2018

Winners and Runners Up

Infrastructure Project of the Year

Scale Computing

Genting Casino deploys Scale Computing across its UK sites in a move to meet distributed enterprise demands. The leading casino chain plans to roll out the deployment of the HC3 platform across its 42 sites, enabling simplified management, IT resiliency and high performance.

Storage Project of the Year

Excelero

Excelero NVMesh™ enables teuto.net to achieve exceptional performance with low-latency block storage for OpenStack cloud. Teuto.net, a German service provider that leads through innovation, offers a popular OpenStack service – teutoStack – that combines public and private cloud as well as hosted Kubernetes (containers). Customers choose teutoStack for a variety of workloads and the company is experiencing significant growth potential in areas such as analytics, machine learning and AI, where demanding databases require storage to match.

IT Security Project of the Year

Advatek UK Ltd

We have designed and deployed a state of the art security, networking and business continuity solution for a global construction company that operates in over 50 countries around the world. This was a 6-month project with a total value of £880k + VAT. The project has been a great success from the client’s perspective and it has been transformational for them as a business.

Digitalisation Project of the Year

Node4

Node4, a cloud, data centre and communications management company, offers a range of products and services as a managed services provider (MSP), including colocation, managed hosting, cloud infrastructure and associated services. The company owns three UK data centres, including full ownership of the infrastructure and operating systems, ensuring that customers receive the highest level of care and commitment, as well as benefitting from a cloud infrastructure platform that has been built and designed uniquely by Node4.

Cloud Project of the Year

Six Degrees

AvantiGas, the UK arm of an international supplier of liquefied petroleum gases (LPG), worked with Six Degrees on implementing a multi-cloud platform. The platform delivers security, hosting, and voice and data services to streamline delivery operations in the UK, and it is currently being rolled out across Europe. By consolidating its IT infrastructure, this leading energy supplier has achieved a reduction in IT operation costs whilst enabling it to deliver faster, more consistent, and higher quality services across the UK and Europe.

Excellence in Service Award

Park Place Technologies

To our channel partners, Park Place Technologies offers the reselling opportunity of our full portfolio of Third Party Maintenance (TPM) services to their end users. This is typically a very high margin offering for our channel partners. This is unique for a couple of reasons; firstly, when a channel partner chooses to work with Park Place Technologies, we place the emphasis on a full two-way partnership and communication with the channel partner, as opposed to just being part of a transaction or an introducer. We fully believe that a partnership with our channel partners should be meaningful and nurtured so that we become their trusted go-to-market partner for all of their third-party maintenance services.

Vendor Channel Program of the Year

Pure Storage

Since 2009, Pure Storage’s market-leading all-flash data platform has been revolutionising how organisations put their data to work, and how partners sell storage into these businesses. Pure Storage was founded as a 100% channel-focused company and as a result all these customers and others have delivered significant revenues to Pure’s exclusive partner base. Pure’s programme isn’t focused on quantity of partners, but quality ones who share Pure’s vision of the future, the data-centric architecture.

Channel Business of the Year

EACS

Founded in 1994, EACS is an award winning and trusted provider of practical, innovative and cost-effective managed services to a wide range of UK organisations of all sizes. Indeed, one of the key contributing factors to EACS™ success is that it is able to supply a broad range of services, allowing it to establish deeper relationships with its clients, generating a strong and loyal customer base. The company has a customer retention rate of over 90% and the average lifespan of a customer is 5 years, although EACS has been working with some clients for over 15 years.

Orchestration/Automation Innovation of the Year

Anuta ATOM

Anuta ATOM software helps Telco’s and Enterprises to deliver network services faster, eliminate human errors, avoid security violations, reduce OpEx and transform today’s networks into future smarter, self-healing ones. Anuta ATOM is a modular, extensible, and cloud-native software platform that enables operators to rapidly design and provision network services, collect real-time telemetry, develop deep network analytics, ensure compliance and provide closed-loop automation.

IT Security Innovation of the Year

Barracuda MSP Managed PhishLine

93% of cyber attacks started with a phishing email, according to Verizon’s latest report. Our own research revealed 79% of IT professionals think poor employee behaviour is a greater concern than inadequate cyber security tools. Both serve as a reminder that you can throw all the money in the world at your cyber security architecture, but if your staff are still falling for phishing attacks then criminals are always going to get in. So how can you plug this gap? When it comes to minimising the human risk, the vast majority (89%) of IT security experts believe end-user training and awareness programmes are important.

Hyper-convergence Innovation of the Year

Schneider Electric's HyperPod™

Schneider Electric's HyperPod™, enables the infrastructure that delivers a hyperconverged architecture; tightly integrating IT, power, cooling, compute, storage, networking and virtualisation for end-users by allowing integrated systems to be pre-engineered, pre-tested and pre-configured away from site.

Backup and Recovery Innovation of the Year

Acronis Backup Cloud

Acronis Backup Cloud has made a technological breakthrough that has revolutionised conventional backup technologies to a new cyber protection category. Its unique ‘Active Protection’ feature is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based protection that actively monitors all processes in the computer system. It identifies those processes that behave like malware and automatically halts them – if any data gets overwritten, it will automatically restore that data.

