Nominations for the highly anticipated 2016 ARN ICT Industry Awards are soon to open.
Now in its tenth year, the ARN ICT Industry Awards recognise and celebrate channel excellence over the past year. To be hosted at a Black Tie Celebration Dinner on Thursday, September 15 at the Sheraton Four Points, Darling Harbour in Sydney, the 2016 awards will celebrate ARN’s 25th anniversary.
Companies and individuals will have a chance to self-nominate across eight categories including community, personal innovation, vendor, distributor, reseller, telecommunications, homegrown innovators, and Cloud.
And this year, you will be able to nominate across 30 awards.
Back by popular demand is the Telecommunications Distributor of the Year award.
The Telecommunications Distributor of the Year award recognises the increased importance the telecommunications industry is playing in a modern IT environment of Cloud and other hosted services. The crossover between telecommunications and the traditional IT channel is significant now, and encompasses providers (vendor), technology distributors and resellers.
We have also reinstated the Sales Excellence award as part of the personal innovation category.
The Sales Excellence award is open to individuals from the vendor, distributor or reseller community and aims to promote an outstanding sales job in the past 12 months. Examples of success could include an ability to grow revenue, closing a significant or highly competitive deal, and customer and market responsiveness.
Another change comes in the Homegrown Innovators category, with the addition of a new Start-up of the Year award.
This new award recognises Australian-made excellence in the ICT industry, with the award highlighting local excellence and ingenuity on a national level, recognising companies less than 10 years old which have established their businesses domestically as start-ups (rather than being a multi-national subsidiary).
We will also continue to offer a dedicated Cloud technology category, which recognises players focusing on Cloud-based technologies and services. There are three awards: Vendor, Partner, and Best Cloud Initiative, which is open to distributors, vendors and partners.
The vendor award category will continue to offer five awards: hardware; software; specialist; security; and networking. The security and networking awards give vendors yet another opportunity to highlight and showcase their success stories in specially designed and highly focused awards.
Meanwhile, in our Personal Innovation category, we will continue to offer the channel manager the ability to show success in sales, profitability and partner recruitment objectives. Rounding out the personal innovation category, are the Technical Excellence and Management Excellence awards.
Of course, we will also keep our other popular award categories open.
To nominate, you will soon be able to visit the 2016 ICT Industry Awards Nominations page and click on the specific award link which will direct you to the simple to navigate online questions.
Each category has four or five questions as part of the award criteria. With a varied mix of questions, you will have a chance to put your best foot forward in answering the criteria, but please limit your responses to the 250 maximum word count set per question.
ARN strongly recommends companies only self-nominate to ensure the best chance of success with our judging panel. Please note that you only need one nomination submission to be in the running for your chosen award (other nominations cannot be considered). Then simply enter your name, company name and email address and you’ll be in the running.
Nominations this year will open on May 23 and close June 20. Channel Choice awards open July 1 and run until July 29, 2016.
