The 2018 Channel Partners 360° Awards: Meet the Winners
We recognized 25 partner businesses – the CP 360° class of 2018 – Wednesday night at the Channel Partners Conference and Expo.
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Aureon
Aureon enables organizations to focus on what they do best by offering them a comprehensive suite of support solutions focused on technology, human resources and contact center services.
The Challenge: Accelerated company growth and outdated technology created a pressing need for mechanical, electrical and plumbing experts P1 Group to remedy a number of challenges including poor user experience, inadequate network security, lack of failover and inconsistent QoS.
The Solution: Aureon engineered a new network design and implemented managed network services, providing increased visibility, 24/7 performance monitoring, MPLS, SD-WAN, hosted PBX for fast deployment and seamless integration, unified threat management with active hosted managed firewall reporting and SD-WAN site-specific reporting on all connections.
The Results: P1's more than 900 employees at six locations have enjoyed more efficient communications and mobility, as well as 100 percent uptime — avoiding a potential loss of $42,000 an hour — and increased security, while the company has enjoyed a capex savings of $50,000 in the first year alone.
Bridlewood Consulting
Bridlewood Consulting is an end-to-end fixed and mobile communications consulting service that works to strategically align clients' needs with technical, financial and operational corporate initiatives.
The Challenge: Voice services in the U.S. and Canada for the client, a pharmaceutical research and development firm, were expensive, complicated to administer and slow to respond, with spotty reliability.
The Solution: Working within capex restraints, Bridlewood architected a fully redundant TDM solution leveraging existing PRIs, POTs lines and SIP, and executed a comprehensive system cleanup and reorganization.
The Results: In addition to improved response time, simplified administration, enhanced customer communications and new system capabilities, the client is realizing a cost savings of $250,000 to $300,000 per year.
Bryley Systems Inc.
Bryley Systems is a managed IT and managed cloud services provider serving the technology needs of clients in central New England and across the United States.
The Challenge: Leaktite Corp., a Massachusetts-based manufacturer and distributor of plastic container products, opened a manufacturing facility in Arizona that needed an IT infrastructure that seamlessly and securely connected to the headquarters network in Massachusetts.
The Solution: Bryley Systems worked with a number of vendors to design a network infrastructure for the Arizona plant that included a rack-mount server, firewall, Ethernet switches connected via fiber, a controller-based wireless network and endpoint computers, with connection between Arizona and Massachusetts via a carrier vetted for the client by Bryley, which also coordinated all elements of the project to eliminate delays and keep costs down.
The Results: Bryley coordinated the entire project, bringing it in on time and on budget for Leaktite whose employees are now enjoying enhanced communications and improved productivity.
Carrier Access Inc.
With a goal of helping organizations fully leverage their technology strategy and assets, incorporate new technology solutions and enhance support offerings, Carrier Access provides connectivity, life cycle management and technology services.
The Challenge: The client, an educational institution with 24 locations, needed to replace its phone system, which was composed of a jumble of equipment and systems, many of which had recently been classified as end-of-life (EOL) and end of manufacturer support (EoMS).
The Solution: Carrier Access designed a solution — including an office phone system along with a dual connection, and an SD-WAN environment with wireless backup — that replaced the myriad legacy systems and gave the client the capability of leveraging additional technologies and accommodating future growth.
The Results: The client now has a system with full redundancy and automatic failover, improved productivity from UC features, as well as increased bandwidth across the WAN to remote sites and a monthly savings of more than $1,500 from converting to SIP trunking.
Corporate Technologies Group Inc.
Starting out as a traditional telecom agent, Corporate Technologies Group (CTG) has evolved into a cloud sourcing and service partner.
The Challenge: Event Source, a party rental company, had tripled in size, with some new locations as far as 1,500 miles away and all of the locations with their own networks and increasing demand on the already overburdened communications system, making effective vendor support and security management all but impossible.
The Solution: Project managing to work with the providers they represent, as well as some of Event Source's existing providers, CTG upgraded the company's connectivity to fiber with increased capacity and implemented a network monitoring solution, a cloud-based UC system with enhanced call center features and a security solution managed by a third party.
The Results: All locations of Event Source are benefiting from enhanced communications, increased productivity, customer care improvements, new capabilities and revenue gains.
Eclipse
Eclipse works to ensure its clients have the right communication strategy, the right technology and the right vendor partners at the right time, transforming telecommunications from a necessity to a strategic asset that drives business growth.
The Challenge: After a decade of growth, the client, a dental services organization, had 850 offices nationwide and a hodgepodge of communications systems that needed to be standardized to support current operations, as well as the planned addition of 500 more offices over the next five years.