Cloud Storage Innovation of the Year

Zerto IT Resilience Platform

In today’s always-connected world, businesses need to be available to customers, prospects and employees 24/7/365. This new world order of uninterrupted business is a non-negotiable business best practice. To have data and applications disrupted for any length of time, and for any reason, puts a business at risk of irreparable harm to its hard-earned reputation. In IDC and Zerto’s recent report, The State of IT Resilience, it was found that nearly 50% of businesses have suffered an unrecoverable data event in the last three years. Not only this, but merely 7% overall would rate themselves as mature for business resilience.

SSD/Flash Storage Innovation of the Year

NGD Systems

NGD Systems has been able to accelerate AI and Analytic applications by running applications locally (In-Situ) on a purpose-built NVMe SSD. No added interface required, and no host OS changes required. With dedicated HW Acceleration and Application processes, there is no contention in the storage device having do to with standard data placement.

Storage Management Innovation of the Year

Virtual Instruments WorkloadWisdom

Traditionally, CIO’s decision-making process regarding storage deployment has taken place with little to no understanding of the concept of workload placement, or the demands of fluctuating workload behaviour upon infrastructure performance. Until recently, there has been no reliable way for storage professionals to test and analyse performance to optimise their organisations’ unique storage infrastructure.

SaaS Innovation of the Year

Qudini and NatWest

NatWest has become the first bank to trial new technology which enables customers to fit their banking needs around their busy schedules. The service has already been trialled in 51 branches across the United Kingdom, Isle of Man & Channel Islands. The bank has partnered with Qudini, a London based technology Software Company, to improve customer experience via this new software. The trial has already led to significant increases in the number of appointments being made across community banking, telephony and in-branch banking services.

PaaS Innovation of the Year

6point6 Cloud Gateway

Cloud Gateway is the first hybrid cloud PaaS solution to the problem of how companies can migrate their network completely and securely to the cloud, while retaining and integrating “must keep” parts of their legacy infrastructure. Cloud Gateway provides effortless cloud connectivity. Providing choice to the customer, Cloud Gateway comprises a suite of modular functionality: - network and software-defined VPN (SD-VPN) - firewall-as-a-service - cloud connection (Cloud Connect) - secure web gateway - portal Pricing is not user-based, it is based on aggregated capacity.

Automation Company of the Year

Opengear

Lighthouse 5 centralizes out-of-band management for IT infrastructure and provides an unparalleled level of resilient access and visibility even during critical failures. Offered as a virtualised software appliance, Lighthouse 5 supports all SSH clients – PuTTY, SecureCRT, OpenSSH with built-in HTML5 Web Terminal with full copy and paste functionality. How does the product or process break with conventional ideas or processes in its field? Remote access to critical infrastructure devices is essential for support staff managing distributed networks, as amongst other things it avoids costly and time-consuming remote site visits.

Cloud Company of the Year

Hyve Managed Hosting

Hyve Managed Hosting is a fully managed UK based cloud hosting provider with a passion for technology. Utilising a small business ethos, Hyve focuses on providing the highest possible levels of support and management services alongside unrivalled service performance and reliability.

Co-location / Hosting Provider of the Year

Sovereign Business Integration Group

The Metro Point Tier III aligned data centre is owned and operated by Sovereign Business Integration Group PLC (Sovereign). It provides colocation and hosting services to suit enterprise and medium-sized organisations, that require high levels of security, access to their data whenever it’s required, as well as bespoke packages to meet clients’ exact requirements.

Hyper-convergence Company of the Year

ExaGrid

ExaGrid provides hyper-converged secondary storage (HCSS) for backup with data deduplication with an integrated landing zone and scale-out architecture that integrates with all leading backup applications. The landing zone with adaptive deduplication provides for the fastest backups, restores, and instant VM recoveries. ExaGrid’s scale-out architecture includes full appliances in a scale-out system, ensuring a fixed-length backup window as data grows, eliminating expensive forklift upgrades and product obsolescence while reducing costs up front and over time.

IT-Security Company of the Year

METCloud

METCloud vision is to be the global brand of choice for next generation cyber secure cloud services. METCloud was launched only 18 months ago and has already been recognised in many awards for innovation; most recently Winner of the Most Innovative MSP in the MSH Awards 2018; shortlisted in Computing Technology Product Awards 2018 in five (5) categories: Best Cloud Service, Best Cloud Security Product, Best Business Security Provider, Best Cloud Computing Provider, Technology Innovator of the Year.

Storage Company of the Year

NetApp UK

SVC Storage Company of the Year 2018 Last year, NetApp celebrated its 25th birthday – an incredible milestone for the California-headquartered company that shipped its first data storage system in 1992. Early on, the company realised that “data” was not a local or regional phenomenon, but a global megatrend that was about to take off with the emerging growth of the Internet and the advent of mobile phones. Ever since then, NetApp has anticipated and initiated change through innovation and an evolving ecosystem.

SVC Industry Award

Navisite

For over 20 years, Navisite has distinguished itself as a leading international provider of Cloud-enabled hosting, managed applications and managed services. When the company was founded, little was known or understood about how the Cloud and Managed Services markets would evolve, and it required companies such as Navisite to embrace these new concepts, develop a portfolio of solutions and, importantly, to educate the end user market. The fact that so many cloud service providers have come and gone since the late 1990s is testament to the strength of Navisite’s technology and customer service visions.


Sponsors for 2018