Outstanding channels performance recognized at the tenth Canalys Channels Forum EMEA

On stage in Venice, Italy last week, Canalys announced the winners of the Candefero Channel Partner of the Year Awards for EMEA. These awards recognize high achievement by the region’s channel partners in a range of areas. The winners were honored in the beautiful Italian city on Thursday, 5 October at the tenth EMEA Canalys Channels Forum, which attracted over 1,000 leading channel partners, distributors and vendors from nearly 40 countries in EMEA. The event featured packed keynote sessions, more than 3,000 one-to-one meetings and a spectacular gala dinner. The entire event was managed using the Canalys Event App. The app is available for vendors and channel partners to use at their own partner events.

Canalys Chief Analyst Alastair Edwards said, “This year’s awards showed the depth of expertise in the EMEA channel. Partners are going from strength to strength, focusing their efforts to deliver complex solutions that enable their customers to become more efficient, to deliver innovation and support their business goals in the face of rapid change.”

The Candefero Channel Partner of the Year Awards recognize outstanding performance in specific areas: Revenue Growth; Innovation and Transformation; Cloud: Software; Cloud: Managed Services; and Infrastructure Growth, together with an overall Channel Partner of the Year award. Winners were selected from the many nominations received by a panel of Canalys analysts, who took into consideration how each partner had made sustainable investments for the future, its performance, its demonstrated expertise and the resulting business value generated for its customers.

Bechtle was announced as the overall Candefero Channel Partner of the Year, recognizing the company’s excellence in terms of its strategy, financial performance and transformation, as judged by a panel of senior Canalys analysts.

James Napp, MD, Bechtle said on winning the award, “We are delighted that the Bechtle Group has been recognized by Canalys with this award. It’s a great accolade and recognition of the ongoing hard work and committed talent at all levels within the Bechtle Group. We are proud of our strong sustained organic growth in profit and revenue over a number of years, an even more pleasing feat given our size. We are innovating and investing further within cloud and our managed services and solutions business, on top of additional investment in our digital platform to drive our buoyant hardware and software business forward in the new subscription era.”

The winners in the other categories were announced as follows:

• Infotheek Group for Revenue Growth.
• ConXioN for Innovation and Transformation.
• K3 Nordic for Cloud: Software.
• SecureLink for Cloud: Managed Services.
• Infront IT-Partner for Infrastructure Growth.

Jordy Kool, CEO, Infotheek Group, winner of the Revenue Growth award, said, “Infotheek has grown its revenue aggressively in 2017 by acquiring key partners Scholten Awater and Centralpoint in the Netherlands, while maintaining profits. Our proposition around the ‘circular economy’ – selling both new, end-of-life and refurbished products, and various services – creates new revenue streams to support future growth.”

Chris Debyser, CEO, ConXioN, winner of the Innovation and Transformation award, said, “ConXioN has transformed to focus on digital transformation. We have developed solutions to include machine learning, predictive analytics and self-healing products and services. We have set up our own SOC and NOC to help drive these solutions in the SMB and mid-market.”

Marcus Lundgren, CEO, K3 Nordic, winner of the Cloud: Software award said, “K3 Nordic has increasingly focused on Microsoft Cloud, selling Office 365 seats within the SMB segment. We were crowned the #1 Ingram Micro Cloud Partner in Europe in 2017 and have grown our cloud management platform business by more than 1,700%. Revenue performance reflects our growing recurring revenue levels.”

Rik Van Herck, Purchaser, SecureLink, winner of the Cloud: Managed Services award said, “SecureLink focuses on providing cloud and managed security services. We have grown profitably over the last couple of years and 60% of our revenue is derived from cloud and managed services, with more than 20% annual growth (helped by acquisition). SecureLink is expanding rapidly across Europe with operations in the Nordics, Benelux, DACH and the UK.”

Fredrik Pürkner, CEO, Infront IT-Partner, winner of the Infrastructure Growth award said, “Infront IT-Partner has focused its efforts to ensure that we create solutions for our customers that help them to use existing infrastructure, taking advantage of new technologies and services. This has enabled us to grow revenue and profit strongly.”

For more information, please contact:

Canalys EMEA: +44 118 984 0520
Alastair Edwards: alastair_edwards@canalys.com

Canalys APAC (Shanghai): +86 21 2225 2888
Daniel Liu: daniel_liu@canalys.com

Canalys APAC (Singapore): +65 6671 9399
Jordan Deleon: jordan_mari_deleon@canalys.com

Canalys Americas: +1 650 681 4488
Alex Smith: alex_smith@canalys.com

About Canalys

Canalys is an independent analyst company that strives to guide clients on the future of the technology industry and to think beyond the business models of the past. We deliver smart market insights to IT, channel and service provider professionals around the world. We stake our reputation on the quality of our data, our innovative use of technology and our high level of customer service.

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