AWS salutes top ANZ partners

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has honoured its top-performing Australian and New Zealand (ANZ) partners at a ceremony in Sydney.

Mantel Group was named Consulting Partner of the Year, while cybersecurity vendor Crowdstrike was recognised as Technology Partner of the Year.

Meanwhile, Sydney-based cloud services firm Cloudtrace was handed the Consulting Rising Star Partner of the Year, and San Francisco-headquartered event data firm PredictHQ was named Rising Star Partner of the Year.

“Each year, we honour members of the AWS Partner Network from around the globe that play key roles in helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on AWS," said Louise Stigwood, director of enterprise, AWS ANZ.

"We are continuously inspired by how our Australia and New Zealand partners have embraced agile and experimental approaches, to drive innovation and success."

"We want to again congratulate Cloudtrace, Crowdstrike, Mantel Group, and PredictHQ on their awards.”

For Mantel Group, it was the third time the Melbourne-based IT services firm had been named Consulting Partner of the Year.

"This is testament to the impact and outcomes our clients such as NIB are achieving utilising AWS’ suite of technology services in new and innovative ways to address their customers’ needs,” said Andre Morgan, Mantel Group’s partner of AWS.

Last year, Mantel Group became the first Australian-headquartered company to achieve the AWS Microsoft Workloads Competency.

It has since secured nine competencies, seven partner programs, five service validations and over 420 AWS certifications.

Morgan said ANZ organisations rate well globally in terms of using cloud adoption to innovate.

“About 20 to 30 per cent of potential workloads have been migrated to public clouds, which is a healthy number, but shows there is a lot of track left to run in this race, there is ample opportunity for businesses to benefit,” he said.

Morgan expects a surge in the uptake of cloud by financial institutions over the next three years.

“These heavily regulated institutions have been understandably and appropriately cautious about rushing to move core computing systems into the cloud given the sensitive nature of the data they handle and the risk potential," he said.

"But they are starting to embrace it, they’ve figured out how to manage the risk and adopt cloud in a measured way, and are moving through the process of doing that.” 

Morgan pointed to front-runners like humm group, which used cloud adoption to rationalise its product offering from 27 to six while expanding into new global markets and simplifying its operations.

One of the biggest benefits for organisations in adopting cloud is the continuous innovation, development and enhancements by hyperscalers like AWS, according to Morgan.

“They’re innovating all the time, investing heavily in research and development to make enhancements so their customers can benefit from new features," he said.

"This includes things like energy efficiency, which will become critical as organisations look to extract benefits from artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence, which require exponentially more computing power and energy, while still meeting their climate commitments."