A crowd of more than 220 people packed the Paramount Conference and Event Venue in North Toronto last night to find out which company would be named Solution Provider of the Year as part of CDN’s 2012 Channel Elite Awards.
The winner was national solution provider Metafore Technologies of Montreal. Metafore won the competition by clearly demonstrating the company understood the potential of virtualization by delivering many cost-saving and productivity boosting solutions for its customers across Canada.
One of its customers who attend the Sept. 11th gala was Conseil scolaire de district catholique Centre-Sud, a French-language school district in Ontario. Metafore implement four high-powered servers that significantly increased the processing power, reduced maintenance time, and provided the school district with more “bang for their buck”. Virtualization also gave the customer a lot of flexibility solved their space issue and gave them a back-up environment.
Real Pilon, the Director of IT at the school said that by consolidating and virtualizing servers Metafore helped the many schools in the system automate their desktops and applications and increased data security for the more than 14,000 students enrolled.
The other big award winner was Navantis who captured four awards in total: Best Silver Cloud Solution, Best Silver Collaborative Solution with its partner IntLock, Best Bronze Mid Market Solution, and Best Silver Enterprise Solution.
Newcomer NexJ Systems Inc. took home two Gold awards for Best Cloud Solution and Best Mobile Solution.
The Channel Elite Awards started off with a workshop on the Bring Your Own Device trend presented by IDC Canada mobile market analyst Krista Napier. Napier was followed by Robert Lloyd of Cisco Systems Canada who presented a new study on BYOD. Both presentations delivered insights, education, new business models and how to avoid pitfalls for BYOD.
The Gold award winners from last night are:
Compugen repeated as Gold award winners for Best Enterprise Solution. The bronze prize went to Insight Canada Inc.
The Best Mid Market gold went to Kifinti Solutions Inc. The runners up in that category were Compugen with silver.
In the Best Small Business section Digitcom Canada won the gold, while Basic IT Solutions of Surrey, B.C., got the silver and EPIC Information Solutions of Winnipeg got the bronze.
Another newcomer to the channel market RadialPoint won the gold award for Best Service Organization. 2010’s Solution Provider of the Year IT Weapons got the silver in this category and Kifiniti won the bronze.
Systemgroup Consulting and CMS Consulting won gold in the Best Collaborative Solution and taking bronze was Illumiti with its partner Onx Enterprise Solutions.
In Best Mobile Solution Empowered Networks won the Silver and Epam Systems got the Bronze.
IT Weapons won another gold award for Best Managed Service. Coming in second with the silver was Quartet Service Inc. and with bronze was Atum Corp.
The Best Marketing Initiative gold went to Contax Inc., Graycon Group of Edmonton won the silver in this category and Atum won the bronze.
The Best Cloud Bronze award was won by Stylusoft Inc.