As the bats under the Congress Avenue Bridge in Austin, Texas, prepared for their nightly flight along the Colorado River, day 2 of GalaxZ18, the fourth annual Zenoss user conference, shifted from some serious tech talk to some serious fun. A hushed excitement fell over the crowd of more than 600 attendees at the JW Marriott Austin, the live monitoring capital of the world, as the annual Z Awards ceremony began.
The Z Awards recognize Zenoss customers and partners for achieving excellence and innovation in hybrid IT monitoring. Zenoss hosts Megan Lueders, chief marketing officer, and Brian Wilson, chief customer officer, returned again this year to announce the 14 award winners, chosen from a group of nearly 100 progressive technology adopters.
“This year is a special one for Zenoss, with the announcement of our new product, Zenoss Cloud,” Wilson said. “Much of the innovation we have built into the new platform, including the new Smart View UI, has been driven by customer input. We take our core value of ‘Customers for Life’ very seriously, and we know that our success as a business relies on satisfying our customers.”
The various nomination categories reflect the high degree of talent, leadership, creativity and determination required to not only win the award but change the shape of modern IT monitoring. These teams of professionals have also experienced a high degree of return on their investments and have created business value within their organizations.
Here are the 2018 Z Awards winners!
Innovator of the Year: BBC
The BBC is the world’s leading public service broadcaster. Its mission is to enrich people’s lives with programs that inform, educate and entertain. They broadcast on 9 national UK TV channels, 10 national radio stations, and 40 regional radio stations. And BBC World Service broadcasts to the world on TV and online in 27 languages.
The BBC monitoring team, through hard work and solid strategic planning, has enabled near-zero downtime for their 24/7 teams. Their incredibly effective and sophisticated deployment of Zenoss showcases their creativity and innovation as an IT organization. True to form, they don’t hoard the expertise they have with our platform — they actively share their best practices with the whole of the Zenoss user community.
Team of the Year: Insight
Insight, celebrating their 30th anniversary this year, is a leader in providing smart, cutting-edge technology solutions for global organizations of all sizes. Their diverse portfolio of hardware, software and services helps their customers solve complex IT challenges.
Zenoss partners with Insight to provide a unified solution to their customer base, which includes cloud and data center optimization services. The IT team has a breadth of knowledge about our platform and is a source of constant feedback that drives our own product innovation.
ZaaS Implementation of the Year: Nuance Communications
Nuance Communications is focused on reinventing the relationship between people and technology. “We make technology fluent in all things human,” is what you will hear when working with them. Their innovations in voice, natural language understanding, reasoning and systems integration are designed with the specific goal of creating more “human technology.”
The incredibly knowledgeable technology team at Nuance created a comprehensive strategy to deploy hybrid IT monitoring from Zenoss with the goal of cloud migration in mind from the start. This award simply confirms that they are at the top of their game.
Implementation of the Year: NTT DATA
NTT DATA is a global innovator in the realm of those who provide technology-enabled services and solutions to others. As a company and as individuals, NTT DATA has the goal of approaching problems differently than you may try yourself in order to transform your business. Based in Japan, but working throughout the world, this team of focused business consultants has your goals in mind.
NTT continues to share their Zenoss prowess with new customers around the world while bringing back to us their most complex projects and challenges. If you are considering Zenoss and need a set of true experts at your side, give them a call today. They will make you look like the rock star you know you are.
Channel Partner of the Year: Cognizant
Cognizant is one of the world’s leading professional services companies, transforming clients’ business, operating and technology models for the digital era. They help clients envision, build and run more innovative and efficient businesses via their unique industry-based, consultative approach.
With more than 25 ZenMasters and over 50 global enterprise ZaaS customers, you can count on their team to improve your IT operations. Often when you hire a services partner, it isn’t because you lack the skill, it’s because you have higher-order problems to solve and need a trusted, steady hand on the wheel of your operations to free you for those pursuits.
Technology Partner of the Year: Nutanix
Nutanix enables companies to build and operate powerful multicloud architectures. Their solutions are 100 percent software based and are built on the industry’s most popular hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) technology, delivering a full infrastructure stack that integrates compute, virtualization, storage, networking and security to power any application at scale.
The Zenoss-Nutanix integration provides the only enterprise monitoring solution certified as Nutanix Ready - Integrated. Nutanix is also an enterprise customer using Zenoss in their own data centers. If you have yet to take a look at the HCI space or you are ready to up your game, then start here.
