Refreshed Canalys Channel Partner of the Year Awards EMEA highlight new skills and expertise

On stage in Barcelona, Spain, 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 Spanish city on Thursday, 11 October at the eleventh Canalys Channels Forum EMEA, the largest independent channels event in the region. The forum was sold out once again, having attracted more than 1,000 of the top channel partners, distributors and vendors from nearly 25 countries across EMEA.

Canalys Chief Analyst Alastair Edwards said, “This year, the Channel Partner of the Year Awards recognized the breadth and depth of expertise in the EMEA channel. Of particular note is the way in which partners in EMEA are developing new skills and creating new services for customers. We introduced new award categories to recognize the changes and challenges that partners must tackle to continue to grow their businesses with new technologies and processes.”

The Candefero Channel Partner of the Year Awards highlight outstanding performance in specific areas: Growth, Innovation and Transformation, Cloud, Impact and New Technology, together with an overall Channel Partner of the Year award. Winners were selected from the many nominations received by a panel of experienced Canalys channels analysts. Their research considered how each partner had made sustainable investments for the future, its performance, its demonstrated expertise and the resulting business value generated for its customers.

Advania 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. CEO Gestur G Gestsson said, “We are delighted to win the overall Partner of the Year award. We grew revenue by 60% in the last 12 months, and profit by a similar margin. We have transitioned to the cloud and 60% of our customers are now on monthly billing, with a customer retention rate of 93%.”

Growth Partner of the Year was awarded to Softcat. CEO Graeme Watt said, “Softcat has continued to grow exceptionally well, topping US$1 billion revenue in the last fiscal year. We are committed to growing organically and profitably.”

Cloud Partner of the Year went to Austria’s k2netsolutions. CEO Georg Karner said, “K2netsolutions started its cloud journey in 2014 and migrated its first customer in 2015. Since then we have successfully evolved from being a traditional reseller to a cloud and managed services provider.”

ITMaster of South Africa was named Innovation and Transformation Partner of the Year. Emmanuel Pillay, Executive Director, said, “ITMaster was founded in 2001 by three entrepreneurs, two of whom are still with the organization. ITMaster has not always found growth easy, but we have expanded to cover all nine provinces and lead on innovative education projects across South Africa.”

Winning in a new category, Econocom took the award for New Technology Partner of the Year. Marc Bringuier, Strategic and International Partnership Manager, said, “Econocom has created a new entity focusing on AR and VR to enable our customers to accelerate the transformation of their organization and actively contribute to the deployment of new uses of mixed reality in organizations. Our solutions combine hardware, software, services, leasing of applications and mobile device management in a single offering.”

The new Impact Partner of the Year award went to Centralpoint from the Netherlands for its pioneering work recycling mobile telephony products to put back into the economy. Marcel Joosten, CMO, said, “We won the contract from the Dutch Government to recycle from seven provinces and two government departments. We are partnering with Closing the Loop to strip back and recycle and to come to a raw material-neutral process.”

The Canalys Channels Forum in Barcelona featured packed keynote sessions, more than 2,000 one-to-one meetings and a spectacular CCF Celebration party. The entire event was managed using the Canalys Event App, which includes the new AI chatbot “Fero”. The app is available for vendors and channel partners to use at their own partner events.

For more information, please contact:

Canalys EMEA: +44 118 984 0520
Alastair Edwards: alastair_edwards@canalys.com +44 118 984 0523
Rachel Brindley: rachel_brindley@canalys.com +44 118 984 0542

Canalys APAC (Shanghai): +86 21 2225 2888
Daniel Liu: daniel_liu@canalys.com +86 21 2225 2817

Canalys APAC (Singapore): +65 6671 9399
Jordan De Leon: jordan_mari_deleon@canalys.com +65 6671 9397
Sharon Hiu: sharon_hiu@canalys.com +65 6671 9382

Canalys Americas: +1 650 681 4488
Alex Smith: alex_smith@canalys.com +1 650 681 4486
Ketaki Borade: ketaki_borade@canalys.com +1 650 681 4485

About the Canalys Channels Forums

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