Garry Gray (Red Hat)
Red Hat has named the winners of its 2021 A/NZ partner awards, honouring partner contributions to the open source ecosystem and commitment to solving customer challenges.
At a virtual awards ceremony today, the company said this year’s winners had proven to be leaders in innovation, empowering customers to adopt the cultural changes required for digital transformation and to achieve success.
“Through working collaboratively with our talented Red Hat partners, we’ve found a common path towards digital transformation as we help our customers navigate the changing technology landscape,” said Garry Gray, director of partners and alliances for Red Hat A/NZ.
Red Hat provides enterprise open source software using a community-powered approach to deliver high-performing Linux, hybrid cloud, container, and Kubernetes technologies.
These help customers integrate new and existing IT applications, develop cloud-native applications, standardise operating systems and automate, secure, and manage complex environments.
“Our partners have been instrumental in generating strong outcomes and leading initiatives to enable customer success with open hybrid cloud technology. Together we’ve demonstrated the power of open source in driving innovation to meet our customers’ new needs and challenges."
The winners were:
- A/NZ partner of the year: Integral Technology Solutions
- Innovation partner of the year: Deloitte Australia and New Zealand
- Professional services partner of the year: Advent One
- Cloud partner of the year: Advent One
- Distribution partner of the year: Tech Data A/NZ
- ISV partner of the year: Hansen
- New partner of the year: Logicalis
- Advanced business partner of the year: Section6
Gray said if he was to pick one theme from this year's cohort of winners it would probably the acceleration of digital transformation.
"We’ve seen many of our customers come under different pressures because of this environment they are now operating in, needing to advance legacy applications or make information more ubiquitous, whether it’s driving cloud applications or accelerating applications to market," he said.
"The pressure that comes on many of our partners is then delivering that acceleration or helping those customers accelerate that transformation."
A large part of that was the continuing drive towards hybrid cloud.
Partners, he said, were delivering greater visibility about what’s going on in customers' IT environments, the ability to more effectively manage those environments and, more specifically, control over compliance and risk issues.
Paul Armstrong, head of customer engagement at New Zealand-based Section6, said organisations were beginning to get their heads around data sovereignty issues and that was helped by some of the cloud providers now looking to move into New Zealand.
"Then they drop the word sovereignty and maintain the word control," he said.
Customers may use public clouds to "burst out into", but for mission critical systems and workloads there was a strong theme of control.
"Then you’ve got the distribution of computing that goes with that as well and that’s what we are seeing enterprises take advantage of," Armstrong said.
