Channel Partners 360°: The Business Value Award Winners

For several years now, the Channel Partners 360° – Business Value Awards have been a staple at our spring show in Las Vegas.

Now, first the first time, we’re recognizing partner businesses with CP 360°s at our second show of the year — Channel Partners Evolution.

It’s also the first time we’ve handed out these awards since introducing our Business Success Stories endeavor, an invitation for partners to send us case studies, aka Business Success Stories, that highlight their efforts helping a customer solve a business problem — anytime throughout the year.

Those successes get published on our website, and the best submissions in certain technology categories are featured in quarterly digital issues — not to mention become eligible to win a CP 360° award.

This gallery shows you who took home hardware during a special ceremony, Aug. 15, at Channel Partners Evolution. You’ll learn a little about these companies and find out why they won.

Follow executive editor Craig Galbraith on Twitter.

Channel Partners 360°: BCM One

Technology consultant BCM One provides clients with planning, network design, deployment and/or management for their technology solutions.

The Challenge: The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS), a nonprofit health organization with multiple locations, needed to upgrade its network for new applications and capabilities but was already overwhelmed by the amount of time, talent and money being invested in keeping a handle on its current IT needs.

The Solution: BCM One provided the nonprofit with a fully managed, enterprise-class network that included a complete overhaul of its primary and redundant WAN connectivity and VPN paths throughout its network and centralization of the network’s management.

The Results: With a network that meets all of its current needs and will provide for future growth, LLS has been able to expand its digital footprint and fundraising efforts with a new website and digital media campaigns, while still realizing a 20 percent reduction in monthly costs.

Channel Partners 360°: Cloud Computing Concepts (C3)

Cloud Computing Concepts (C3) is an award-winning provider of technology and communications services — cloud-based technologies and expert on-site and remote support — to small, medium and enterprise businesses nationwide.

The Challenge: Infinity Behavioral Health Services, a medical billing service, required more agility across the board — in applications, scalability and secure expansion. It needed to be able to add global locations and business units into the production process quickly and with little or no disruption of service.

The Solution: C3 provided a highly redundant and secure, dynamically virtualized environment in the form of a worldwide interconnected cloud platform that provides real-time on-demand processing, data integrity and business continuity for any situation.

The Results: In addition to improved employee satisfaction with IT performance, Infinity realized operational savings of 25 percent year over year and annual savings of between $100,000 and $250,000 on capex expenditures and around $100,000 on licensing fees.

Channel Partners 360°: Fusion PPT

Fusion PPT provides IT consulting and system-integration services to organizations worldwide with challenging technology initiatives.

The Challenge: The Peter C. Alderman Foundation (PCAF) needed help in providing its mobile health workers in northern Uganda with solutions for challenges with connectivity and in data collection in remote areas.

The Solution: Fusion PPT provided commercial Android-based 7-inch touch-screen tablets customized with ruggedized casings for protection from environmental harm and loaded with an Android application developed to allow data collection when there is no internet connection, then synchronize to a cloud environment when there is. In addition, a cached version of data in the cloud can be downloaded for the user to create, search and modify data offline. And all of this meets individual country requirements for security and patient privacy.

The Results: In addition to a reduction in administrative burdens and errors associated with paper-based data collection, the solution improves care to the patients by providing more information to the clinicians in the field, lets clinicians spend more time with patients and less time taking notes, and provides better analysis on the impact of the care with metrics that cross clinics, regions and territories.

Channel Partners 360°: LanYap Networks and TeraNova

LanYap Networks and TeraNova submitted a joint application for a project that utilized their symbiotic relationship as much as it did technology.

LanYap Networks is a leading provider of strategic telecom and cloud solutions for midsize and enterprise-level companies nationwide. TeraNova designs, implements and manages mobile and fixed technology solutions for companies of all sizes across myriad industries.

The Challenge: An Arizona-based public power and energy utility, a longtime LanYap Networks customer, needed help with its out-of-control wireless spend, which had reached $186,000 a month.

The Solution: Leveraging LanYap Networks’ relationship with the client and TeraNova’s subject matter expertise, the two companies assumed the role of customer advocate and audited the client’s complicated wireless contract.

The Results: Based on the audit findings, the data plan was right-sized, which produced a monthly savings of $43,000 — more than $1.5 million in savings over the life of the contract. In addition, eliminating devices that were no longer needed saved another $20,000, which was invested in a wireless help desk to increase efficiency and produce additional savings.

Channel Partners 360°: Liquid Networx

Liquid Networx is a telecommunications life-cycle management organization with a vertical focus on mobility, cloud and compliance solutions.

The Challenge: A Fortune 500 energy-related company needed to replace legacy infrastructure and networking, implement an inventory and expense management system, and secure their network while implementing network redundancy.

The Solution: Liquid Networx utilized its design and deployment team to provide the client with a new infrastructure and network, along with a managed services solution to provide 24/7 support to the client’s more than 300 sites; a satellite backup network for redundancy, even in remote locations; and a technology solution to manage its wireline/mobility inventory, devices and expenses on an ongoing real-time basis.

The Results: With the new products and services in place, key personnel were freed up to work on business-specific projects and downtime from network outages and the time needed to resolve trouble tickets were cut, all while the client realized $650,000 in annual savings.

