2014 was a historic year for VCE with unprecedented industry and company growth, and VCE continues to define and lead the converged infrastructure CI space. We surpassed a $2 billion annualized demand run rate1 and achieved greater than 50 percent year-over-year growth.
Last year, we made a significant investment in the VCE partner ecosystem, focusing much of our efforts on increasing engagement and deepening relationships with our partners. We evolved the VCE Partner Program to include greater incentives and rewards while introducing new certifications, specializations and enablement tools aimed at better preparing our partners to market, sell and support VCE converged infrastructure. These endeavors resulted in a 56 percent increase in partner-driven sales and a record number of new customer acquisitions.
So it is with great pleasure that I have the opportunity to announce the global VCE Partner of the Year awards for 2014. In addition to meeting all the requirements of the VCE Partner Program, these partners have demonstrated a high level of commitment to VCE, overall value to customers, in-depth knowledge of the converged infrastructure market, and outstanding sales performance.
The award recipients were evaluated in three key areas:
- Success in incremental growth: Overall achievement with adding new customers through the VCE value proposition
- VCE Partner Program achievements: Achieving and maintaining a high level of program specializations and services through certifications and training earned with VCE
- Business relationship strength: Overall advancement in partner’s business relationship and investment with VCE, along with a deep understanding of the converged infrastructure industry
The VCE Partner of the Year recipients are:
Global Partner of the Year: AHEAD, a solutions provider that helps customers move to optimized IT service delivery models serving over 400 enterprise clients in Healthcare, Manufacturing, Financial Services, Retail, Legal, and other industries.
Global Systems Integrator Partner of the Year: Canopy – the Atos Cloud, an end-to-end cloud services provider enabling customers to drive transformational IT via the cloud by leveraging world-class data center and consulting services
Americas Partner of the Year – World Wide Technology Inc., an award-winning systems integrator and supply chain solutions provider that brings an innovative and proven approach to how organizations discover, evaluate, architect and implement technology
Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) Partner of the Year – Computacenter UK, is a leading independent provider of IT infrastructure services in Europe, advising organizations on IT strategy, implementing the most appropriate technologies, optimizing its performance, and managing customers’ infrastructures
Asia-Pacific Japan (APJ) Partner of the Year – Telstra, a leading telecommunications and information services company in Australia, offering a full range of telecommunications services.
Congratulations to this year’s partner award winners!
1 Demand run rate is an annualized calculation of orders received in the applicable period by VCE, VMware, EMC and Cisco for the sale of VCE Vblock and Vblock-related products and related services.