Canalys identifies 12 vendor 'Champions' of channel management in EMEA

A total of 12 vendors achieved Champion status in the 2019 Canalys EMEA Channel Leadership Matrix. They are APC by Schneider Electric, Cisco, Fortinet, Fujitsu, HP, Kaspersky, Lenovo, NetApp, Nutanix, Palo Alto, Trend Micro and Veeam. 

Even more impressively, seven of the vendors – Fortinet, Fujitsu, HP, Lenovo, NetApp, Palo Alto and Veeam – successfully retained their Champion status from last year. This is an exceptional achievement, as it requires a vendor to show year-on-year improvements in their already industry-leading partner engagement, as well as further increase channel investment.

This year’s Champions span a broad spectrum of technologies, including PCs, networking, data center infrastructure, software and security. However, they exhibit some common characteristics. They all show improvements in channel processes to drive simplicity and ease of doing business; they prioritize investments in partner profitability and business models; and demonstrate a commitment to maintaining or growing the share of revenue generated through partners. All of the Champions generate the majority of revenue through partners, but crucially are supported by a channel-led (rather than a channel neutral) sales approach. This tends to be reflected in the importance given to channel management functions at a corporate level, and internal sales cultures that recognize the value of partners to the vendor’s success.

Other leading vendors fall into three categories - Contenders, Growers or Stragglers.

Contenders: AWS, Dell EMC, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) and Juniper either have high partner ratings relative to competitors, or have made significant channel investments, but have seen partner sentiment decline over the last year.

Growers: Apple, Huawei, IBM, Microsoft and VMware have lower scores relative to peers, but have seen improvements over the last year.

Stragglers: Citrix, McAfee, Oracle and Symantec have the lowest scores and have seen partner sentiment stagnate or fall in the last 12 months.

About the Matrix:

The Leadership Matrix assesses vendor performance in the channel, based on channel feedback into the Vendor Benchmark over the last 12 months, and independent analysis of vendor channel strategy, investment, execution and planned initiatives by experienced Canalys analysts. The Vendor Benchmark tracks leading technology vendors around the world, collating the experiences channel partners have when working with different vendors. Channel partners are asked to rate vendors across the 10 most important areas of channel management (ease of doing business, profitability, support, marketing etc). To be included in the Leadership Matrix, vendors must have a minimum number of channel partner responses to the Vendor Benchmark.