Vox pop: Do vendor awards matter to you?

Nick Beaugeard, chief executive and founder, HubOne

Vendor awards are important to us and we participate in them regularly. While they are useful, especially where the vendor is generating demand for their products, they are self-serving by themselves, and some can reflect vendor motivation rather than partner performance.

More valuable, in my eyes, are the industry awards. These offer a chance to look at the channel over and above vendor specifics, and look at organisations that have done interesting and useful solutions for customers, which serve the needs of the industry and its clients.

If I were a customer, I’d look to vendor awards to identify which company would best deliver a vendor specific solution, and to more general industry awards to identify who could help me choose a solution before deciding who best to implement it.

Both add to the exciting and vibrant ecosystem that is the Australian technology industry.

Des Ryan, director of business units, Dimension Data

Yes, vendor awards are very important to us, for a number of reasons. Dimension Data clients like to know that they are dealing with the very best services firm in the market, and vendor awards can help give them this confidence. 

From a vendor partnership perspective, these awards demonstrate that we are an effective and dynamic partner, both at a technical level and from a client’s planning perspective.

 Perhaps the most important benefit we see, though, is the way awards can help us attract and retain the best employees.

We are a services business, and one area that has always been a strong differentiator for us is the high quality of our technical talent. 

We pride ourselves in having the very best engineers in the market, and the vendor awards that we win contribute to the reinforcement that Dimension Data is a great place for technical people to work and develop their careers.

Allan Aitchison, chief executive officer, MIMP

MIMP values industry awards rather than vendor awards, as do our customers and the industry at large. We solve problems for our customers, which in turn helps the industry improve and produces innovation.

Industry awards come from that, and then vendors build new products from it. If we come up with new ideas on one of our projects, then vendors look at that to inspire new products.

Everything out there comes from a need, not just from what a vendor produces. Vendor awards tend to reward people for using their products rather than innovating new solutions to business problems.

With them, the vendor chooses the winner. With industry awards, the winner is chosen by your peers and your competitors. I don’t think MIMP has ever won a vendor award, but we have a whole shelf of industry awards for bespoke solutions we’ve developed based on vendor products.