ARC Winners Come Out To Shine

The 2009 Annual Report Card awards event, held Wednesday evening at the Gaylord National Resort Hotel in Washington, D.C., honored 17 vendors across 18 technology categories and subcategories for earning high marks from solution providers in this year's survey.

Additional awards were given for subcategory wins, for outstanding product innovation, support or partnership. Overall category winners were named ARC Company of the Year in their given technology areas. The channel executive of the year also was named.

Cisco Systems nabbed three technology categories: Networking Infrastructure - Enterprise, Unified Communications and Wireless Infrastructure. Cisco cleanly swept the subcategories in each product category. Likewise, Hewlett-Packard won three overall awards: Volume Mainstream Business Servers, Workgroup Color Printers and Midrange High-End Servers. HP swept in all subcategories.

Kaspersky Lab took the overall award for Client Security Software and won the Partnership subcategory. Sophos won the Support and Innovation categories.

IBM won the Data & Information Management category, but lost the Innovation and Partnership subcategories to Microsoft. Samsung swept the Display Technologies category, as did Western Digital in External Portable Hard Drives.

Middleware saw a rare tie for overall winner in a technology category. Microsoft and Oracle shared the honors. While Microsoft scored higher in the Partnership subcategory, Oracle showed its stuff in Innovation and Support.

Fortinet made a clean sweep in the Network Security Appliances category, just as EMC did in Network Storage. Trend Micro took overall honors in Network Security Software, winning two subcategories, but losing Innovation to McAfee.

Panasonic was the overall category victor in Notebooks and Mobile Computers, winning one subcategory -- Innovation. Last year's overall winner, Toshiba, won the Support and Partnership subcategories in Notebooks.

Server Virtualization Software was won by VMWare, which took overall honors, losing only the Partnership subcategory to Microsoft. EMC and Adtran also swept their respective technology categories of Storage Software and SMB Network Hardware.

Rounding out the evening, Cisco's Senior Vice President of Worldwide Channels Keith Goodwin addressed the audience after receiving the Channel Executive of the Year Award.