Wondering how the IT vendors partners work with stack up against their competitors in product innovation, partner programs and support, and other important criteria? Here’s a close look at the scores in this year’s CRN Annual Report Card.
For the 41st year, CRN offered solution providers in North America the opportunity to grade the performance of their IT vendor partners with the CRN Annual Report Card.
CRN ARC provides a look at which IT vendors are doing the best jobs – and which ones have some work to do – in meeting their channel partners’ needs in product innovation, support, partner program resources, and managed and cloud services, all critical elements of a successful vendor-solution provider relationship.
In August CRN provided a peak at the 2026 ARC results, highlighting the vendors that received the highest scores across 23 product technology categories. Here we provide the detailed scores for all participating vendors.
Solution providers scored vendors across 23 product technology categories. These include longtime channel technology mainstays such as notebooks and mobile computers, network infrastructure and connectivity, data storage, and data recovery and resiliency. It also included newer technology areas such as hybrid cloud infrastructure and consumption-based on-premises cloud services. It also covered nine categories of security technology including data security, managed detection and response, and security operations platforms.
Partners graded IT vendors on a total of 21 criteria spanning four subcategories: product innovation, support, partnership, and managed and cloud services. Companies received average scores for each criteria category and an overall score for the product technology category. Details on the survey and methodology can be found on the following slide. A more detailed description of the ARC methodology can be found here.
In some technology categories a single vendor dominated the scoring, winning not just the top overall score, but also the average grades across all four subcategories and, in some cases, even sweeping all 21 criteria. In most technology categories, however, two or more vendors split the results with different vendors earning the highest average scores for different subcategories – and in some cases even splitting the highest scores for specific criterion within the four criteria categories.
How did the IT vendors you work with score this year? Take a look and see.
