SEATTLE, WA--(Marketwire - July 13, 2010) - Avanade, a business technology services provider, has been honored by Microsoft as the 2010 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Virtualization in the Core Infrastructure Solutions category, recognizing the company's innovation and exemplary customer service and satisfaction.
The Partner of the Year Award reflects Avanade's continued commitment to leveraging the Microsoft platform to help companies realize business results. Microsoft selected Avanade to receive this honor from more than 3,000 partner entries based on the expertise and experience of the Avanade UK office.
"Microsoft is pleased to honor Avanade as the Core Infrastructure Solutions Virtualization Partner of the Year," said Bob Kelly, corporate vice president, Server and Tools Business, Microsoft Corp. "By delivering a new datacenter platform using Hyper-V and System Center for the client's Windows Server estate, Avanade ensures both business agility and TCO reduction for their client."
The Core Infrastructure Solutions, Virtualization Partner of the Year award honors partners who have created value for customers by developing and implementing virtualization solutions within the last year based on Microsoft technologies. This award also recognizes partners that helped customers maximize resource utilization through server and desktop consolidation, and the provisioning of streamlined virtual environments.
"We strive to keep our finger on the pulse of the ever-changing technology landscape in order to provide our customers with real expertise and innovative thinking to deliver business value," said Aziz Virani, vice president, global technologies and solutions at Avanade. "We are honored to receive continual recognition from Microsoft for Avanade's world-class services and commitment to helping our customers solve their toughest problems, improve performance, lower costs, and grow the bottom line."
Microsoft honored Avanade for its work leading the early adoption of the Microsoft server virtualization platform for several customers. For example, Avanade worked with a leading supplier of energy services based in the United Kingdom to transform the data rooms in each power station, which were managed separately from the company's core IT activities. This separation resulted in an aging server estate, under-utilized hardware, and a number of support and management challenges. Many of the servers and applications were mission-critical and required to be on-site to ensure smooth running of the power station, so moving the servers to a central data center was not an option.
Avanade proved that virtualizing the data room with Microsoft Hyper-V would enable the company to consolidate databases more efficiently and lower overall licensing costs. The Hyper-V platform also increased the flexibility of the ITdepartment, supporting the deployment of new virtual servers in a matter of hours and at no extra cost. This solution is expected to save approximately £2 million over the next three years.
Avanade is also supporting the efforts of a large undersea engineering company to reduce IT costs and its environmental impact by virtualizing over half of the servers in the UK and Norway datacenters. This change is expected to save over £100,000 a year in operations, energy, cooling, and licensing costs.
Avanade's Next Generation Datacenter (NGDC) initiative addresses common challenges that companies face with their aging infrastructures, including how to reduce costs, drive efficiencies, and deliver transformation. By combining Microsoft technologies for virtualization, management and security, including Microsoft Hyper-V and Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008, Avanade's datacenter optimization solutions help propel businesses' IT infrastructures to a fully optimized computing model that delivers on-demand enterprise services and improves the bottom line, promotes innovation, and reduces business risk.
Microsoft will present the awards at this year's Worldwide Partner Conference in July to showcase partner solutions in each key Microsoft technology area, including virtualization, as well as the newly added Microsoft Country Partner of the Year award. Winners and finalists demonstrate significant customer impact, solution innovation, speed to market, deployment, and utilization of advanced features in Microsoft technologies over the past year.
About Avanade
Avanade provides business technology services that connect insight, innovation and expertise in Microsoft technologies to help customers realize results. Avanade's services and solutions help improve performance, productivity and sales for organizations in all industries. The company applies Microsoft expertise from its global network of consultants, drawing on the right mix of onshore, offshore and nearshore skills, which together are designed to help deliver results faster, at lower cost and with less risk. Avanade, which is majority owned by Accenture, was founded in 2000 by Accenture and Microsoft Corporation and serves customers in more than 24 countries worldwide with more than 10,000 professionals. Additional information can be found at www.avanade.com.
Avanade and the Avanade logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of Avanade Inc. Other product, service, or company names mentioned herein are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. ®2010 Avanade Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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