Methodology: How we did it
This year we decided to expand the scope of the CRN Channel Champions Survey and break it into two parts. The last issue of CRN (February 15, 2010) consisted of channel champions rankings for the components and consumer products. In this issue we feature the results of commercial product categories, sold largely to SMBs and large enterprises.
As visible in the table, we have added some new categories this year in our channel satisfaction survey—scanner, network security, end-point security and commercial UPS. Last year, network security and end-point security were clubbed under a broad heading of enterprise security, while commercial UPS was clubbed with PC UPS under the broad category of UPS.
Survey methodology
In 2008, we polled around 1,400 unique resellers across 160 cities through a combination of tele-research and online poll across 19 categories. In 2009, the entire survey was conducted online between December 1, 2009 and January 7, 2010, and there was no element of tele-research. Overall, 1,159 unique respondents from 150 cities took the survey across the components, consumer and commercial product categories. Of these, 604 unique respondents voted for the 13 categories of components and consumer products, while the remaining 555, from 80-odd cities, voted for the commercial product categories.
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Channel Champions 2009 vs 2008
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Product Categories
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2009 Winners
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2008 Winners
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Commercial PC
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Hewlett-Packard
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Hewlett-Packard
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Laser printer
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Canon
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Samsung
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Scanner
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Canon
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Category didn't exist
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Server
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IBM
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Hewlett-Packard
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Storage
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EMC
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EMC
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Networking
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Cisco
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D-Link
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Network Cabling
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Digilink
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Digilink
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End-point security
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Symantec
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Cisco
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Network Security
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Check Point
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Commercial UPS
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APC
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APC
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With each unique reseller voting for an average five commercial product categories, we received a total of 2,887 vendor evaluations across 10 categories. For each product category, unique respondents voted their vendor preference and satisfaction on eight key parameters and 22 sub-criteria.
Product availability: Included parameters such as the regular availability of products, and whether a product was over or under-distributed. In several commercial product categories, products are delivered back-to-back and hence we also captured the delivery lead time for such products.
Price-performance: Included sub-criteria such as product features, quality and reliability, and price. For commercial products, special prices are decided by the size of the deal and the importance of the customer. So, we also factored the special pricing offered by vendors which often makes or breaks a deal.
Partner profitability: The overall profitability that partners could achieve while dealing with a particular vendor. This included the front-end margins offered and the back-end incentives that partners could earn.
Brand-pull and customer marketing: This criterion included the brand-pull enjoyed by vendors among end-customers, and the various local customer marketing and promotions conducted by the companies to generate demand.
Channel marketing and pre-sales support: This comprised parameters like market development funds provided to partners for generating demand and business development, and channel schemes and incentives. Pre-sales support, which includes technical and sales enablement of partners, was also incorporated.
Channel training and certification: This criterion included regular sales and technology training provided, online training resources, product specific training, and the value and effectiveness of vendor certification.
Post-sales support: Included aspects such as warranty policy, RMA turnaround and escalation mechanism, toll-free phone support, and Web and e-mail support.
Channel policy and management: Respondents voted on parameters such as fairness, transparency and swiftness of various channel processes, and the accessibility and responsiveness of managers.
Scoring
For each product category, respondents were asked to vote for one of their top three vendors in terms of business dealings and rate it on the eight key criteria and 22 sub-criteria. It must be mentioned here that the CRN Channel Champions survey is open-ended, and resellers are allowed to rate any vendor of their choice; we don’t compel respondents to choose vendors from a list of names.
Vendors that received less than 10 percent of the total votes polled in a particular category were not considered eligible and were hence not included in the final ranking. For instance, in the networking category, we received 273 unique votes (from 273 unique channel organizations), and hence any vendor who got less than 27 votes did not make it to the final ranking table. Brands such as Netgear and Extreme Networks failed to make the cut in the final ranking because they did not receive the minimum 27 votes.
Within the finalists, we arrived at the average scores for each vendor for each criterion. Under each main criterion, the scores of the sub-criteria were added and averaged to arrive at overall criterion ranking. Individual criterion scores were added to arrive at the final score, and the final rankings were based on this overall score. In slicing and dicing the survey data, and providing deeper insights to arrive at the final rankings, we were ably helped by our knowledge partner, Aranca, India’s leading B2B research agency. |