HOUSTON – Mississauga, Ont.-based Systemgroup was recognized at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference this week with vendor’s Country Partner of the Year Award for Canada, and president Ken Ryder said it comes down to their client.
Founded in 1994, Systemgroup is a Microsoft Gold partner and exclusively develops with Microsoft solutions, specifically .NET, SharePoint, SQL, BizTalk and Silverlight. Ryder said its focus is on the upper midmarket – client with 500 seats or more – particularly in the financial services, health care and mining/resources verticals.
“We focus in creating line of business applications that improve their business through increasing revenue, reducing costs and creating competitive differentiation,” said Ryder.
The recognition from Microsoft, said Ryder, is really a reflection of Systemgroup’s commitment to the Microsoft stack, and its commitment to grow and expand in pace with Microsoft.
“Also, the referencability of what we do,” said Ryder. “When the client experience is such that the solution met or exceeded their expectations it often leads to the opportunity to do it again, and grow our business.”
Systemgroup is a Microsoft-exclusive partner, and leverages other members of the Microsoft partner community to help round-out its solutions as necessary. It’s a major commitment to the vendor, its stack and its direction.
“It goes to the strength of their technology suite, their commitment to R&D and technology advancement, and the performance of the technology they provide that allows us to sell into a very broad audience,” said Ryder.
Systemgroup is also mirroring Microsoft’s investments in the cloud, and is implementing hybrid cloud solutions with platform as a service options around its line of business applications. Ryder said he’s been impressed with the rapid speed of advancement of Microsoft’s cloud solutions, and the support they’re providing to enable partner to be successful.
“It’s more us pushing the cloud conversation (with clients) at this time, but cloud is on every CIO’s objective sheet for this year, how they can take advantage of the cloud,” said Ryder. “For us it’s education, and proof of concept to help drive adoption.”
Last fall, Systemgroup and partner CMS Consulting was recognized by CDN with the 2012 CDN Channel Elite Gold award for Best Collaborative Solution.
