The Good & Bad Of Today's VAR Channel

By Mike Monocello, editor-in-chief, Business Solutions magazine

In a couple weeks, many of you will receive your copy of the January issue of Business Solutions magazine. As with the past three years, this issue will feature our Best Channel Vendors special report. If you aren't aware of, or didn't participate in, the survey we ran a few months ago to collect the information for this report, we asked resellers to rate vendors on a scale of 0 (worst) to 5 (best) in seven categories. The categories are service/support, channel friendliness, channel program, product features, product reliability, product innovation, and adequate VAR margins. Thousands of VARs took the survey resulting in mountains of data to be crunched and analyzed. I can't reveal the winners here, but I did want to point out what I thought were some interesting trends in the data.