Reseller Choice Awards 2017 Winners

It was a fantastic evening in Toronto to recognize and celebrate with the best of the best in the Canadian IT industry. Every year we conduct a huge 3-month national survey of the entire channel to get their opinions on vendors and distributors. They vote for the companies that they believe do the very best job in 82 categories (each year we add and subtract categories to reflect the reality in the channel). The companies with the most votes win a Reseller Choice Award. Well over 500 vendors were nominated by the channel.

From Left to Right: Tech Data Bluestar IT Cloud

Again this year, everything Cloud and SaaS showed the most growth. We are having to research many more nominees because it’s the first time that we are seeing them. We also added a category exclusively for Cloud Distributors where the winner was IT Cloud (recently became a Microsoft distributor) with Sherweb a close runner up. We expect this category to heat up this year.

From Left to Right: Cisco Fujitsu Epson

Many of the expected-to-win vendors and distributors held on to the #1 spot but some upsets did happen. Eset made tremendous gains to take the #1 Security Vendor. Datto continues to win lots of awards including the top prize for Best Vendor. Microsoft, HP, Cisco and Lenovo took home multiple awards. Epson continue to dominate the projector categories and made more gains in printers. Zebra has also made huge gains in several categories.

From Left to Right: Fujitsu Solarwinds MSP HP

Tech Data again took the #1 spot for the Best Distributor for the 11th year and Bluestar took the top spot for specialty distributor. We are also seeing other distributors gaining on some of the sub distributor categories like Best Customer Services, Terms and Conditions. Sherweb also did very will in the specialty distributor category and could be the one to watch in 2018.

From Left to Right: Microsoft Zebra ESET

There were many interesting stories that came between #2 through #10 spots as vendors and distributors continue to rally. We will be reviewing this further to bring some highlights. Vendors and distributors should leverage this annual report card as a good benchmark to help improve their game in 2018!

From Left to Right: Datto ESET Lenovo

It is also very interesting to monitor how vendors and distributors are ranked year over year. The decade-long patterns tell great stories. The story gets bigger when you benchmark the rankings by region and channel management year over year. More Vendors and Distributors should take this channel report card more seriously. It matters a lot when their partners vote or don’t vote for them!

From Left to Right: Connectwise Lenovo ESET

It is clear that the channel partners are putting more importance with their vote towards vendors with recurring revenue solutions. We are also seeing an incredible amount of previously unknown-to-us companies getting votes.

DATTO’s team

As with every year, we merely rank every vendor and distributor in each category based on the number of votes that they receive by Canadian VARs, MSPs, ITSPs. Voting by vendors do NOT count. Each VAR, MSP or ITSP may only vote for one company in each category, but does NOT have to cast a vote in every category.