The Solution: Eclipse moved the client to a UCaaS solution that provided them with a single platform to manage, new visibility and analytics around calling behavior and volumes, and dramatically reduced operating expenses.
The Results: The client realized a $1 million savings in the first year, with savings of $1.5 million projected for the second year and beyond, all while enjoying improved call center performance, enhanced customer experiences, improved internal management capabilities and its first-ever access to analytical data on call results.
eGroup
eGroup provides innovative IT solutions to businesses, aligning their solutions, services and support to clients' technology initiatives to make their businesses more productive.
The Challenge: A nonprofit health services organization needed to modernize and simplify IT services to increase security and productivity, and reduce downtime for their international user base.
The Solution: eGroup assessed the client's current infrastructure and needs, then designed, implemented and integrated Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure and Cisco Meraki in a solution that allows the client to fully manage their IT environment in the cloud.
The Results: End users are now able to work securely from anywhere, and the client has realized a dramatic reduction in IT-related service outages, is using less than half as many servers as before and has reduced its annual costs to the equivalent of what they were paying for data center space, power and networking with their previous configuration.
ETS Solutions
ETS Solutions provides comprehensive technology assessments and leverages expertise in voice, data, cloud and security to help clients make informed technology decisions that can increase revenue and productivity, and decrease expenses.
The Challenge: Citizens Lanier Holdings, providing parking services under five brands with 8,000 employees in more than 1,200 locations, needed to improve their overall service uptime and reliability to their properties, simplify and consolidate the management of service to all locations and prioritize new technology projects with an eye to price and limited staff resources.
The Solution: After reviewing the clients' current services, ETS developed and project managed conversion and upgrade rollout plans, bringing in an aggregation carrier and coordinating with the client's existing firewall vendor.
The Results: The client now enjoys greatly improved productivity from a streamlined system that ETS can quickly extend to any new locations, as well as an annual savings of approximately $312,000 off their previous telecom spend.
Eze Castle Integration
Eze Castle Integration is a leading provider of IT solutions, managed cloud services and cybersecurity to more than 650 alternative asset management firms around the globe.
The Challenge: The client, a Boston-based independent private investment firm managing more than $1 billion in assets, needed to re-evaluate their IT infrastructure with an eye to regulatory compliance and investor requirements and was looking to enhance their disaster recovery and cybersecurity protections, as well as investigate the benefits a cloud solution could offer.
The Solution: After being presented with a variety of public vs. private cloud options, the client selected Eze Castle's private cloud — built using best-of-breed technologies from Cisco, NetApp, VMware and others — with a 24/7/365 fully-managed support package.
The Results: The client now enjoys enhanced cybersecurity and disaster recovery protections, simplified IT management and cost savings, including an upgrade to a less expensive storage and DR solution over the course of three years.
INFINIT Consulting
A digital transformation expert, INFINIT Consulting helps companies optimize digital assets to align with business priorities and goals.
The Challenge: The client, a retail cosmetics giant, needed a secure, next-generation network infrastructure to serve both corporate and retail store locations with features such as tactical help desk and IT management services, data to drive AI-based systems learning, end-to-end accountability and managed retail IT, cloud, infrastructure international IT management, voice and cybersecurity services.
The Solution: INFINIT provided the client with cybersecurity threat detection, performance and activity analytics, optimized and standardized cloud services under Microsoft, optimized and standardized networking infrastructure under Cisco Meraki and optimized and standardized telecom services under Spectrotel, Spectrum and Egnyte.
The Results: INFINIT's solution provided the client with improved agility, flexibility and omnichannel fulfillment; improved operational efficiency and increased productivity; cost savings of approximately $340,000 through standardized connectivity; and increased revenue through greater systems availability and network infrastructure stability that enable retail store point-of-sale system transaction processing.
LanYap Networks
LanYap Networks is a leading provider of strategic telecom and cloud solutions for midsized and enterprise-level companies nationwide.
The Challenge: Arizona Biological Control (ARBICO), a pest control company, was contending with outdated premises-based equipment as well as a VAR that lacked the technical expertise to help them architect the working environment they needed as a growing small business.
The Solution: LanYap's solution included desktops-as-a-service (DaaS) to deliver a scalable, anytime-anywhere platform for all business-critical applications, email and file storage; hardware-as-a-service to deliver fully managed firewalls and switches; a carrier-agnostic SD-WAN to resolve constant carrier outages; and a carrier to take on day-to-day break/fix, providing 24/7/365, unlimited help desk service for all users.
