CRN to Announce the Eleventh Annual Channel Champions Winners March 14thPRNewswire-FirstCall CMP Media's CRN, the newsweekly for builders of technology, today announced that the eleventh annual Channel Champions awards will be published in the March 11th and March 18th issues of CRN. This year for the first time CRN is also publicly honoring the channel champions beyond editorial coverage at an awards ceremony on March 14th at CMP's Solution Provider XChange event in New Orleans. The Channel Champions study was designed to measure overall solution provider perceptions of vendor products and services. The result is a premier resource used by solution providers throughout the industry to evaluate vendors and their programs. The Channel Champions survey is the largest and broadest-based solution provider market study in the industry. Over 7,500 phone interviews were completed between November 2001 and January 2002, representing more than 2,200 unique solution providers. Vendors that were rated in each category were chosen on the basis of market share data provided by major research firms. In the case where market share data was not available, vendors were chosen by CRN senior editorial staff recommendations. Solution providers were asked to specify the strength of their business relationship with the vendors and products in the category. The relationships were categorized in three ways -- key strategic partner, major partner, or minor partner. CRN limited solution providers to rate only those vendors with whom they had either a strategic or a major partner type of business relationship, when possible. Solution providers rated the vendors based on the following:
-- Technical or product factors such as product quality and reliability,
product scalability, and ease of management
-- Channel factors such as technical support, marketing support, and
overall return on investment
Throughout the survey solution providers were asked to rate the relative importance of the individual evaluation criteria. To derive the overall score for each vendor, the raw satisfaction scores were weighted according to the relative importance of the evaluation criteria. The survey rated vendors in the following 20 key product and service categories: Anti-Virus Software, Data Services, Databases, Enterprise Network Attached Storage, Firewalls, Four-Way Wintel-Based Servers, Intrusion Detection, Java Application Servers, Microprocessors, Monitors, Motherboards, Network Color Laser Printers, Network Hardware, Network Management Software, Network Operating Systems, Notebooks, Rack mounted UPSes, Storage Area Network Arrays, Unix-based Midrange Servers, and Wireless LANs. "The Channel Champions survey is a testimony to what is important to Solution Providers when they evaluate vendors and when they ultimately select the products and services they will recommend to their customers," said Charles Humphrey, Publishing Director, CRN. "We want to thank all of the sponsors of this year's awards and are looking forward to announcing the 2002 channel champ winners March 14th in New Orleans during Solution Provider XChange, as they are very influential in the products and brands integrated into solutions today." CRN's eleventh annual Channel Champions Awards is generously supported by industry sponsors. Gold sponsors include: Hewlett Packard, Symantec, and Viewsonic. Silver sponsors include: AMD, Compaq, Qwest, Sun Microsystems and Synnex. About CRN CRN is the nation's leading trade newsweekly that provides timely industry news and analysis for solution providers, integrators and e-businesses building technology solutions. It is the most trusted source of news for 117,500 channel professionals. A media leader in the high-tech industry, CRN provides the most comprehensive suite of online resources: http://www.crn.com/, the site where industry news breaks first; CRN Direct, a daily newsletter that brings personalized news to solution providers' desktops; and CRN News Radio, a daily news broadcast covering the solution provider channel and the industry. About CMP Media LLC CMP Media LLC is the leading high-tech media company providing essential information and marketing services to the entire technology spectrum-the builders, sellers and users of technology worldwide. With its portfolio of newspapers, magazines, custom publishing, Internet products, research, consulting and conferences, CMP is uniquely positioned to offer marketers comprehensive, integrated solutions tailored to meet their individual needs. Online editions of the company's print publications, along with products and services created exclusively for the Internet, can be found on CMPnet at http://www.cmpnet.com/. CONTACT: Ramona Castaldo
Marketing Manager
CRN
516.562.7219
rcastald@cmp.com
SOURCE: CMP Media LLC Contact: Ramona Castaldo, Marketing Manager of CRN, +1-516-562-7219, Website: http://www.crn.com/ Company News On-Call: http://www.prnewswire.com/comp/181993.html |