Credit: 129934839 © Ken Wolter | Dreamstime.com
NetApp has revealed the winners of its annual partner awards, celebrating 17 top performing individuals and businesses in the last 12 months.
Going on its sixth year, the virtual awards ceremony was hosted by NetApp A/NZ director of channels and alliances Neville James along with APAC vice president pathways, alliances and strategies Wendy Koh and CEO George Kurian.
This year’s awards presented an opportunity to commemorate the efforts of six partners who demonstrated resilience and tenacity in the channel by working with customers to adapt to the challenges of 2020, and foster innovation and optimisation of operations.
Two new awards were added to the mix — Rising Star and Deal of the Year — with the hybrid cloud data services and data management provider recognising 11 individuals who demonstrated excellence.
“This year threw up many unforeseen challenges, and yet the high calibre of entries shows just how passionate our partners are, and how hard they have worked to be able to meet our customers’ needs,” James said.
“Our customers tell us that they need partners, who are subject-matter experts and who can help them successfully design and implement their digital transformation projects. These awards commemorate the commitment from our partners to help solve our customers’ biggest challenges — together with NetApp.”
Katana1 was awarded Platinum Partner of the Year and Gold Partner of the Year went to Cube Networks.
Gammer Group received New Partner of the Year while TasNetworks picked up the Converged Infrastructure/Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Excellence award.
Digital Sense scored Cloud Provider of the Year and Leidos achieved Global Systems Integrator of the Year.
Among the individual awards, Josche Stuart, sales engineer for data centre transformation at Arrow, was awarded the Rising Star for 2020 — a category that recognises an individual who is new to the NetApp partner ecosystem, going above and beyond to align with NetApp’s value proposition.
Thomas Duryea Logicalis’ Jim Zelener and Katana 1’s Steve de Celis were joint winners for the Sales Excellence award.
There were also joint winners for Marketing Excellence delivered to Thomas Duryea Logicalis’ Catriona Walkerden and ASE’s Jacqueline Leech.
Deal of the Year was also shared with Meridian IT’s Matt Powell and Fujitsu’s Paul Floro gaining recognition for their efforts.
Arrow’s Shane Ferris scored the Technical Excellence gong while Veeam’s Aggie Grom accepted the Alliance Partner Champion award.
Citrus Consulting Group’s Kevin Rapson and Adrian Hall received Data Visionary of the Year.
NTT’s Nathan Vandenberg was inducted into the NetApp Hall of Fame.
