systems and processes. Similarly, for retailers, the jury felt that marketing innovation and the products mix were important criteria.
For each award category, the weighted scores provided by each jury member were added up to arrive at the final score.
In this manner we identified India’s best channel companies. Read on… |