The Results: Productivity is up significantly for ARBICO, thanks to anytime-anywhere access to applications and critical data, and call center personnel being able to focus 100 percent on customer experience and not deal with system outage issues.
MicroCorp
MicroCorp provides a powerful combination of back-office systems, people and support offerings to simplify the purchase of and management of telecom and cloud solutions for business customers.
The Challenge: The client, a U.S.-based retail and franchise chain with more than 5,000 locations worldwide, needed a consolidated, streamlined network solution that would connect all locations and provide the systems and solutions needed for the digital evolution taking place in retail.
The Solution: MicroCorp moved the client to a ubiquitous cloud voice platform and network-as-a-service from CBTS and provided an aggregated redundant and diverse connectivity solution from Hypercore Networks, as well as coordinating and the implementation and support processes between CBTS and Hypercore NOCs and PMs.
The Results: The new solution has provided the client with lower costs, improved connectivity and security; improved downtime and outages across multiple locations; provided a seamless failover between multiple, diverse connections; ended technology obsolescence by building hardware refresh, upgrades, maintenance and licensing in the solution life cycle; and enabled next-generation networks for IoT, with the added feature of user analytics and reporting.
MotherG
MotherG is a Chicago-based It managed services provider that serves business with 20 to 400 users.
The Challenge: The client, a machining company for industrial and aeronautic clients, needed greater visibility to the production process, specifically metrics such as on-time delivery, quality control and similar data points.
The Solution: MotherG deployed Microsoft Power BI and combined it with Excel using pivot tables, to create a dashboard modeling tool that allows the client to define and deploy BI analytics in a dashboard format, while bypassing expensive and cumbersome warehouse requirements.
The Results: In addition to being able to comply with customer requirements, the client reported a near-immediate ROI, thanks to enhanced visibility to on-time performance and quality issues, which has resulted in less scrap and better cash flow.
Net7 Solutions
Formed in the belief that technology service providers fail to deliver adequate customer support, Net7 Solutions offers a team of experienced, industry-leading professionals who are fully involved in all aspects of the client relationship, from solution development to implementation and ongoing support.
The Challenge: The client, a $9 billion automotive company with 550 sites across North America, lacked internal personnel or expertise to undertake the scope of the upgrade needed on their companywide network to eliminate application performance problems and meet contact center needs.
The Solution: After an in-depth analysis of the client's network needs, Net7 developed a plan to migrate them to a fully managed broadband, SD-WAN, UCaaS/CCaaS and cloud project that would transform the way they did business.
The Results: Call abandonment rates were lowered by 43 percent — adding $5 million in additional income per quarter, circuit tickets and office downtime dropped by more than 75 percent and new collaboration capabilities greatly reduced the need for travel to meetings, all while the client saves $8.2 million in opex over the next 36 months.
No More Salespeople Consulting
Representing more than 400 providers, No More Salespeople Consulting works to empower clients to make the most informed technology procurement decision by providing experts who are continually trained on all available solutions and provide clients with an honest and objective opinion — not a sales pitch.
The Challenge: GlobalMed, a tele-medicine company, had only one IT person, new to the job, who needed help evaluating all of the company's technology systems, services and vendors to determine how to reduce costs, improve functionality, add redundancy and enhance network management using solutions that could integrate with Netsuite.
The Solution: No More Salespeople engaged a certified IT vendor to do an assessment and make recommendations for the client's current system, then made their own recommendations for enhancements, including a global UC system with soft phones to integrate with Netsuite, reduce roaming costs and provide a variety of reporting options, and an SD-WAN solution for AWS optimization and a single IP failover.
The Results: By upgrading to a UC platform integrated with their tracking software and optimizing their AWS traffic with SD-WAN, GlobalMed has drastically improved their employee performance and executives' ability to track employee activity, while the IT audit and network assessment provided visibility to the IT director to understand everything in the company's environment, improving his ability to fix issues.
PICS ITech
PICS ITech provides word-class IT services and sophisticated sets of IT tools previously only available to larger companies and simplifies support by managing the entire IT process or specific workloads to help clients grow.
The Challenge: Allied Energy, an HVAC company, had processes ranging from record keeping and data collection to job scheduling and procurement that were being performed manually, which generated business but could not support the company's growth.
The Solution: PICS ITech fomulated and implemented a corporatewide line of business application and CRM (service, inventory and accounting), developed custom software based on state energy audit guidelines to facilitate field data gathering and rolled out more than 100 tablets with GPS and software to field users that enabled them to accurately document site surveys, service calls, schedules customer sign-offs, photos, etc.
