At a gala event that brought together the who’s-who of the channel community, Reseller Middle East yesterday honoured leading members and organisations with the RME Partner Excellence Awards 2012.
“The third annual Awards received over 250 nominations across 30 categories. For our prestigious online nominations for the Reader’s Choice we received an overwhelming 12,000 nominations. RME has highlighted the work of channel organisations and the trend-setting individuals leading the charge with these 30 trophies tonight,” said Richard Judd, MD of CPI.
Most of the categories were judged by a four-man jury team. They sifted through the large number of diverse nominations, some of them submitted multiple times by multiple departments to come up with a unified ranking. The judges included Ivan Kraemer, senior advisor at Potential, Amer Kherino, founder of Avenues, Samer Karawi, managing partner at G&K Consulting and Philip Hughes, CEO of Akhdar FVCO.
“The winner selection was based on various parameters across the four major categories of vendor, reseller, distributor and personality. We owe a big thanks to the judges for making the time, and putting in the effort to ensure that the right winner got to walk away with each of the trophies during the Awards evening,” said Rajashree R Kumar, Commercial Director of CPI Technology.
“We would like to thank all the sponsors who made the Awards ceremony a grand success. A special note of thanks to HP, our presenting partner, who has been a great support. Thanks are also due to Octogon, Avaya, Dell, EMC, BDL, Du, Optimus, Despec, Aptec, Nanjgel, Asbis, Almasa Distribution, Key Information Technology, Manage Engine, Emax and Touchmate,” added Kumar.
The Awards evening was preceded by the RME Partner Excellence Conference, which brought together thought-leaders in the vendor and reseller community to discuss trends and challenges of dealing with IT solutions and products in the Middle East.
The winners of the RME Partner Excellence Awards 2012 are:
VENDOR AWARDS
Networking Vendor of the Year – Cisco
Software Vendor of the Year – SAP
Storage Vendor of the Year – EMC
Peipherals Vendor of the Year – Belkin
Components Vendor of the Year – Intel Corporation
Printing Vendor of the Year – HP Middle East
Security Vendor of the Year – Trend Micro
Systems and Hardware Vendor of the Year – Dell Middle East
Reader’s Choice Vendor of the Year – Avaya
RESELLER AWARDS
SMB and Consumer Reseller of the Year – Quality Computers
Enterprise Reseller of the Year – HelpAG
Super Retailer of the Year – Emax
Systems Integrator of the Year – Gulf Business Machines
DISTRIBUTOR AWARDS
Broadline Distributor of the Year – BDL Group
Components Distributor of the Year – Asbis Middle East
Security Distributor of the Year – COMPUTERLINKS Distribution
Specialised Distributor of the Year – Secureway Network Distributors
Networking Distributor of the Year – Westcon ME Group
Value-added Distributor of the Year – Aptec Holdings
Reader’s Choice Distributor of the Year – Optimus Technology and Telecommunications
PERSONALITY AND EDITOR’S CHOICE
Woman Executive of the Year (Vendor) – Claire Jones, Cisco
Woman Executive of the Year (Channel) – Meera Kaul, Optimus Technology and Telecommunications
Partner Champion of the Year (Vendor) – Simran Chhabra, Microsoft
Partner Champion of the Year (Channel) – Roger El Tawil, Almasa Holdings
Outstanding Executive of the Year (Channel) – Arun Chawla, CEO, Trigon
Outstanding Entrepreneur of the Year (Channel) – Sukant Mishra, Octogon Group
Best Growth Initiative of the Year (Vendor) – Huawei Technologies
Best Growth Initiative of the Year (Distributor) – Almasa Holdings
Best Partner Excellence Programme of the Year (Distributor) – Redington Gulf
Best Partner Excellence Programme of the Year (Vendor) – Microsoft Gulf
