Australian partners centre stage in Microsoft global Awards

Microsoft today announced the winners and finalists of the 2020 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards. The annual awards recognise Microsoft partners demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.

Award winners and finalists from around the world will be recognised at the first ever digital Microsoft Inspire, July 21-22, 2020.

This year, Microsoft acknowledged partners in 49 categories celebrating each of the solution areas, industries and sectors globally in which Microsoft technologies are used. Microsoft introduced 10 new categories this year, including the first-ever Community Response award. This new award recognises partners that have made a great difference, providing innovative and unique services or solutions to help solve problems for our customers and community during these unprecedented times.

The Australian winners of this year’s Awards are:

• Australian Partner of the Year – Accenture/Avanade
• Global Partner for Social Impact Award – Barhead Solutions
• Modern Solutions Partner of the Year – CompNow
• Australia Growth Award – LAB3

Avanade/Accenture A long term strategic partner of Microsoft Australia, Avanade/Accenture has over the past year driven digital transformation to the cloud, and delivered stellar COVID-19 leadership in partnership with the local Microsoft team. When tasked with migrating approximately 50 government agencies to Azure, not only did they do it in six months, but they created the world’s first multi-tenanted SAP migration to Azure. Accenture/Avanade’s agility also ensured a major Brisbane hospital was able to save lives during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using Power Apps, Power Automate, and Azure API Management, the team produced an app in 10 days that helped doctors monitor the health and recovery of patients presenting with COVID-19 symptoms. Accenture/Avanade, together with Microsoft, have collaborated for many years supporting some of Australia’s biggest brands.

Barhead partnered with a nonprofit organisation committed to empowering and inspiring young people through recreation activities and community building. With COVID-19, the nonprofit had to close 90 percent of its operations and stand down thousands of critical workers. When the Australian Government launched the JobKeeper program to help COVID-affected organisations continue paying for staff wages, the organisation needed to process over 5,000 employee records in a short timeframe to obtain the much-needed funding securely and compliantly. Within two days, Barhead and the nonprofit partnered to build a PowerApp leveraging Microsoft Power Platform to process the employee records, thereby ensuring 5,000+ employees were paid during this global pandemic.

CompNow – they consistently demonstrated their ongoing commitment to both Microsoft and their customers. Their unique positioning in the market as an agile partner capable of delivering and supporting complex cloud-based solutions and Surface device rollouts has enabled them to create and deploy several unique offerings. They have always been forward in bringing these solutions to Microsoft, presenting alongside our Surface team and creating a unified front for their customer base. Their diverse strategies and proactive attitude mean that they are always on the leading edge with modern workplace initiatives introduced by Microsoft – including modern deployment and DaaS.

LAB3 is the inaugural recipient of Microsoft Australia’s new award – the Australia Growth Award. This recognises significant progress by a partner which has demonstrated exemplary values and achievements and serves as a beacon to other partners. Founded in 2017 the organisation develops proprietary intellectual property and provides managed services to support customers, including Fourpoint (manufacturing IoT & analytics solution), SensorMine (a mining IoT and data platform), Azure Bedrock (Azure scaffolding as code) for highly regulated industries such as financial services and LAB3 Teams calling. It has played a key role for Microsoft customers across enterprise, corporate and SMB.

Seven additional Australian partners were named as finalists in the global awards:

• Community Response – FiveP Australia
• DevOps – Arinco
• Dynamics 365 Business Central – Wiise Software
• Healthcare – Illuminance Solutions
• Indirect Provider – Rhipe
• Project and Portfolio Management – Sensei Project Solutions
• Solution Assessment – Insight Enterprises Australia

The finalists and winners for all Microsoft Partner of the Year awards were selected from more than 3,300 nominations collected from more than 100 different countries worldwide based on their commitment to customers, their solutions’ impact on the market, and exemplary use of Microsoft technologies. More than 100 nominations were received from Australian partners for this year’s awards.

Rachel Bondi, Chief Partner Officer, Microsoft Australia congratulated all winners and finalists, noting; “The immense impact that our partners have had, particularly in terms of supporting customers through the challenges of COVID-19 has been outstanding.

“It is a great pleasure to be able to publicly acknowledge that work through our Partner of the Year Awards. Working together over the coming 12 months I am confident we will build on this year’s success and progress to even greater things.”

The complete list of categories, winners and finalists, including the Microsoft Country Partner of the Year Award winners for 2020, is available at https://aka.ms/POTYA_WinnersFinalist_List. For more information visit https://partner.microsoft.com/en-us/inspire/awards.