On Sunday night at IBM PartnerWorld, I presented two CRN Best In Show awards, recognition that we’re giving out this year in conjunction with IBM, Intel and Microsoft. My colleague Steven Burke is doing the same this week at the Intel Solutions Summit.
We started this practice more than five years ago to shine a brighter light on VARs, resellers and integrators that emphasized solutions over product-specific sales. At the time, the debate over whether or not this would work was raging, and we figured the best place to take a stand was at the partner conferences held by several of the industry’s biggest and most partner-friendly companies. Today, the solutions message seems almost a moot point as we banter about terms like trusted advisor when describing VARs. |
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The awards given out Sunday here at PartnerWorld underscore two of the vendor’s biggest thematic priorities in 2006: collaboration and managed services. It was tough to choose from among the dozen or so applicants (all of which had to be exhibitors in the Solutions Center here at the show).
What helped crystalize my decision for the first award, Innovation in Hosted Services, were several things, not the least of which was the fact that this partner, Ardence of Waltham, Mass., was able to cut the server provisioning process for its customer, Freeze.com, to roughly five minutes from five hours. In addition, the offering accommodates spikes in Web traffic demand handily, an important consideration, since Freeze.com reports daily online traffic of 1.5 visitors when it’s running a promotion. The partner’s use of blade servers, which helped its customer in terms of power management, was also key.
The second award, Innovation in Collaboration, actually recognized the collaborative work of several different IBM partners, orchestrated by Arrow Enterprise Computing Solutions. The solution, called Rapid Response, is sold by Paaridian Technologies and represents a joint effort by Arrow, Paaridian, E-team, IBM Software and IBM Global Services. It uses an impressive cross-section of IBM products including xSeries servers, WebSphere Portal Express Plus, Tivoli Directory Integrator, DB2 and Lotus Web conferencing.
Look for more footage about both soon on CRN TV.
The partners recognized this week at the Intel conference are Brite Computers, which worked with developer TeleAtrics to create a desktop telemedicine solution; Other partners recognized for a custom laptop , and custom video surveillance servers.
Kudos to all. |
