Meet the CRN MVPs: Insight Australia

Insight Enterprises general manager for Australia and New Zealand, Matt Hendra, told CRN that attaining and maintaining vendor accreditations is “all about credibility”.

“It’s about ensuring clients, who put faith and trust in your organisation, that you are working hand-in-hand with the vendor and providing solutions to meet the challenges and opportunities they have,” he said.

Insight spends considerable effort and resources into maintaining top-level partnership levels with MVP-eligible vendors Citrix, Intel, Symantec, VMware and Microsoft, as well as Oracle and Veeam.

“Yes, it is expensive. But it is absolutely treated as an investment.” Hendra said.

“And obviously we expect a return on that investment. So we work with vendors that our clients are significantly consuming; have significant R&D focus so that they’re bringing new products out to market consistently; and vendors that put the clients' needs first.”

Hendra added that vendors should focus their channel investment more in solutions, rather than solely concentrate on the nuts-and-bolts of their products.

“Clients expect resellers and vendors alike to solve real business problems. So vendors should ensure that [partner] certifications are linked to those business challenges – from a real world point of view, as opposed to a purely technical certification.”

MVP vendor partnerships

• Citrix Solution Advisor Gold
• Intel Security Gold
• Microsoft Gold
• Symantec Platinum
• VMware Premier

Notes on methodology

The CRN MVP program recognises Australia's top IT providers by measuring their value and versatility based on third-party vendor accreditations across 12 eligible vendors: Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Citrix Systems, Dell, EMC, HP (incl Aruba), IBM, Intel (incl McAfee), Lenovo, Microsoft, Symantec and VMware. 

Only eligible vendors listed above. Only Gold-equivalent partner levels are included. CRN MVP companies may have accreditations with other, ineligible vendor programs or lower-level accreditations with eligible vendors (for example, we do not list silver accreditations). 

We expect the list of eligible vendors to change in coming years, which may open up the CRN MVP program to new entrants.

For further information on the CRN MVP program, see this article.

We are currently accepting expressions of interest for the 2016 CRN MVPs at www.techpartner.news/MVP. Entries will open in coming months.