A crowd of more than 250 people packed the Paramount Conference and Event Venue in North Toronto to find out which company would be named Solution Provider of the Year as part of CDN’s 2008 Channel Elite Awards.
The winner was Long View Systems of Calgary, CDN’s No. 13 out of 100 Solution Provider for this year. Long View delivered solutions that help its client realize its goal to become one of the largest companies in North America in its vertical by 2010. To do this, Long View needed to satisfy four important client priorities. The client wanted to improve their competitive position, reduce costs by adopting virtualization technologies, protect their business with a business continuity strategy, and implement a computing environment capable of growing with the business.
Long View reduced hardware costs for the client by 28 per cent, operation costs by 72 per cent and overall costs by 29 per cent. The client now has a business continuity strategy for its technology. The client’s architecture is scalable, allowing it to quickly absorb acquisitions.
Long View has built on its success since the turn of the century. This good work along with many other projects benefited the company that saw year over year revenue grow by 50 per cent. Eighty per cent of revenue in 2007 came from repeat clients.
The night started off with international renowned channel profit guru Bruce Stuart, president of Vancouver-based ChannelCorp, who delivered an insightful educational session on managing cashflow and other recession proofing strategies.
Stuart also presented the Best Channel Marketing Initiative gold award to Triware Technologies. The runner up in that category was Epic Information Solutions of Winnipeg and Brodie Computes of Kitchener, Ont.
Team SFA was the only double award winner. That company picked up two silver awards for Best Small Business Solution and Best Mid-Market Solution. The winners in both those categories were Unity Telecom and intelliNet, which has offices in Richmond, B.C. and Mississauga, Ont.
CDN also features two new awards: Best Managed Service and Best Collaborative Solution. IT Matters of Calgary won the gold for Best Collaborative Solution, while Metafore captured gold for Best Managed Service.
Finally, ThoughtCorp of Toronto who was the bronze finishers last year in the Best Enterprise Solution category won the gold award this year. The silver in this category went to Lanworks, while Digica Solutions took home the bronze.
Look for more profile stories about the gold winners in the next edition of CDN.
CDN would also like to thank the sponsors Tech Data Canada, Symantec Canada and new sponsors AMD, D-Link, Samsung Canada and Dell Canada.