Datacentrix scooped the lion’s share of awards at HP’s annual Partner Awards late last week, including the coveted trophy for Overall Partner of the Year, while the effervescent Apil “Appie” Pema, CEO of Aptronics, took home the prestigious Executive of the Year award for the fifth time.
HP South Africa MD Frank van Rees paid homage to the company’s channel partners, once again stressing the vital role they play in the success of the company in the southern African region.
“Partnering is part of our DNA at HP and when you consider that 90% of our business in South Africa goes through our partners, then you realise just how important you are to us,” Van Rees told partners. “Our CEO Meg Whitman has said that our partners are at the centre of what we do and that is never more true than today, and she is making sure that we are fully aligned to your business.”
Van Rees says that HP’s PartnerOne programme is one of the most comprehensive and successful channel programmes in the industry and that the company continues to tweak it to ensure that partners benefit as fully as possible from doing business with it.
“The fact that PartnerOne is a success is borne out by the fact that at last week’s Channelwise Awards, HP won eight of the nine categories it was eligible for,” he says.
The Channelwise Awards are the local industry’s only independent awards in which reseller partners vote for their preferred distributors and vendors.
The winners in the various categories of HP’s Partner Awards 2013 were:
PPS Preferred Partner: Running Computers
Enterprise Group Preferred Partner: AdvanceNet
HP Networking Gold Partner: Sizwe IT Group
Storage Partner: Datacentrix
Business Critical Systems: SYSDBA
Industry Standard Servers: Datacentrix
PPS Gold Partners
Thin Client and Virtualisation: Aptronics
Workstations: Datacentrix
Retail Point of Sale: Datacentrix
Managed Print Service Award: First Technology and Nashua
Supplies: Waltons
PPS Services: First Technology
Software Services: Dimension Data
Software: SortIT
Information Management: Datacentrix
Enterprise Security Portfolio: DRS
Most Certified Channel Technician: Riaan Swart, Business Connexion
Outstanding Channel Technology: Merwe Erasmus, Datacentrix
Outstanding Services: Adele Schoonwinkel, Aptronics
Outstanding Product Manager: Francois van Wijk, Drive Control
Channel Salesperson: Susan Dey, SYSDBA
Channel Champions: Tony de Sousa and Hannes Steyn, Datacentrix
PPS Consumer Partner of the Year: Digital Planet
PPS Hardware Distributor: Tarsus
PPS Supplies: Kolok
Enterprise Group Distributor of the Year: Tarsus
Special Recognition Award from EMEA Region: Aptronics and EOH
PPS Partner of the Year: First Technology
Enterprise Group Partner of the Year: Datacentrix
Overall Partner of the Year: Datacentrix
Executive of the Year: Apil Pema