The Results: Both accuracy and productivity were enhanced, with salespeople and auditors able to make 25 percent more calls in day due to GPS routing and obtain better quality documentation and more complete record keeping with the custom software.
Plow
Plow provides expertise, consulting and advocacy in IT systems design and development, helping organizations make strategic decisions that increase efficiency, grow business and give them peace of mind.
The Challenge: The client, a large health care network, was acquiring several new hospitals and divesting itself of others, necessitating a complete evaluation and upgrade of their network to facilitate the realignment.
The Solution: Plow performed a comprehensive assessment of the client's network infrastructure to identify interoperability challenges and optimization opportunities while architecting and designing both short- and long-term road maps to standardize a centralize a new, secure-intelligent-always-on platform and consolidating several domains while migrating the client's more than 14,000 users to Office 365.
The Results: The client realized cost savings and productivity enhancements from consolidation, streamlining and enhanced performance of the network, while moving network management from in-house to Plow's NOC provided them with 24/7/365 support, as well as peace of mind from securing their network and all associated endpoints.
Richardson Communications and Consulting
Richardson Communications and Consulting (RCC) enables clients to strategically align technology with their business operations by providing expert advice, transformational solutions and innovative products and services.
The Challenge: Worldwide growth and acquisitions had left the client, the world's largest provider of hospitality transaction processing, with a complex amalgam of disparate IT infrastructures and systems serviced by multiple providers around the globe.
The Solution: RCC developed a solution that addressed the client's current needs as well as future growth, reducing the number of data centers from four to two — one in North America and one in Europe — using a global hybrid computing platform with a DRaaS solution and active-active replication that added a level of redundancy and business continuity that didn't exist before.
The Results: The client has a fresh, new infrastructure and consolidated IT environment with a single provider to support its growing global business and help produce a cost savings.
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: The client, a public utility that had grown through multiple large acquisitions and, as a result, had four different MPLS networks, disparate data centers and a complex IPSec network connecting hundreds of sites, wanted a single, simplified network.
The Solution: Shamrock recommended leveraging SD-WAN with integrated UTM security to obtain high availability at all sites, regardless of size or location, and worked in tandem with the client's MSP, that was virtualizing the client's entire data center environment, giving them multiple redundant 10G circuits between data centers for rapid replication and failover.
The Results: Every site gained redundant connections and a simplified WAN topology achieved through SD-WAN, with most sites achieving increases of more than tenfold in bandwidth, while the client went from dealing with more than 100 invoices for network services down to one single invoice, with a net savings of $35,000 per month, despite massive upgrades across the board.
Spectrotel
For more than 20 years, Spectrotel has provided quality, affordable, personalized and integrated communication services to multilocation and enterprise customers
The Challenge: The client, a national retailer, needed help upgrading their network and making sure it would pass the PCI compliance scan.
The Solution: Spectrotel provided the client with VoIP services and broadband internet, and configured their network to include all the necessary firewalls, policy attributes, device separation and reporting to ensure the client would achieve PCI-Level 3.
The Results: In addition to passing their PCI scan, the client will save more than $1 million over the term of their contract with Spectrotel by replacing legacy MPLS and TDM services with higher bandwidth and scalable products, and another $15,000 per month in operational savings.
Stratosphere Networks and Converged Communication Systems
Stratosphere Networks is an IT managed service provider focused on delivering comprehensive technology services and solutions. Converged Communication Systems (CCS) is a nationwide provider of best-in-class IP telephony solutions and support services for businesses of all sizes
The Challenge: The client, a commercial real estate management company, needed to achieve compliance with several security regulations to attract and retain clients, but was hampered by IT support issues.
The Solution: The client was provided with security information and event management (SIEM), threat management (web and log management) and firewall management with proactive monitoring, as well as BC/DR and migration to a virtualized server and desktop environment.
The Results: The client achieved the desired compliance and is enjoying enhanced system performance, improved security, resilient DR capability and improved troubleshooting, with deeper insight and more granular control over network traffic.
Symplicity Communications
For more than a decade, Symplicity Communications has worked to make choosing and managing business technology simple for organizations of any size.
The Challenge: When a Michigan-based regional supercenter chain with 261 locations put out a request for bids on POTS line pricing, Symplicity came back with a recommendation that the client do a full inventory to determine the products and pricing being represented on their 460 phone bills from 13 service providers, and how they could better manage their communications.
The Solution: Symplicity's four-month audit resulted in the elimination of unused services, the consolidation and migration of more than 1,600 POTS lines to one carrier, the replacement of expensive analog CO trunks with POTS lines and the porting of DID numbers from analog DID trunks to SIP trunks.
