Microsoft New Zealand honoured a wide-ranging crop of new and current partners last night, with cloud dominating at the 9th annual Partner Awards, held at a black tie event in Auckland.
During an evening of thrills and laughs - in which the tech giant raised $26,000 for Stand Children’s Services thanks to generous partner donations during a live auction - the cream of the Kiwi channel joined together to celebrate another stellar year of business across the country.
Such growth across the local IT sector played out in the numbers, with Microsoft recognising partners in 22 categories that celebrated core partner competencies, showcasing excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technologies.
“In this year’s winners list it was great to see a mix of consistently performing winners from previous years and some exciting new entrants from our booming IT sector,” says Brent Kendrick, Director of Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partner Group, Microsoft.
“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.”
The 2016 Partner Awards also saw the introduction of a new award category - Innovative Software Product of the Year – which is all about recognising ISVs that have built an innovative product on the Microsoft stack which utilises the power of the cloud.
“We were pleased to see a high number of competitive entries in this inaugural category,” Kendrick adds.
“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.”
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,” Kendrick adds.
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.
Kendrick says this year’s global winners will be announced at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference taking place in July in Toronto, Canada.
A full list of category winners as follows:
Cloud Awards
- Winner, Cloud Small and Medium Business (SMB) Partner of the Year – Computercare
- Winner, Cloud Enterprise Partner of the Year – Fujitsu
- Winner, Cloud Platform - Azure Partner of the Year – Datacom
- Winner, Hosting Partner of the Year – Revera
- Winner, Innovative Software Product of the Year – 11Ants Analytics
- Winner, Devices and Deployment Partner of the Year – Intergen
- Winner, Datacentre Partner of the Year- Dimension Data
- Winner, Data Analytics Partner of the Year – Intergen
- Winner, Windows App Developer Partner of the Year – NV Interactive and Intergen (joint application)
Competency Awards: Business Productivity
- Winner, Collaboration and Content Partner of the Year – Datacom
- Winner, Communications Partner of the Year – Lexel
- Winner, Customer Relationship Management Partner of the Year – Fusion5
- Winner, Enterprise Resource Planning Partner of the Year – Sable37
- Winner, Sales Specialist of the Year – James Stainton, Datacom
- Winner, Partner Seller of the Year – Andrew Kosmadakis, Intergen
- Winner, Marketing Partner of the Year – Provoke
- Winner, 'Rising Star' Partner of the Year – Timely
- Winner, Distributor Partner of the Year – Dicker Data
- Winner, Education Partner of the Year – pcMedia
- Winner, Fujitsu
- Winner, Kinetics Group
- Winner, Spark Digital