Channel Partners 360°: Onepath

Managed services provider Onepath is one source for all things to do with designing, deploying, and supporting technology — from cable to cloud.

The Challenge: U.S. Auto Sales, a network of used car dealerships with 17 locations primarily in Georgia and South Carolina, realized its outmoded technology was actually hampering rather than helping their operations by creating bottlenecks in customer sales and service operations, and not having business continuation capabilities, but thought their limited budget and IT staff meant an upgrade was out of the question.

The Solution: Onepath introduced the client to desktops-as-a-service (DaaS) and cloud-based applications as an affordable means of providing employees with much-needed computer access and virtualizing customer service functions while controlling IT costs.

The Results: With its desktops, operational servers and phones in the cloud, U.S. Auto Sales is now able to provide responsive customer service at any time from any place and has experienced record-breaking growth. The dealership reduced the total cost of PC ownership from $1,500 per desktop to $500 and now has a collection team that is fully virtualized 24/7 and can collect payments even when dealerships are closed. 

Channel Partners 360°: Opex Technologies

Opex Technologies is a hybrid technology brokerage and advisory firm that represents clients during critical technology decisions to deliver greater efficiency, accountability and value.

The Challenge: Merz Pharmaceuticals, an international medical research and development company headquartered in Germany and with operations and offices worldwide, had completed multiple acquisitions across the United States, each with its own data center. It needed a strategy for migrating these applications to an enterprise-class hosting company that had an international presence, especially in Germany, and could execute a hybrid cloud environment with hyper-scalers Microsoft and Amazon.

The Solution: Opex recommended a hybrid solution of consolidating computing environments across three facilities into a private cloud environment at a hosting company, then to start transitioning certain workloads into Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.

The Results: Consolidating environments provided Merz with a cost savings, while system performance improved tremendously from the deployment of advanced technology. In addition, the managed component of the solution supplemented the limited resources of the Merz IT team.

Channel Partners 360°: Platte River Networks

Platte River Networks provides complete IT services for businesses across every industry, throughout Colorado and the nation.

The Challenge: Summit Pathology, a medical lab, was having major issues with its cloud environment in which it was trying to run a complex and bandwidth-consuming industry-specific application, and its current MSP couldn’t seem to come up with a fix.

The Solution: Platte River Networks created a hybrid solution that took the pathology application out of the cloud and put it on-premises in its own virtualized and redundant data center, with Exchange email, security monitoring, spam filtering and Office operating in the cloud.

The Results: Performance of the pathology application improved immediately, as did that of the cloud-based applications and a new remote desktop server. In one weekend, Platte River Networks was able to do what the MSP hadn’t been able to achieve in five years.

Channel Partners 360°: PriorityOne Group

PriorityOne Group is a provider of integrated IT services to businesses including physician practices, ambulatory surgery centers and hospitals.

The Challenge: A rapidly growing health-care provider had security that complied with the HIPPA Security Rule but still worried that it wasn’t enough.

The Solution: PriorityOne Group replaced the client’s real-time anti-virus scanner, which detects a virus only after it is present, with a service that also provides real-time outer layer internet protection against visiting infected websites. In addition, PriorityOne Group developed a protocol for automatically installing the solution on staff members’ accounts, eliminating the need for time-consuming and expensive manual installation.

The Results: The service not only improved security, but revealed that staff members were visiting social media sites more than 45,000 times per week. Restricting access to these sites increased staff efficiency and productivity.

Channel Partners 360°: Richardson Communications & Consulting

Richardson Communications & Consulting (RCC) specializes in four major technology areas — voice, data, cloud/IT services and business continuity — forming trusted partnerships with clients seeking world-class technology solutions, professional and process-driven implementations and unmatched customer service.

The Challenge: Before medical technology company Spectocor could launch its real-time cardiac monitoring equipment, it needed to find communications technology that would easily integrate into its devices, plus a scalable, global communications provider.

The Solution: RCC leveraged globally positioned technology partnerships to enable Spectocor’s IoT-enabled biomedical devices to connect with its health management platform via the internet and a worldwide mobile network.

The Results: RCC helped Spectocor maximize its speed to market and to keep its product competitively priced as it scales from market to market. Expanding internationally with the same global provider for technology and network, Spectocor grew exponentially into Europe and Asia.

Channel Partners 360°: Shamrock Consulting Group

Shamrock Consulting Group, a full-service telecommunications and IT consulting firm, works to help clients get the best pricing, service and support in the carrier industry.

The Challenge: To meet federal funding mandates, Borrego Health, a health-care clinic with a limited IT staff, needed to consolidate the PBXs of its 22 sites, move from a single point-of-failure voice network to a QoS-based auto failover network and add a sophisticated contact center.

The Solution: Shamrock Consulting Group worked with Borrego’s IT team to design a cloud-based solution that gives all sites prioritized access to a fail-safe managed PBX/call center by way of a fail-safe network. All users now have web-based UC features.

The Results: The cost-effective new system, which can easily be supported by the internal IT team, provided Borrego with the call reliability and improved patient experience required to retain federal funding. It also will allow for easily and efficiently scaling services as the organization expands. 

Channel Partners 360°: The Business Value Award Winners

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Learn more about Channel Partners 360° and our Business Success Stories here.