(3 votes, average: 8 out of 10)
Loading ...Great night at CDN’s Top 100 Solution Provider event
More than 200 solution providers turned out to see where they ranked on the annual CDN Top 100 Solution Provider list.
Softchoice was again the top solution provider of the year, but they were closely followed by Insight Canada, Compugen and Xwave. It was the closest race in years. Following up in the fifth spot was MetaFore IT Solutions. To view the entire list please click here: CDN Top 100 Solution Providers.
There were 12 newcomers to the list this year. The most CDN has ever witnessed. It is great to see smart and savvy new resellers challenging the established partners in the industry. It just makes everyone better, in my opinion. The award for newcomer of the year was handed out to The Herjavec Group, a security solution provider who acquired MetaComm last year. This company was established only a few short years ago and is led by Robert Herjavec, the former president of Brak Systems and current CBC TV personality on the show Dragon’s Den.
The fastest rising company was Epic Information Systems of Winnipeg, who moved up an amazing 27 spots from last year. This company is great in the community as they have their own Technology Day computer show. This show has been put on for five years and attracts more than 350 people from the area. David Reid, the president of Epic, said at the show last night that Winnipeg is the fly over show capital of Canada. All the computer trade shows fly over Winnipeg to get to Toronto or Montreal or from there to Calgary and Vancouver. He said for this market to have a show they would have to do it themselves. And, I have to congratulate Reid and the folks at Epic for the effort and initiative.
The event belonged to everyone in the channel. There were no runaway winners. All the people who attended I would consider winners, whether the made the list or they did not. Two people I would like to thank are Dave Neil of Neil Corporate Services who drove from North Bay, Ont., to make the event and Stuart Crawford of IT Matters of Calgary. Both narrowly missed making the list.
I also enjoyed meeting people such as Gary McNally of Digica Solutions, another newcomer to the CDN Top 100 Solution Provider list. I enjoyed listening to McNally telling me about his company and his future plans for success.
It was also great to catch up with Patrick Power, formerly of OAM and now with Nitro Microsystems after an acquisition. The Nitro/OAM deal is one of those classic cases of a win-win. Similar deals such as Compugen buying Orbex and Epic acquiring Prairie Computers are other examples of win-win deals in the channel. These win-win deals are rare, but they seem to happen more often in the Canadian IT channel. It says something about this community.
I also wanted to mention Bill MacDonald of Genuit and Herb Roblin of Hartco. I enjoyed listening to both of them talk about their days at Compaq and IBM respectively. We can all learn a few things from these veteran executives who are still making waves in the industry.
In closing I want to thank the sponsors for their time and attention to the CDN Top 100 event. They are HP Canada, Cisco Canada, Tech Data Canada, Symantec Canada, NEC Display Solutions and the newest sponsor AMD.
Two quick hits before I go. I has come to my attention that Paul Patterson has left Lexmark Canada. Patterson is a great friend of CDN and an excellent channel executive. I wish him the best.
Also Corel announced that Kris Hagerman, formerly Group President of Symantec’s Data Center Management Group, has been appointed as Corel’s interim Chief Executive Officer. Hagerman will replace the outgoing David Dobson, who accepted a senior executive position at a Fortune 500 company he has yet to name.
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