Time to Celebrate - Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards

Microsoft announced the winners of the Microsoft 2019 Partner of the Year Awards. SoftwareONE has been recognized by Microsoft for two of the prestigious award categories. We are proud to be Datacenter Migration Partner of the Year for the LATAM region, Country Partner of the Year in Bolivia and Licensing Solution Partner of the Year in Ireland. The goal of the annual awards are to honor Microsoft partners demonstrating excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology. Our teams explain their key to success and what keeps them motivated.

SoftwareONE has been recognized as Cloud Migration Partner of the Year for the LATAM region. We spoke with our colleagues about this great success and asked them about the foundation behind their cloud approach.

What does this award signify for you?

André Fernandes: We are very humble, proud and thankful to Microsoft for this award – as LATAM partner of the year in Cloud Migration this shows a true example of the transformation from both of our organizations.

What was your biggest cloud success during the past year?

André Fernandes: We had a customer with a datacenter issue. A complete datacenter had to be renewed because of downtimes causing data loss and having severe consequences for the business. Moreover, the customer was looking for more flexibility and speed. Moving data to the cloud was the optimal solution. The project was interesting because 70 workloads were migrated to the cloud that consisted of more than 280 servers.

What is so special about the SoftwareONE approach?

Ademir Tavares: During the advisory phase we created a vision of the cloud journey for the customer. The detailed vision of the two-year cloud consumption contained an extensive technical and financial plan. We wanted the costumer to see us a trusted advisor.

What were the challenges and how have you mastered them?

André Fernandes: The challenge was to make a strategic decision whether to renew an existing datacenter or migrate all systems to the cloud. We evaluated both options with the customer and proposed Microsoft Azure as the cloud platform and Office 365 standardization. We used cloud management best practices to enable digital transformation. Datacenter usage was inventoried, and infrastructure services rationalized. We now support with ongoing managed services.

SoftwareONE Bolivia has been awarded with the Bolivia Partner of the Year Award by Microsoft. The subsidiary in South America grew from one employee to a team of eleven people based in Bolivia’s two main cities La Paz and Santa Cruz. We talked to Milton Diaz and Dante Paniagua from the Bolivian team about their motivation, challenges, daily routines and future plans.

What are the challenges in the market and how have you handled them?

Milton Diaz: The team is focused on Microsoft cloud solutions, however, the local market in Bolivia is quite challenging. While the IT market is growing by 6% year over year, cloud adoption is rather slow due to governmental regulations. Our team’s approach is to advance cloud projects step by step using hybrid solutions.

What is your key to success?

Dante Paniagua: We have been working hard to create strong relationships with our customers by delivering great solutions. 

Milton Diaz: We focus on long-term customer relations. Our aim is to deliver a unique business value through our Managed Services.

What is your motivation?

Dante Paniagua: I love my work, I have been in the business for more than 20 years. I had the pleasure of meeting SoftwareONE’s founder Patrick Winter in Colombia three years ago. Our visions were aligned – from both a global and local perspective – and I knew SoftwareONE would provide immense business value in the long-term for all of its customers.

Do you have any team rituals?

Dante Paniagua: Every Monday morning, I buy cuñapes, a Bolivian cheese bread, for all subsidiary members and send an inspirational message. Our weekly team meeting is also very important. 

Milton Diaz: Indeed, team meetings are very important. We also try to do fun activities together or grab a drink together during happy hour.

What are your plans for 2020?

Milton Diaz: We are working towards transforming SoftwareONE into the main Cloud Services Partner in the country delivering our solutions and services to key customers across Bolivia.

What does this award signify for you?

Una Keeshan: We are delighted to be awarded with the Licensing Solutions Partner of the Year award in Ireland. It demonstrates the recognition from Microsoft for the work that we are doing in market to drive best in class solutions to our customers.

What / why our customers turn to SoftwareONE for these types of solutions?

Una Keeshan: SoftwareONE, through excellence in delivery, have forged strong relationships with our customers over the years, as true trusted advisors. We help customers identify the challenges that they face and in turn recommend solutions to resolve these challenges. Examples of these challenges are around security, spend management, standardization after acquisition & ongoing cloud management support. We as a business are able to address all of these challenges, we drive business outcomes through our Advisory Services, execution is enabled through our Professional Services, maintenance is available through our Managed Services and all of this is powered by our unique central digital PyraCloud platform.

What are the challenges for today’s Microsoft partners and how have you mastered them? 

Una Keeshan: The challenges partners face is to stay relevant and up to date with the changing and fast pace of the industry.  It is evident through SoftwareONE’s recent acquisitions in RightCloud and Intergrupo that we are investing in the future to the benefit of our employees but also our customers. We can offer cloud migrations solutions, but what really sets us apart is the innovative solutions that we can offer the market, this is where customers can rely on us to drive transformation within their workloads in the cloud.

What is your key to success?

Una Keeshan: Our people drive our success. Our core values and culture is evident in all employees through the passionate and hardworking approach they take to their daily work. We work as a team and ultimately want to ensure customer success.

What are your plans for 2020?

Una Keeshan:Moving into 2020 we want to build on the success to date. We will continue to collaborate more with Microsoft and our customers advising them on technology solutions that enable transformation and disruption whilst also being there to manage the challenges of change, speed and adoption. It is exciting to watch the business as it continues to evolve, grow, transform, and become a global leader that is enabling and accelerating customer’s digital transformation journey.

It’s time to celebrate! All winners have been recognized at Microsoft Inspire, July 14-18, 2019, in Las Vegas, Nevada.