Slideshow: CDN's 2011 Channel Elite Awards

Cloud Computing on camera

A crowd of more than 200 people packed the Paramount Conference and Event Venue in North Toronto in September to find out which company would be named Solution Provider of the Year as part of CDN's 2011 Channel Elite Awards.
Meet the winners for categories such as best cloud solution, best mobile solution and, of course, solution provider of the year in this CDN slideshow.

Best Collaborative Solution

Gold winner IT Weapons has won multiple CEAs by being innovative. An example of this was with its customer First Capital Realty, a real estate business that required a revolutionary way to manage its many, many deals. With the consultative help of SharePoint experts Concatenate of Toronto, they created the Deal Workflow System for leasing, new business, budgeting and forecasting. Ed Galasso from Tech Data Canada presented them with their award.

Best Enterprise Solution

Compugen actually took home the gold and silver solutions in this category, a first in CEA history. The gold award recognized Compugen's work with Finning Canada, a Caterpillar equipment dealer with 4,000 users and 60 locations across Western Canada. To solve PC fleet management issues, Compugen implemented a one-stop solution for complete PC lifecycle management - everything from procurement to disposal, including leasing. The end result was that it eliminated a lot of hassles and unnecessary costs, while providing aggressive hardware maintenance SLAs and a sophisticated approach to parts sparing that have significantly improved PC repair turnaround time. Mike Ansley from Cisco Systems presented Compugen's Luis Lima with the award.

Best Cloud Solution

With their client moving offices, instead of migrating their seven servers to the new location, our Gold winner 3 Peaks Inc. migrated them to the cloud instead, building a private cloud solution that leverages public cloud storage. The result is a more flexible IT infrastructure with lower energy costs and a lower carbon footprint, with employees in North America, Asia and Europe more easily able to share information. Cisco's Mike Ansley presented their award.

Best Managed Services

With its Gold-winning solution, i3 Solutions Inc. helped make a hospital stay a little less painful. It developed a managed services offering that not only brings better entertainment options to the patient bedside, but better access to patient information for medical professionals as well. With the Patient Bedside System, patients are able to access all services such as entertainment, telephone and internet access through a simple swipe card, and hospital staff can turn the entertainment console into a patient records system. Sandi Sandiland from Dell Canada presented their award.

Best Channel Marketing Initiative

Broadview Networks of Winnipeg was determined to develop a marketing strategy that would gather over 200 IT professionals into the same venue to listen to a detailed presentation on a new product roadmap, and generate qualified leads. They also wanted attendees to enjoy themselves and set up a private screening of the movie TRON: Legacy in 3D. Approximately 200 IT professionals from around Manitoba attended the event. Presenting the Gold marketing award was Ed Galasso from Tech Data Canada.

Best Mid-Market Solution

GFI Solutions Group's client was dealing with the government imposed eco-fees and needed to charge customers in some stores but not all, because only a handful of provinces passed this law. GFI designed a customized solution to help dealers manage environment fees, based on its existing Acomba point-of-sale solution to great results. They were presented their award by Cisco's Mike Ansley.

Best Mobile Solution

For health care providers, pandemic preparedness and response is a key concern, and Tenet Group Inc.'s Mobile Emergency Management application addresses those concerns. It facilitates cooperation and coordination during emergencies, by ensuring that users always have up-to-date information stored in their BlackBerry smartphones, including critical documents and contact lists, and automatically collects information from internal or external systems, and pushes it to designated BlackBerry smartphones. Their Gold award was presented by Sandi Sandiland from Dell Canada.

Best Service Organization

Supporting Hewlett-Packard through its contract to provide IT service and support to a major worldwide mining company's Canadian operations, Compugen wasn't just called in to service desktops or upgrade infrastructure in a downtown office. Its technicians were called out on service calls to underground operations and operations in extremely remote isolated locations, having to deal with the constant dirt, heat, humidity and even danger found in industrial environments. Presenting their gold award was CDN editor Paolo Del Nibletto.

Best Small Business Solution

Oakville Blueprinting, a full-service digital print provider that caters to the architectural and engineering industries, needed server migration along with a large amount of data storage, but didn't have the necessary space to house all this IT equipment. They required a transformation and our Gold winner, Atum Corp., built a solution for hosting large documents, online portals, collaboration tools and order submissions, and migrated them to a reliable and efficient VPS solution. Sandi Sandiland from Dell Canada presented the award.

Solution Provider of the Year

Our solution provider of the year worked with a health care product supplier burdened by an outdated and inadequate IT infrastructure. Infinite IT Solutions brought its client into the 21st century with a complete forklift of every aspect of their IT environment, from a new network, firewall and phone system based on the latest Cisco technology to network-based security and a unified communications strategy. Basically, everything is new except the desktops. It was a soup to nuts IT overhaul that leveraged every area of this solution provider's expertise, and is a performance clearly worth of a solution provider of the year. The award was presented by Ed Galasso from Tech Data Canada.

Tackling mobile security

Businesses of all sizes are struggling to deal with the consumerization trend. While iPhones, Android phones and other mobile devices take over the workplace, there is an opportunity for the channel to help enterprises deal with the security risks involved.

As part of this year's Channel Elite Awards, James Quin, a security analyst with London, Ont.-based Info-Tech Research Group, gave solution providers some tips on dealing with mobile security. Click to watch the video.