Winners rejoice in Bangkok

DQ Channels Excellence Awards
were announced during the fifth Solution Providers (SP) Summit in
Bangkok, Thailand on Jan 30. The event took off on a cruise boat on
River Chaopraya in Bangkok. Flagging off the event was Jayesh Kotak
,VP-Product Management and Marketing, D-Link India, who informed
the solution providers about the company's plans for the current
year in the channel space.

There were five distinct categories of
awards, with one runner-up and winner in each category. The first
category of awards was for the Fastest Growing SP. The SPs were
judged on the premise of growth in the past three years. The
runner-up in this category was Omnitech InfoSolutions while the Gold
award was bagged by Allied Digital Services, as the company
registered a significant growth of around 87 percent in 2008-09. This
was the first time that Allied Digital Services was considered for
the category of fastest growing SP.

In the second category of awards-Best
Service Volume-the jury opined that the winners should be judged
and rewarded on the value of their service business. The runner-up
for this category was yet again Allied Digital Services. The Gold
winner in this category was Devendra Taneja of PC Solutions, which
posted a revenue of whopping Rs 139 crore in 2008-09. A major part of
the aforesaid revenue was accounted for by managed services. The
company's 28 percent of total revenue came from these verticals.

The third set of awards was for the
Most Comprehensive SP, where the Gold award was given to Frontier
Business Systems. The company was nominated in almost all award
categories. Some of the their prominent collaborations are with
Citrix, VMware, PlateSpin, Marathon, Cisco, Tyco, Emerson, Lenovo,
IBM, Sun, Oracle, Dell and others. The company is also one of two
channel partners in India to achieve certification for Dynamic
Infrastructure, IBM's Smart Planet initiative, besides being
recognized by VMware as a first authorized consultant Gold partner in
India and was honored as its Model Partner at VMworld in USA last
year. The Silver award in this category was presented to Orient
Technologies, which has been steadily increasing its services
revenue, and contributed Rs 21 crore to the overall revenue of Rs 103
crore. Out of this, Rs 7 crore came from facilities management,
followed by network integration, Rs 3 crore came from third-party
maintenance and Rs 2 crore from systems integration business.

The fourth set of awards were entitled
Best Deployment, where the panel had to judged which SP had
successfully deployed the most unique and innovative project in
2009-10. Dubbed the toughest category of awards, the Gold award in
this category went yet again to PC Solutions for undertaking a
Unified Communication project valued at Rs 1.5 crore for a global
offshore outsourcing company. PC Solutions configured a front server
for audio, video and instant messaging integrating the OCS with PBX
for 8,000 users. The Silver award went to Wysetek Systems
Technologists for setting up a cost effective DR site with optimal
performance using VMware and IBM Blade Center, which enabled it to
consolidate and vitualize physical production servers to
corresponding virtual machines. The value of the project was Rs 2
crore.

The fifth and most awaited award was
for the Most Successful Solution Provider, and the criteria for
selection included low dependency on founders for business and a lot
of autonomy built in to ensure smooth functioning even if there was a
change at the management level. Additionally, the winners should have
scalable business models, which are quick to adapt to newer verticals
and opportunities as dictated by market dynamics. This year, the
Silver category for the Most Successful SP was shared jointly by
Frontier Business Systems and Team Computers, which had superseded
others and were successful across all categories. Allied Digital
Services was yet again awarded Gold, taking its award count to three
this year.

Incidentally this year, another set of
unique awards was given for the nation's Best Automated Managed
Services Providers. Constituted especially by Kaseya Software, the
winners were chosen on the basis of their understanding of automated
managed services, their business model, the number of endpoints they
managed in an automated fashion, the number of AMS enterprise
customers they had and how many employees were supporting the AMS
offering. The Silver award in this category went to Team Computers
while Allied Digital again won the Gold.

The awards presentation was followed by
dinner and cocktails, which was immensely enjoyed by the attending
SPs.