Microsoft says there were more than 3,300 nominations for this year’s Partner of the Year Awards from over 100 countries, and Softchoice took home the honour of Canadian Partner of the Year, while three other Canadian partners walked away with category awards.
In its announcement of the winners, Microsoft described Softchoice as a partner with a “strong practice” of quickly driving multi-cloud adoption of its solutions.
“Their success stems from their programmatic approach to drive cloud adoption, which has resulted in exceptional growth with Microsoft. Canada’s first accredited Microsoft Azure Expert MSP has continued their commitment to accelerating tech intensity with their continued focus on skilling and certifications in this past year, further enabling their success,” Microsoft explained. “During the recent COVID-19 pandemic they displayed considerable agility as they embraced a new working model to support their customers, team, and community during these challenging times.”
Softchoice is a Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Service Provider, Microsoft Cloud Service Provider (CSP), Licensing Solutions Partner (LSP), and Gold Certified Partner with 13 Microsoft competencies including Gold Cloud Platform and Gold Cloud Productivity.
“Being named Microsoft’s Canada Partner of The Year is a recognition of Softchoice’s leadership in delivering innovative solutions and services that accelerate our customers’ digital journeys” said Andrew Caprara, senior vice-president of strategy and development at Softchoice, in a statement. “We are excited about the positive impact Microsoft and Softchoice have together on our customers’ business as they adapt to a new working environment.”
Wipro Limited won the Application Innovation award for its work with one of the largest airports in America, according to Microsoft. “Their solution is especially important in this current environment with a strategic focus offloading processes from people to AI, allowing essential workers to stay home safely without sacrificing customer experience. Wipro’s solution is due to its modern architecture and perfect use of various Azure application services, extended by solutions of other key Microsoft partners.”
Architech Solutions Consulting Services snagged the OSS on Azure partner award for its work with a “major service retailer” to deliver a modern customer web experience. Leveraging the latest version of the Java CMS and an Azure PostgreSQL database, combined with a Single Page Approach (Angular), allowed the solution to meet the performance and maintainability requirements, Microsoft explained. The team containerized the front and backend applications using Docker. It lead to a 54 per cent education in page load times as well as a 22 per cent increase in conversion rates on the site.
Consulting firm RedBit Development impressed the tech giant for its work during the pandemic. RedBit helped Canada’s largest food rescue charity to expand its nationwide efforts as well as support a grant portal to distribute $4.5 million in federal funding to appropriate charities in need of relief.
Gavriella Schuster, corporate vice-president of One Commercial Partner at Microsoft, said this year’s Inspire event and the annual partner awards took on a new meaning this year. It led to a new Community Response Award. This new award recognized partners that are providing innovative solutions or services to help solve challenges for our customers and community during the COVID-19 pandemic. The inaugural award received 211 submissions, says Schuster.
“Each of them told us a story not just of technologies, but of people connecting to create something larger than themselves,” she said.
