'We'd like to dump them like so many bricks': Most brutal burns from CRN Vendor Report - so far….

Resellers and MSPs rarely get a chance to give their vendors no-holds-barred, anonymous feedback on where they are going right and wrong.

But we have provided you with a forum to do exactly this via our 2019 CRN Vendor Report.

The research is still in full swing, and you can still rate up to five of your vendors here. In return you will receive an exclusive copy of the Executive Summary of the report (as well as £3 Amazon vouchers).

Good, bad, or ugly, your scores and comments will provide them with valuable feedback on where they can improve in areas such as channel strategy, margin retention, training and technology.

Here is a cross-section of the some of the more brutal comments that have flowed in since we ran a similar article last month. Can you match the comments to the vendor?

"Volume is the only thing they have going for them. Their operations are so bad it's hard to know what to do; we'd like to dump them like so many bricks but the public sector like their pricing."

Candidates: HP, Microsoft, Dell, Lenovo

"[They] seem to be coasting along and look ripe for acquisition. I do not see strong, media-savvy leadership from them."

Candidates:WatchGuard, Juniper Networks, Extreme Networks, Webroot

"Worst vendor ever. Shocking sales tactics and very anti-channel!"

Candidates: SolarWinds MSP, Datto, Kaseya, Connectwise

"Irrelevant vendor and just surviving." 

Candidates: Symantec, Kaspersky Lab, McAfee, Veeam

"A former leader, who is now looking lost." 

Candidates: Cisco, Brocade, NetApp Pure Storage

"Their training programme is so difficult to fathom it may as well not exist." 

Candidates: HPE, Mimecast, AWS, Google

"The margins have declined rapidly. Too often the vendor is promising a price to an end user and is squeezing the channel to find the discount. If you stripped out our services, the blended retention on any $250,000 deal is likely to be around 7.5 to 8.0 per cent and they are not a plug-and-play vendor. The MDF has been awful for a while now and leads from [them]? You must be joking."

Candidates: Juniper Networks, Check Point, Palo Alto Networks, SonicWall

"Appalling is probably the best way to sum them up. No leads, poor margins, no partner empathy." 

Candidates: Dell, Lenovo, Microsoft, Cisco

"[It] was the victim of a rapacious takeover and has never recovered."

Candidates: Avaya, Forcepoint, McAfee, Brocade

"Anything outside their product scope (in relation to embedding into other systems) is painful. Support beyond cookie-cutter scenarios is non existent."

Candidates: Mitel, Cisco, Intel, Poly

"[Their] channel is a mess. They made a big song and dance about their new partner programme, and then we've heard nothing else from it. We constantly get pushed back to disties because they don't have the time for channel and it shows!" 

Candidates Kaspersky Lab, ESET, Sophos, Trend Micro

"Expensive, complicated and elitist [regarding training and accreditation]."

Candidates: Cisco, Juniper, Extreme Networks, HPE

If you work with any of the following vendors, please join in the project here:

Adobe

Amazon Web Services

Apple

Avaya

AVG Technologies

Barracuda Networks

Broadcom (Brocade Communications)

Check Point

Cisco

Citrix

D-Link

Dell Technologies/Dell EMC

F5 Networks

Forcepoint

Fujitsu

Hitachi Ventara

HPE

HP Inc

Huawei

IBM

Juniper Networks

Kaspersky Lab

Lenovo

McAfee

Microsoft

Mimecast

NetApp

Nutanix

Oracle

Palo Alto Networks

Pure Storage

Salesforce

Samsung

SAP

Sophos

Symantec

Trend Micro

Veeam Software

Veritas

VMware

Webroot

Xerox

SolarWinds MSP

Datto/Autotask

Kaseya

Connectwise

ServiceNow

Google

Toshiba

SonicWall

Mitel

WatchGuard

Intel

Extreme Networks

Netgear

ESET

Plantronics (now known as 'Poly')

FireEye

Micro Focus