Rising star companies shared the limelight with some familiar faces on the winners’ podium at Microsoft New Zealand’s 2015 Partner Awards event held in Auckland.

Now in its eighth year, the annual Partner Awards exists to recognise excellence in the IT sector from those companies that integrate Microsoft solutions into their products and services to accelerate innovation and go above and beyond customer expectations.

In congratulating all finalists and winners, Brent Kendrick, Microsoft New Zealand’s SMB and Partner Director, noted the impressive range of entries for the 2015 Awards, which saw a significant increase in the number of partners who had never competed before.

“The quality of entries this year has been truly outstanding, and shows the extent to which partners have been joining Microsoft on our journey of transformation towards becoming the productivity and platform company for a mobile-first, cloud first world,” he says. 

“We know that a cloud-first world requires new and different ways of reaching customers, and I’m glad to see some really good marketing work happening inside many of our partners. Your efforts and strength of engagement have made New Zealand number one in the world in terms of year-on-year growth in the number of Gold Competency partners.”

A full list of award categories, finalists and winners follows:

Cloud Awards

• Cloud SMB

• Cloud Enterprise

• Cloud Platform

• Hosting

Competency Awards: Core Infrastructure

• Devices and Deployment

• Datacenter

Competency Awards: Application Platform

• Data Analytics

• Windows App Developer

Competency Awards: Business Productivity

• Collaboration and Content

• Communications

Competency Awards: Business Applications

• CRM

• ERP

Individual Awards

• Presales Technical Specialist

Segment Awards

• Education

• Innovation Technology for Good Citizenship

• Learning

• Volume Licensing

• Marketing

• Rising Star