'Exciting new entrants' and old hands shine in Microsoft NZ 2016 Partner Awards
The Kiwi channel's night of nights has seen Intergen and Datacom each walk away with three Microsoft Partner Awards, while Fujitsu scooped up two and Dicker Data took the top distribution award.
Last night's ninth annual Microsoft NZ Partner Awards saw 22 awards presented to Kiwi partners.
Brent Kendrick, Microsoft director of small and midmarket solutions and partner group, says all of the winners are companies demonstrating 'genuine transformational success'.
"It was great to see a mix of consistently performing winners from previous years and some exciting new entrants from our booming IT sector," Kendrick says of this year's winners.
"Cloud computing continued to dominate entries this year as more businesses look to their IT partners to transform their business with cloud-based services.
"The winners last night are shining examples in this space.
Intergen continued its stellar run with the annual awards, taking home Devices and Deployment Partner of the Year, Data Analytics Partner of the Year and Windows App Developer Partner of the Year – which it won in conjunction with NV Interactive – while Intergen's Andrew Kosmadakis won the individual award for Partner Seller of the Year.
Datacom scooped up the awards for Cloud Platform: Azure Partner of the Year and Collaboration and Content Partner of the Year, while the company's James Stainton took out the individual award for Sales Specialist of the Year.
Meanwhile Fujitsu took out the top award for Cloud Enterprise Partner of the Year as well as the Good Citizenship Partner of the Year.
Dicker Data took the gong for Distribution Partner of the Year, with Provoke named Marketing Partner of the Year, Timely the Rising Star Partner of the Year and pcMedia Education Partner of the Year.
This year's awards saw the introduction of a new category for Innovative Software Product of the Year, recognising ISVs which have built an innovative product on the Microsoft stack which utilises the power of the cloud.
Kendrick says Microsoft was pleased to see a high number of competitive entries in the inaugural category, which was won by 11Ants Analytics.
"The winner, 11Ants Analytics, impressed the judges with an innovative retail software solution that enables retailers to take their raw transactional data and transform it into powerful decision making and promotional activity," Kendrick says.
Judges felt 11Ants Analytics has enormous global potential and is already becoming a great Kiwi export story, from start up through to global ISV.
"We look forward to seeing their business grow further in the next 12 months," says Kendrick.
The New Zealand Microsoft Partner Awards act as a springboard to the Global Awards programme with winners and finalists encouraged and supported to enter in the global awards which will take place in July in Canada.
The full list of winners from last night is:
Cloud Awards
Cloud Small and Medium Business (SMB) Partner of the Year – Computercare
Cloud Enterprise Partner of the Year – Fujitsu
Cloud Platform - Azure Partner of the Year – Datacom
Hosting Partner of the Year – Revera
Innovative Software Product of the Year – 11Ants Analytics
Competency Awards: Core Infrastructure
Devices and Deployment Partner of the Year – Intergen
Datacenter Partner of the Year- Dimension Data
Competency Awards: Application Platform
Data Analytics Partner of the Year – Intergen
Windows App Developer Partner of the Year – NV Interactive and Intergen (joint application)
Competency Awards: Business Productivity
Collaboration and Content Partner of the Year – Datacom
Communications Partner of the Year – Lexel
Competency Awards: Business Applications
Customer Relationship Management Partner of the Year – Fusion5
Enterprise Resource Planning Partner of the Year – Sable37
Individual Awards
Sales Specialist of the Year – James Stainton, Datacom
Partner Seller of the Year – Andrew Kosmadakis, Intergen
Segment Awards
Marketing Partner of the Year – Provoke
'Rising Star' Partner of the Year – Timely
Distributor Partner of the Year – Dicker Data
Education Partner of the Year – pcMedia
Innovative Technology for Good Citizenship Partner of the Year: Fujitsu
Learning Partner of the Year: Kinetics Group
Volume Licensing Partner of the Year: Spark Digital
