Channel Partners announced the 2020 Excellence in Digital Services winners just before last year’s pandemic began. So after being identified as “partners who deliver stellar business outcomes for their clients,” how did some of these winners fare in the months that followed?

For most, the major focus was on helping their clients make the shift to a work-from-home business model. “Many clients needed to shift to working from home very quickly,” reported phoenixNAP, the 2020 Master of Disaster. “Remote work policies had a whole new set of requirements for infrastructure performance and security. This created a great opportunity … to help clients adopt and migrate to the cloud to better support their distributed employees.”

TnT’s Traci L. Cox

For TnT, the 2020 Digital Docent, that opportunity consisted of equal parts solutions and soothing fears. Traci L. Cox, senior IT consultant at TnT, the 2020 Digital Docent, “Many clients had fear and concern over how to move forward, migrate to a new communication strategy and quickly evolve into this new work-from-home world,” said Traci Cox, senior IT consultant at TnT. “We did what we knew was best: proactively contact our clients with a few different partner solutions available to them and keep clear, consistent communication.”

“We helped them to understand we have been working from home for years,” said Cox. “This is new to them, but not us.”

Pine Cove Consulting’s Brandon Vancleeve

The experience was similar for Pine Cove Consulting, the 2020 White Hat Award winner. The company’s 23-member team had been working remotely for more than 10 years. “Everyone was already virtual in a sense,” Brandon Vancleeve, vice president of Pine Cove told the Wyoming Business Report. “So we already had a nice footprint in place.”

Experience and Expertise

A decade of remote working gave Pine Cove insights into the technologies that would work best for their clients’ individual needs and help them remain competitive. The company focused on helping their clients remain competitive. And as a result, their capacity nearly doubled over the past year.  2020 was their best year ever financially.

TnT also not only survived but thrived during the pandemic. For that, Cox gives credit to their clients and the channel community as a whole.

“When I reflect on how our partners also evolved to help support us, as well as how our client relationships strengthened  while we empowered the existing IT teams, I really believe that all in the channel partners community are heroes,” she said. “I know a multitude of people who worked tirelessly to be of service to their client base and their company. We all know IT people who sacrificed family time to implement solutions, risked their health to go on-premises to their office or a client’s knowing IT is and was the lifeblood and on-site was the only way to remediate.”

Service and Sacrifice

“I know that we collectively had to navigate the rapidly changing landscape while giving peace to our clients,” said Cox. “Just like when a first responder arrives on the scene, we created calm with care , concern and solutions.  When I look at this and think how we collectively helped companies keep people employed and provide service and enabled businesses to be resilient, I am very proud of our channel partner community.”

“I am equally proud of our clients and how they dedicated they were to their organizations. Together as an IT community, we united and stood up in the face of a pandemic. We did our jobs in the trenches. I rest at night knowing we played a big part in being a solution and helping others.”