Reseller News Innovation Awards 2020: and the winners are… – Reseller News
Reseller News is proud to honour New Zealand’s best and brightest channel players, recognising the achievements of an outstanding line-up of partners, start-ups, vendors, distributors and individuals at the 2020 Reseller News Innovation Awards.
Held in Auckland on the evening of 21 October and hosted by comedian and television personality Te Radar, the event saw hundreds of attendees representing New Zealand’s channel community come together to celebrate the achievements of more than 30 winners on the night.
Among the winners were Datacom, The Instillery, CCL, Base2, UneeQ, SecureCom, Company-X, Lexel Systems, SAS IT, Enlighten Designs, vBridge, Base2, Aportio Technologies and many, many more.
Once again, Datacom won awards in two categories, including Emerging Technologies – IoT, and Partner Value – Enterprise, the latter in recognition of the company’s work with Hitachi Vantara to build a Hitachi Content Platform solution to eliminate unstructured content silos.
Aportio Technologies and UneeQ also appeared twice each in the winners’ list, under their own names in the Homegrown Innovators – Start-Up and Emerging Technologies – Smart Technology categories, respectively, and again as part of a consortium with Consegna, under the name Inteso, which took out the Partner Value – Collaboration gong.
Lexel Systems and SAS IT, meanwhile, tied to become joint winners of the Partner Value – Customer Value category, while Acquire and Exeed were among this year’s Channel Choice winners, along with Palo Alto Networks and HP.
On the vendor side, Veeam Software, HP, Vocus, Cisco and Microsoft won at least a category each. At the same time, channel talent from the likes of Veeam Software, Network for Learning (N4L), Acquire, SAS IT and Kordia went home with Entrepreneurship awards.
Among the distributors, Ingram Micro won two awards, in the Distributor – Hardware and Distributor – Cloud categories, while Westcon-Comstor and Chillisoft also claimed wins on the night, with Duo, a division of Sektor, and Umbrellar being highly commended.
The evening also saw a new channel stalwart inducted into the Reseller News Hall of Fame, with Datacom Group director of sales and longtime channel veteran Mark Hardie joining past inductees.
Below is the complete list of winners and highly commended finalists from the Reseller News Innovation Awards 2020.
Reseller News congratulates all winners, highly commended, finalists and nominees, and thanks a judging panel comprising many of the industry’s leading influencers.
EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
Datacom wins this award for its design and delivery of a new IT system that provided its client with a range of new capabilities, including fleet optimisation, real time data capture and field force job management in the form of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering.
Smart Technology
Winner: UneeQ
UneeQ wins this award for the development of its conversational AI digital human creator platform, UneeQ Creator, which provides machine learning functionality and the ability to create and deploy unique ‘digital humans’ capable of recreating natural human interaction.
Digital Transformation
Winner: SecureCom
SecureCom wins this award for implementing a digital transformation programme that enabled its client to move its infrastructure to the cloud, gain greater visibility of its IT environment and transform the way it works, while resulting in substantial cost savings.
The Instillery wins this award for the rapid deployment of a cloud solution leveraging Microsoft Azure and Zscaler that helped to dramatically reduce its client’s operating costs while enabling the seamless transition of its workforce to a remote working environment.
HOMEGROWN INNOVATORS
Service Provider
Highly commended: SecOps NZ
Highly commended: SecureCom
vBridge wins this award for the development of its MyCloudSpace management platform, a multi-tenant portal, companion mobile app and set of APIs allowing for self-service provisioning, management, reporting, pricing and billing.
Company-X wins this award for designing and deploying a platform with a Speech Synthesis Markup Language (SSML) editor to automate a labour-intensive manual process for its client, introducing automated workflow technology to transform the process for users.
Start-Up
Winner: Aportio Technologies
Aportio Technologies wins this award for the development of its enterprise grade service for processing emails and messages using machine learning and natural language processing techniques, along with the inclusion of its solution on the AWS and Datto marketplaces.
PARTNER VALUE
Base2 wins this award for the development of digital transformation technology to improve business process and automation it uses to assist in the advancement of the SMB market, within which it counts more than 450 organisations as clients.
Mid-Market
Winner: CCL
Highly commended: CodeBlue
Highly commended: Lexel Systems
CCL wins this award for its work assisting clients in the mid-market impacted by COVID-19, helping them to reduce running costs and defer payments, create efficiencies where practical, change business models and deliver services remotely and much more.
Datacom wins this award for its partnership with Hitachi Vantara to build a Hitachi Content Platform solution to eliminate unstructured content silos, deliver compliance-level data protection, centralise data management and employ best-in-class metadata architecture.
Customer Value
Winner: Lexel Systems
Winner: SAS IT
Lexel Systems wins this award for solving its client’s long-standing SQL server issues in the space of a week, eliminating performance issues and bringing one of its client’s key systems back to its former glory, improving processing times and reducing costs.
SAS IT wins this award for its work taking on the management of its client’s business as usual environment, freeing up the client’s high-value resources, while also providing the basis for a range of technology solutions and helping to deliver new products.
Winner: Inteso – a consortium between Consegna, UneeQ and Aportio
Inteso wins this award for its Digital Human Contact Centre Agent ‘Tess’, a cloud-based technology jointly built by UneeQ, Aportio and Consegna. Tess draws on UneeQ’s digital human technologies, Aportio’s email and chat integration and back-end conversation processing and Consegna’s advanced AWS consulting and integration competencies.
Corporate Citizen
Highly commended: Base2
Highly commended: Network for Learning
Enlighten Designs wins this award for its efforts promoting the possibilities of STEM careers in local secondary schools, along with its work in collaboration with the Microsoft European Communications team using Power BI to disseminate regional results from a study of 11,500 girls across 12 European countries, with a focus on understanding the current challenges to increasing the uptake of STEM subjects by girls and young women.
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