Matt Hurford (NetApp)
Storage vendor NetApp has celebrated its Australia and New Zealand (A/NZ) channel for 2023 at its annual Partner Excellence Awards.
The awards recognised “strategic partnerships aid in providing NetApp products and solutions to solve the business challenges of their joint customers”.
“I am delighted to recognise and celebrate the outstanding achievements of our partners and distributors in Australia and New Zealand, who have not only driven exceptional growth but have also demonstrated an unwavering commitment to customer excellence,” said Matthew Hurford, managing director of NetApp in A/NZ.
“These awards reflect our strong collaboration and the remarkable impact our partners have had in delivering innovative data services solutions and driving success in the cloud, AI, data protection\ and backup-as-a-service sectors throughout the fiscal year 2023.”
CyberCX won the title of New Partner of the Year for delivering sizeable revenue contributions and new significant business development investments in NetApp.
Partner of the Year of the Preferred tier went to gold partner Meridian IT while the Prestige tier award went to Cirrus Networks.
Service Provider of the Year was handed to Aussie Broadband and Cloud Partner of the Year was handed out to Versent. Alliance Partner of the Year was won by Amazon Web Services (AWS).
In the individual categories, Neil Deoki of DDG Technology won the prize for Sales Excellence, for which he was said to have showcased “exceptional customer relationship knowledge and sales management expertise.”
Technical Excellence went to Luke Mulcahy of FlexData for his commitment to high levels of skills, quality processes and consistently high customer satisfaction through investment in their technical capabilities.
Onel Consulting’s James England was awarded the Rising Star award. This recognises an individual who is new to the NetApp partner ecosystem but “who in a very short space of time has gone above and beyond to become enabled on NetApp’s value proposition”.
Steve Parsonage of Canary IT was inducted into the NetApp Hall of Fame for his “best-of-breed leadership”.
Additionally, Canary IT also scored Deal of the Year while Richard Tomkinson of CyberCX was recognised as Data Visionary of the Year.
