Later at an Award Luncheon Microsoft's Thomas Hansen, Birger Steen, Jon Roskill and Allison Watson were photographed with Express Data's Ross Cochrane and Paul Plester. 

Intergen's Wayne Forgesson accepts the Microsoft Country Partner of the Year award for New Zealand from Microsoft’s Jon Roskill and Allison Watson at the Microsoft WPC2010 conference.

 

Express Data Wins Microsoft Global Distribution Partner of the Year!

 We are incredibly honoured to have won the Microsoft award for Global Distribution Partner of the Year.

 This is our first Global award and we are ecstatic to have won.

 The World cup success of the All Whites probably bought it home to me most of all. The All Whites are competing with every other country in the world and experiencing success against the world’s best. I think our winning of this award is the equivalent of New Zealand winning the Football World Cup, (something that is still possible, as I write this by the way).

 Lou Nunn our Microsoft Business unit manager came back from the Microsoft Distributor Advisory Council earlier this year and told me that we were going to enter for this award. He had just spent three days with many of Microsoft's distributors from around the world and in the course of the discussion, he gained an appreciation of how our success with Microsoft locally compared to our global counterparts.

 I am proud to say that the success experienced over what has been a tough 12 months for everybody was based on our strengths. We are a value add distributor that focuses on delivering exceptional transactional service coupled with great practical knowledge about our vendors products. Our Microsoft team have an incredible knowledge on how Microsoft licensing works, how this varies for every individual product, and the best licensing program to use for each individual end user.

 We decided to use these strengths to educate more of our resellers within the Microsoft Breadth Community. We put together a practical training course on how to best license Microsoft products and took it out to resellers around the country. We made this relevant and practical to the New Zealand reseller community and we were subsequently asked to run this in Australia, Singapore and the US. This translated into more sales for our resellers as they became more confident of their licensing knowledge, it translated into better margin as they correctly quoted their customers and those customers recognised the extra value and sometimes lower cost.

 With more sales of new versions of Microsoft products anticipated we decided to partner with Ace Training to provide introductory technical training to better enable resellers to do the services work. The original concept was that Ace would provide a trainer to run just the first module of the full certification courses. We added some more licensing training onto those sessions and encouraged the attendees to go on to complete the full technical training course. This was incredibly successful as it seemed to hit a sweet spot by highlighting what the reseller technical people didn't know about the new products while giving them enough of a depth to encourage them promote the new products with confidence.

 These were not the only initiatives which we ran during 2009-2010, but they are the ones that I wanted to focus on as they emphasise the skills of our Microsoft team, how in touch they are with Express Data's customers, and how well we partnered with Ace Training and Microsoft to achieve mutual goals for the benefit of our customers.

 I would like to take this opportunity to say thank you to our reseller customers first and foremost for valuing Express Data. We are focused on understanding the changes happening to Microsoft and how they relate to your business so that you can grow your relationships with your customers in a professional and consistent way.

 Thank you to Ace Training. Tony and the team at Ace grasped what we wanted to do and used their expertise to deliver on our ideas while displaying the top training skills that they have built up over many years in business.

 Thank you to Microsoft New Zealand. Your support and understanding of Express Data's business has allowed us to push the boundaries to help our resellers and the New Zealand business community.

Thank you to the Microsoft team within Express Data. The intelligence, passion and focus you have for the benefit of our reseller customers is clearly evident to all.

Of course the fantastic support people within Express Data provide the icing on the cake for a great sales team. The care and attention to detail from everyone that is involved with all of our processes are of the highest level. The greatest sales team in the world would not make a difference if the people and systems supporting them are not up to standard.

The storm front that is Cloud computing is going to challenge all of us in the next 12 months, please trust that Express Data is working hard to understand and apply to New Zealand conditions what needs to be done and how best to do it for New Zealand resellers and their customers. After all what Express Data does best is handle complexity for the channel in New Zealand.