Reseller News Innovation Awards 2021: and the winners are… – Reseller News

Reseller News is proud to announce the winners of the Innovation Awards in 2021, featuring a leading and diverse line-up of partners, vendors, distributors, telcos, start-ups and individuals across New Zealand.

Celebrated during a black-tie event at Shed 10 that brought together more than 600 members of the Kiwi channel community, this running of Innovation Awards celebrated the accomplishments of more than 30 winners and one new inductee into the Reseller News Hall of Fame — Richard Morgan.

Despite the event being rescheduled from October 2021 due to COVID-19 restrictions, winners were selected and honoured from 190 finalists (including 46 individuals) which made the shortlist across partner, start-up, telco, vendor and distributor businesses.

Reflective of a diverse technology network, finalists ranged from large-scale multinational consultancy firms to emerging start-ups, alongside leading system integrators, managed service providers and solution consultants, plus cloud specialists, independent software vendors, boutique agencies and application developers. This was in addition to channel-centric vendors, telecommunications providers and supply chain experts.

Within this standout group, finalists were located across the entire country — from North Island to South Island — including Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Hamilton, Tauranga and Palmerston North.

Aligned to the Reseller News approach of representing established and emerging technology providers in equal measure, the Innovation Awards program in 2021 stands tall as the leading forum for setting the industry benchmark for ecosystem excellence across New Zealand.

“Congratulations to our finalists, highly commended and winners in 2021,” said Cherry Yumul, vice president of Channel across Asia Pacific at Foundry. “This running of Innovation Awards has undoubtedly captured the most challenging yet transformative period of the Kiwi channel.

“To display of such inspiring examples of innovation balanced with stoic levels of resilience is testament to the strength of the ecosystem in New Zealand. We are proud to provide a platform upon which market-leading partners, vendors, distributors and individuals can be recognised — kudos to such a thriving channel community.”

In 2021, Innovation Awards honoured the channel across eight categories, spanning Partner Innovation, Tech Innovation, NZ-wide Innovation, Start-up Innovation, Personal Innovation, Vendor Innovation, Distributor Innovation and Hall of Fame.

In streamlining the program, the aim was to increase focus on the pace-setters of the local market, those revving up the innovation engine and powering ahead in the delivery of transformative solutions and services.

One new category introduced was NZ-wide Innovation which recognised partners headquartered outside of the two most-populated metropolitan areas in the country (Auckland and Wellington) delivering customer value and transformation. Other award additions included Think Differently, acknowledging partners operating beyond transactional engagement to deploy creative and unique solutions in the pursuit of customer transformation.

Specific to distribution, Incubation honoured pioneering distributors introducing innovative new vendor technologies to the Kiwi channel through a nurturing and next-generation approach to ecosystem transformation. This was in addition to Creativity, acknowledging distributors delivering outside-of-the-box initiatives to enhance vendor value propositions and spearhead partner innovation efforts, aligned to the collective goal of driving ecosystem growth.

Finalists were selected by an executive judging panel of more than 80 business leaders from partner, vendor and distributor organisations.

Reseller News congratulates all finalists and thanks all organisations and individuals for taking the time to submit nominations.

PARTNER INNOVATION

Partner Innovation recognises customer innovation and excellence across the key market segments of Enterprise, Mid-Market and SMB, in addition to pioneering technology specialists and collaborative providers.

— presented by Andre van Duiven – Managing Director, Sektor

Enterprise:

Winner: Datacom

Datacom wins this award for designing and delivering a mobile electronic camera solution that can be mounted on vehicles, with the ability to scan the licence plates of parked cars and electronically ‘chalk’ their tyres. Datacom significantly improved efficiency for its public sector customer thanks to the solution, increasing the number of parking bays being patrolled with no increase in officer numbers.

Mid-Market:

Winner: Lexel Systems

Lexel Systems wins this award for its work migrating the IT environment of its aged care sector customer from an on-premises environment to remote hosting in a purpose-built data centre. The outcome of this work exceeded all performance and scalability objectives and customer support expectations, with the new IT infrastructure integrating seamlessly with other software systems.

SMB:

Winner: SecureCom

SecureCom wins this award for implementing a range of modern, managed workplace ICT services for its customer, a business of just 20 people, moving the organisation to a secure digital environment that allowed it to grow cost effectively. SecureCom delivered technology leadership, ICT continuous improvement, governance and innovation, ultimately becoming its customer’s IT department.

Think Differently:

Highly commended: Spark 

Winner: CCL

CCL wins this award for building a unique solution for its infrastructure construction sector customer that takes video footage of road surfaces, which is uploaded to a machine learning platform developed to identify, locate and classify road defects. The success of the project has created new IP and a standalone cloud service slated for a global launch in 2022, targeting the road surveying market. 

Collaboration:

Highly commended: Network for Learning

Winner: Umbrellar

Umbellar wins this award for its work partnering with Medtech and Augen to create a New Zealand healthcare solution platform with a mission to save lives by empowering doctors to focus on diagnosing and curing their patients. Built in the cloud, the ALEX platform is already saving lives in the NZ health sector and is readily available to other countries such as Australia, Ireland and the UK. 

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