The Results: The consolidation services and technology upgrades brought the number of separate phone bills down to less than 35 and saved the client $232,000 per month on their voice spending, putting the year-end P&L $1.89 million under budget, while additional bandwidth enables new marketing efforts for digital signage and real-time video in the stores.
Telarus
Telarus sources data, voice, cloud and managed services for clients through its robust portfolio of 150 leading service providers.
The Challenge: Inflow Communications, a provider of UC and contact center implementation, was looking to replace its legacy remote access and monitoring with a more modern, scalable tool that could meet the core requirements around remote access, but also provide a more expansive toolset for monitoring, alerting and isolating potential issues.
The Solution: Telarus provided Inflow with its UC management platform VXSuite, which allowed them to build a new management package that was cloud-focused, but maintained their value adds.
The Results: The new platform provided the client with an immediate savings of $10,000 and additional annual costs savings by allowing deployment across almost double the number of customers, while providing tool consolidation for the operations team and adding more features, especially around more granular monitoring and call quality analysis, facilitating a higher service level.
Telegration
Telegration features a portfolio of services and providers to enable enterprise clients of all sizes to efficiently research, select, procure, deploy and manage their IT and telecom networks.
The Challenge: Cheetah Digital, a New York City-based digital marketing company with 24 locations in 11 countries, had been spun off from a larger enterprise and needed to move all its IT services off the parent company's infrastructure within a tight timeline set down in their TSA agreement.
The Solution: Diverse fiber access to all locations was built, with verification of last-mile and backbone providers and POP diversity to ensure the highest uptime available, and all services were moved to the cloud with a combination of UCaaS and CCaas that work together globally and directly integrate with Saleforce.com.
The Results: The solution created quantifiable cost savings and enabled new capabilities that facilitated a chain reaction of improvements including measurable productivity gains, improvements to customer care and topline revenue growth.
Think Network Technologies
Based in Durango, Colorado, and servicing the Four Corners, Think Network Technologies provides managed IT, premises-based and cloud solutions, integrated communications and IT consulting.
The Challenge: Retailer 2nd Avenue Sports had an outmoded and outdated proprietary phone system that was difficult to repair and expensive to maintain, and frequently failed, seriously impacting business.
The Solution: Think Network Technologies implemented a flat-rate hosted VoIP solution that provided 2nd Avenue Sports with the scalability, reliability and advanced call-management features they needed.
The Results: Improved features increase employee productivity by giving them mobility and collaboration capabilities that enable them to better focus on serving customers, while the 2nd Avenue Sports is saving $5,000 to $10,000 on calling charges, maintenance and simplification of the process for moves, adds and changes.
Think Network Technologies
Based in Durango, Colorado, and servicing the Four Corners, Think Network Technologies provides managed IT, premises-based and cloud solutions, integrated communications and IT consulting.
The Challenge: Retailer 2nd Avenue Sports had an outmoded and outdated proprietary phone system that was difficult to repair and expensive to maintain, and frequently failed, seriously impacting business.
The Solution: Think Network Technologies implemented a flat-rate hosted VoIP solution that provided 2nd Avenue Sports with the scalability, reliability and advanced call-management features they needed.
The Results: Improved features increase employee productivity by giving them mobility and collaboration capabilities that enable them to better focus on serving customers, while the 2nd Avenue Sports is saving $5,000 to $10,000 on calling charges, maintenance and simplification of the process for moves, adds and changes.
We didn’t know just how big an awards program we started several years ago would grow, but the Channel Partners 360° Business Value Awards have become an industry standard.
What’s ironic is that while the recognition is large in stature, the CP 360°s aren’t about the biggest sales — they’re about specific strategies that helped partner businesses create business value for their customers.
Channel Partners 360° is just for partners – agents, VARs, dealers, systems integrators, MSPs, solutions providers and consultants – that have a well-rounded portfolio and a proven track record of providing holistic technology solutions.
We asked applicants to provide a case study that exemplifies the stellar work they did in helping customers save money, achieve productivity gains and make their businesses more successful.
Infinit Consulting, LanYap Networks and Shamrock Consulting will participate in the CP 360° Winners Spotlight, part of the Business of the Channel conference track at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo, April 19, at 10:25 a.m., in Lando 4301, on Level 4 of the Sands Expo. |
Wednesday night at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas, we recognized 25 partner businesses, from big to small – including a few master agent/distributors for the first time – at a special networking event.
Click through our gallery below to learn who won and what they did for a customer that helped them achieve success with Channel Partners, but more importantly, their customers.
You, too, can join us as a CP 360° winner at a future Channel Partners event. Go here for more information and to apply.
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