Which vendor has been castigated for its 'wide boy' sales staff, and whose 'stupid schemes and obscure rebates' are driving the channel mad?
Vendors have variously been branded "arrogant", "useless" and "horrendous to deal with" in comments left so far in the 2019 CRN Vendor Report.
We are canvassing for brutally honest feedback on how your vendors are faring for this year's report, and the more than 100 channel partners that have completed the survey so far have not pulled their punches.
Anyone who completes it will receive a free executive summary of the report (as well as £3 in Amazon vouchers), upon request.
As the survey is COMPLETELY ANONYMOUS, you can be as brutal as you like without fear of reprisal.
If you work at a reseller, MSP, solution provider, or other breed of frontline technology provider, you can add your thoughts here, but here is a selection of some of the bluntest feedback - both good and bad - we have received so far.
Can you match the comments to the correct vendor?
"Staff are friendly in the account team, but have no authority. There is still a huge amount of going direct and undercutting the partner and actually taking over the relations with the client; this is usually via poor account management that is then passed onto the partner to front and subsequently discredited, and then they slip in."
Potential culprits: Dell, HP Inc, Lenovo, Microsoft
"Deal registration scheme is generally excellent, easy to navigate and not overly time consuming. Rebate and MDF schemes are competitive and work well for us as a business."
Potential culprits: Citrix, VMware, Apple, Lenovo
"Horrendous company to deal with. Arrogant, obstructive, rigid. Not accessible and not friendly. Antiquated approach to the channel based on their lengthy reign as a true tier 1 vendor but on borrowed time with the arrogance they show."
Potential culprits: F5 Networks, VMware, Cisco, Check Point
"[They] used to be great; not any more! The staff are useless and are out for each other. The tech is clunky and leadership is shocking."
Potential culprits: Check Point, Symantec, Kaspersky Lab, McAfee
"Easy company to make money with - and you don't need a masters degree to understand the partner portal or MDF claims."
Potential culprits: Lenovo, HP Inc, Microsoft, Sophos
"Wide boy sales people, just doing any deal at any price."
Potential culprits: Mimecast, SonicWall, , Barracuda Networks, Oracle
"Mountains of grey stock to quote against. [They] seem powerless to do much about it. Previously lost large deals to grey."
Potential culprits: HPE, Cisco, IBM, Lenovo
"The margins have declined rapidly. Too often the vendor is promising a price to an end user and are squeezing the channel to find the discount. If you stripped out our services the blended retention on any $250k deal is likely to be around 7.5 - 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."
Potential culprits: Check Point, Juniper Networks, SonicWall, Palo Alto Networks
"Lots of stupid schemes, obscure rebates and monthly price changes (usually increases)."
Potential culprits: WatchGuard, Forcepoint, Check Point, SonicWall
Are your vendors channel champions or channel chumps? Rate them across four categories in our survey here.
