Phil Goldie - Director of Partner Business, Microsoft Australia
Australia has been recognised in record-breaking fashion at the Microsoft Worldwide Partner of the Year awards, with local partners taking home seven awards against the tech giant's global channel community.
With Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference edging closer, MOQDigital took home the coveted Australian Partner of the Year award, which recognises top partners "demonstrating excellence in innovation" and implementing customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.
Selected from a pool of over 2,500 entrees, collected from across 119 different countries worldwide, other Australian winners include Kloud, Ensyst, DDLS, 3P Learning Ltd, SMS and Software Optimisation Services.
“We are incredibly proud of our partner ecosystem and the role you all play in helping our customers have great experiences with Microsoft products and services,” Microsoft Australia Director of Partner Business, Philip Goldie, said.
In addition to the seven winners, MOQDigital, Kloud and 3P Learning Ltd also made the final reckonings, alongside UXC Eclipse.
Goldie said the recipients of these awards represent the “very best of our Australian partners”, recognised on a global stage.
“Each of these partners, like all our partners, are working every day to help transform Australian businesses with Microsoft technology,” he added.
“It’s great to see such powerful examples of innovative excellence in our partner community and it’s fantastic to see this excellence recognised on such a global stage.”
Australia Partner of the Year - MOQdigital
Over the past twelve months MOQ Digital has created a solution built around the Internet of Things, helping that customers extract business impact from their data.
MOQ Digital and the Laing O’Rourke innovation team developed the ‘smart hardhat’, based around a sweatband sensor array and data collection unit which can be retrofitted to an existing hardhat.
The solution monitors the temperature and heart-rate of the wearer, plus the external temperature and humidity, eliminating Laing O’Rourke to eliminate workplace accidents, potentially saving the lives of their 6,000 employees.
Enterprise Mobility award - Kloud
As a previous finalist for the Enterprise Mobility and Identity and Access Microsoft awards, Kloud has built up its enterprise mobility practice to help customers such as Pact Group, a manufacturer of packaging and other products, address the modern day productivity and security challenges.
According to judges, Kloud demonstrated its ability to help its customers be more productive with Office 365 while providing strong identity and access management, mobile device management, and data protection through the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility Suite.
Hybrid Cloud and Infrastructure Platform award - Ensyst
As a Gold Certified partner, Ensyst positioned Microsoft’s Hybrid Cloud offering to a South Australian customer by leveraging the vendor's partnership with Red Hat.
Judges said the partnership addressed key requirements of businesses building, deploying and managing applications on Red Hat software in Microsoft Azure.
Ensyst presented how Microsoft Hybrid Cloud can drive value to businesses, specifically for this customer situation to shift its on-premises Red Hat Linux system to a novel, hybrid environment connecting Azure with other on-premises infrastructure.
The result was a huge reduction in support and management costs along with significant productivity gains and ROI.
Looking beyond this however, judges acknowledged that the solution has "great benefit" to the whole Microsoft Partner ecosystem, as it has now created an "iconic reference" for Red Hat users to see what’s possible through Azure.
Learning award - DDLS Australia
Over the past year, DDLS partnered with Microsoft to create a training program inclusive of traditional classes, on-the-job training and Custom MOC for the Australian Department of Defence.
Leveraging this training program allowed DDLS to train end users on an expedited schedule while helping the client unify their technology stack around Microsoft’s solutions.
Legacy technologies, as well as direct competitors, were displaced from the client environment as they consolidated around a Microsoft platform including Cloud, SQL and Exchange.
Public Sector Education award - 3P Learning
As a global Cloud-based education company, 3P worked closely with Microsoft Team Australia to migrate from a hosted datacentre into the public cloud on Microsoft Azure.
The move to Azure was done with an eye towards the fast growing 2015 World Education Games and throughout the event, 3P served 6,308,021 students from 166 countries, who spent +128 million minutes answering 133 million math, literacy and science questions.
In addition, 3P also leverages Windows 10’s stylus capabilities allowing students the option to handwrite answers.
Public Sector award - Public Safety and National Security SMS
SMS eBorderForce leverages the power, scale and availability of Microsoft Azure and Dynamics CRM, Skype for Business and Microsoft Surface to enhance the security of Australia's borders.
eBorderForce provides an Operational Communications and Collaboration platform that captures data for high risk deliveries for analysis and investigation, which provides offline capability and enables officers to use their Surface tablets to capture and store the inspection details to upload later if out of range of a mobile data signal.
Software Asset Management (SAM) award - Software Optimisation Services Australia
According to judges, Software Optimisation Services’ (SOS) team "set a high standard" in combining energy, passion, and long term customer value through every Microsoft SAM engagement.
For judges, this unique set of qualifications and innovative approach, created the winning success criteria.
“It was evident this year that our partner ecosystem is maturing in its transformation,” Microsoft Worldwide Partner Group General Manager, Gavriella Schuster, added.
“Many award winners found that embracing Cloud technology was a spark for continued innovation and rapid growth. Microsoft’s cloud technology enables partners to develop creative applications, transform go-to-market, and deliver greater customer success.”
Software Optimisation Services Australia CEO, Filipa Preston, said the company is incredibly proud to be the first ever Asia-Pacific SAM partner to win in this category.
"We are euphoric to win the global SAM partner award. This award is recognition for our continual pursuit of SAM excellence which comes from our dedicated focus on the discipline of SAM and ITAM. It is so great to be recognised as the best in the world.”
In addition, Kloud was recognised as a finalist in Collaboration and Content, while UXC Eclipse, MOQdigital and 3P Learning were finalists in Enterprise Resource Planning Award, Internet of Things (IoT) Award: MOQdigital, Technology for Good Citizenship awards respectively.