Managed Services Partner of the Year: Cegeka
Cegeka, the Belgium-based supplier of cloud computing, remote infrastructure management and outsourced IT services boasts expertise in many areas, including hybrid IT monitoring. For many CIOs, outsourcing day-to-day IT management responsibilities is a cost-effective way for them to focus on their core business without wasting time and money on processes that aren’t their strong points.
Much like they do for their own customers, Cegeka has cleverly leveraged the Zenoss platform to automate many trivial tasks, which has freed up time to investigate new technology initiatives. Their deployment of our “monitoring as a solution” is absolutely state of the art. Learning from the best couldn’t be easier.
ZenMaster of the Year: Sean Hummel, Department of Veterans Affairs
The mission of the Department of Veterans Affairs is to fulfill President Lincoln’s promise “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan” by serving and honoring the men and women who are America’s veterans. The ZenMaster award is highly coveted among the deepest experts in the world on all things Zenoss. Not entirely unlike a Jedi Master who is disciplined in the ways of the force.
Sean Hummel is one such master. As a member of the Booz Allen Hamilton team that supports the VA cyber team, he shares his mastery with a valuable team that brings Lincoln’s promise to life. Sean was first a master of our Core open-source product and then moved to our commercial solution suite. Our Core users are often the source of tremendous inspiration for our team.
Service Partner of the Year: SOPRIS Technologies Inc.
SOPRIS Technologies provides end-to-end services that target business, technology and operational challenges faced by technology-driven companies. Their goal is to increase efficiency, reduce cost and grow revenues in order to increase customer satisfaction. They offer a full suite of IT software and hardware design services all the way through to operations and maintenance of the solutions.
SOPRIS architects complete solutions that integrate Zenoss deep infrastructure monitoring with log, application and video user experience monitoring, configuration management/orchestration, and incident management. They provide many services for our joint customers in the Latin American markets and absolutely speak your IT language.
Rookie of the Year Award: Enbridge
A North American leader in energy delivery, Enbridge has been ranked on the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations index for the past nine years. They operate the world’s longest crude oil and liquids transportation system. They are also Canada’s largest natural gas distributor.
Preparation and planning along with a commitment to communication, technical training and a partnering approach created an environment that facilitated a streamlined systems deployment. These humble award winners have worked hard to earn this award, and I know that many new customers in the audience will tap them for ideas and vie for this award in 2019!
Vision and Innovation - Education: Dartmouth College
Founded in 1769, Dartmouth is a member of the Ivy League and consistently ranks among the world’s greatest academic institutions. Their mission statement is simplicity itself: “Dartmouth College educates the most promising students and prepares them for a lifetime of learning and responsible leadership, through a faculty dedicated to teaching and the creation of knowledge.”
Dartmouth is a pioneer and premier user of Zenoss Service Impact. Their creativity has led them to model over 600 unique services, which has led to innovation benefiting all Zenoss customers. It is not a surprise that in a learning environment like the one at Dartmouth, new ideas continue to spring forth.
Vision and Innovation - Government: United States Air Force
“Aim High” has been the long-standing motto for the U.S. Air Force, and the service men and women within aim to remain elite every day. Protecting our country in air, space and cyberspace while pursuing that mission with excellence and integrity is the core of their mission.
Zenoss has worked closely with the Intelligent Waves team to deploy over a dozen sites, preventing IT outages that support mission-critical systems. Their adoption of Zenoss has put them on the path to software-defined IT operations. You can read a bit more here in our recent joint press release.
Vision and Innovation - Health Care: WEX Health
WEX Health focuses on helping their partners with the incredibly difficult job of administering health care benefits in a way that is effortless and engaging. They develop business growth strategies to provide IT efficiencies and cost savings while creating a stellar user experience.
WEX Health has been an early adopter of the ZaaS offering from Zenoss. They have simplified the experience of keeping their platform fast and available. WEX has elevated Zenoss to the position of principal monitoring partner, and all of us can reap those benefits when we interact with our health care professionals.
Vision and Innovation - Technology: Juniper Networks
Juniper brings simplicity to networking with products, solutions and services that connect the world. Their raison d’etre is to solve the world’s most difficult problems in networking. They believe that today, complexity is at the heart of the toughest IT challenges and that simplicity in engineering is the answer.
Juniper has been an early adopter of technology and a pioneer in using the latest from Zenoss as it becomes available. Folks like Juniper make working at Zenoss fun for so many bright technologists. Adapting today’s solution to tomorrow’s problem defines this category and Juniper.
