Microsoft New Zealand announced local winners of the 9^th annual Partner Awards at a black tie event held in Auckland last night. 

The awards recognise Microsoft partners who show excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technologies. This year, Microsoft recognised partners in 22 categories that celebrate core partner competencies. 

Brent Kendrick, Director of Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partner Group at Microsoft, says all winners are companies demonstrating genuine transformational success.

“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 Kendrick.

“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.”

This year’s Partner Awards 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,” says Kendrick. 

“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,” says Kendrick.

 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.

 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.

Competency Awards: Core Infrastructure

• Winner, Devices and Deployment Partner of the Year – Intergen
• Winner, Datacenter Partner of the Year- Dimension Data.

Competency Awards: Application Platform

• 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.

Competency Awards: Business Applications

• Winner, Customer Relationship Management Partner of the Year – Fusion5
• Winner, Enterprise Resource Planning Partner of the Year – Sable37.

Individual Awards

• Winner, Sales Specialist of the Year – James Stainton, Datacom
• Winner, Partner Seller of the Year – Andrew Kosmadakis, Intergen.

Segment Awards

• 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.

Innovative Technology for Good Citizenship Partner of the Year

• Winner, Fujitsu

Learning Partner of the Year

• Winner, Kinetics Group

Volume Licensing Partner of the Year

• Winner, Spark Digital