'We'd like to dump them like so many bricks': Most brutal burns from CRN Vendor Report - so far….
Vendors variously branded 'appalling', 'elitist' and 'anti-channel' in CRN 2019 Vendor Report
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
Toshiba
SonicWall
Mitel
WatchGuard
Intel
Extreme Networks
Netgear
ESET
Plantronics (now known as 'Poly')
FireEye
Micro Focus