Kathy Gibson is at Fujitsu Forum in Munich – South Africa’s Sizwe Africa IT Group has won a global Fujitsu channel award.
The company was named Best Partner Focus Portfolio Countries 2019 in a closely contested competition that saw Elbex Technologies scoop the top spot.
The prestigious Fujitsu Select Innovation awards, now in their fifth year, recognize Fujitsu channel partners who consistently deliver outstanding value to customers by combining their expertise and services with Fujitsu’s extensive product and solution portfolio.
Selection criteria for winners include the positive impact that digital co-creation has had on a customer’s business and the extent to which projects bring Fujitsu’s vision of a human centric intelligent society to life.
The Sizwe solution
Sizwe won its award primarily for the work it has done in developing and implementing its container-based, fully-connected off-the-grid classrooms.
Fran Cantos, head of channel: Europe Focus Portfolio Countries at Fujitsu, comments: “This partner has had tremendous growth and fantastic revenue.
“But more importantly, they are very connected to developing society in South Africa, and have done a fantastic job of developing schools in the rural areas.”
The Elbex solution
Elbex won the Select Innovation Award for its intelligent traffic monitoring implementation.
The project brought together Elbex Technologies’ video processing expertise, optical character recognition algorithms and intelligence with Fujitsu’s Primergy servers to transform passive video surveillance information into a smart data system that delivers real-time insights and enhances planned logistics.
Its winning project involved deploying a complex system to deploy a complex system through integrator ATN/APK-Group to help the customer monitor vehicle movements around its depots in real-time, through tracking vehicle license plates. This was a challenging data management task, given the volume of traffic entering and leaving each facility and the subsequently huge amount of video data generated.
Capturing license plate information relating to every vehicle entering or leaving its facilities enables customer Katoen Natie to identify peak traffic times, then plan and dynamically adjust freight logistics based on the number of vehicles arriving and departing at any given time. The system also provides valuable real-time information relating to – for example – the country of origin of vehicles in addition to detailed reporting and analysis.
Live video streams from the multiple video cameras monitoring each facility are analyzed on a series of dedicated Fujitsu servers that extract license plate information using optical character recognition algorithms.
The extracted information is stored in a database alongside thumbnail images of each license plate, and information relating the color of each vehicle, its country of origin and reliability score. Video streams are stored in a sophisticated management system, which connects every vehicle movement to the corresponding video clips, making it extremely fast and easy to identify vehicle information when required.
All the winners
The full line-up of winners are:
| Award | 2019 Recipient |
| Best Nordics Partner | AS Datel, Estonia |
| Best UK&I Partner 2019 | Egton, UK |
| Best W&EE Partner 2019 | ESC, Belgium |
| Best Partner Focus Portfolio Countries 2019 | Sizwe Africa IT Group, South Africa |
| urope Best Digital Infrastructure Partner 2019 | SVA System Vertrieb Alexander, Germany |
| Best CE Partner 2019 | RedNet AG, Germany |
| Europe Best Newcomer Service Provider 2019 | Engineering D.Hub, Italy |
| Europe Rising Star Partner 2019 | Softline, Russia |
| Select Innovation Award Winner 2019 (APAC) | Invotec Solutions, Australia |
| Select Innovation Award Winner 2019 (Europe) | Elbex Technologies, Belgium |
Why Fujitsu
Fujistu cares what its channel thinks about it, says Dave Hazard, head of channel Europe at Fujitsu.
For the third consecutive year, Fujitsu has been in the leaders quadrant of the Canalys Channel Report – it even made it to number one earlier this year.
The company has also increased its sales through the channel, with data centre business growing 11% and Primergy servers growing 14%.
Partners have to put together a lot of pieces to be able to best serve their customers, says Cantos.
“We have been developing the ecosystems that help all our partners to support their customers in their digital transformation journey.”