Data And Information Management: IBM Garners Channel Support Kudos

Riding on the strength of its high scores for channel support, IBM--for the second year in a row--has taken top ARC honors in Data and Information Management Software.

IBM, with its total ARC score of 68.2, narrowly edged out Microsoft's 67.7 score, and was comfortably ahead of the 59.9 solution providers gave Oracle and Sun's MySQL score of 58.9.

customers that had moved from Oracle's database to IBM's DB2, citing the latter's better performance and customers' need for analytics and energy savings. However, IBM came in second to Microsoft in overall product innovation and was outscored by both Microsoft and Oracle in richness of product features and functionality, and product quality and reliability.

It's in the partnership and channel partner support subcategories where IBM really shines. The company handily beat the competition in every support criteria, including presales and postsales support, marketing support, training and field management quality.

IBM works closely with channel partners when designing partner programs, such as its content syndication effort that lets partners move marketing collateral and other content from IBM's Web site to their own, said Bernie Spang, marketing director for IBM data management software. It seems to be paying off: "The value of opportunities generated by our partners around the world is up by double digits," Spang said.