After a solid and energetic first day of high-powered industry keynotes and meaty tech sessions, Zenoss rolled out the red carpet, turned on the spotlights, and popped open the chilled Champagne for the 2017 Z Awards.
The prestigious Z Awards honor customers and partners for achieving excellence in hybrid IT monitoring and are presented each year at our the annual user conference, GalaxZ, held in Austin, Texas — the Live Monitoring Capital of the World!
A fantastic time was had by all, and award emcees and presenters Megan Lueders, vice president of marketing at Zenoss, and Brian Wilson, chief customer officer at Zenoss, kept the show rolling at an upbeat pace the Oscars would envy.
"I am fortunate to lead the customer success programs to capture and analyze feedback and effectively apply this to our ongoing strategy," said Brian Wilson, chief customer officer at Zenoss. "The GalaxZ event is three days of invaluable in-person dialogue, which is a key element to success across the ecosystem. Today, we publicly present Z Awards to those who stand out and demonstrate incredible leadership and commitment to innovation, driving IT transformation across a broad range of industry verticals."
Nomination categories showcase organizations that have gone the distance, with incredible talent, excellent leadership skills, a vision of gaining new value from the Zenoss platform, and that have realized exceptional business results and return on investment (ROI) from adopting an effective hybrid IT monitoring strategy.
Without further ado, here are the 2017 Z Award winners:
Innovator of the Year Award: Presidio
Presidio is a leading IT solutions provider assisting clients in harnessing technology innovation and simplifying IT complexity to digitally transform their businesses and drive return on IT investment. Presidio’s digital infrastructure, cloud and security solutions enable almost 7,000 middle-market, enterprise and government clients to take advantage of new digital revenue streams, omnichannel customer experience models, and the rich data insights generated by those interactions.
Presidio is a leader that understands the tough balancing act and unwavering mission of improving customer service, improving profitability, and providing differentiated products in a highly competitive market.
Team of the Year: Huntington Bank
Founded in 1866 as The Huntington National Bank, today, Huntington Bancshares Incorporated still operates from the same Columbus, Ohio, founding location in the heart of the Midwest. As of January 25, 2017, Huntington Bancshares Incorporated is a $100 billion asset regional bank holding company.
The Huntington Bank team is comprised of exceptional, dedicated and engaged employees with a mantra of, "Truth before hope — always," which is a reflection of their interest in an honest partnership that holds us accountable to each other.
Implementation of the Year: Datalink
Throughout the years, technology and business challenges have changed, but the core foundation of Datalink’s business has remained the same — listen to our clients, understand their business needs, and know how to serve them.
As a complete IT services and solution provider, Datalink helps organizations transform technology, operations and service delivery to meet business challenges.
Channel Partner of the Year: NTT DATA
With operations in more than 50 countries, NTT is known for helping clients address complex business and technical environments, minimize costs and maximize efficiencies.
“Modernizing monitoring not only allows organizations to ensure IT service health but also helps us stay ahead of the game and creatively deliver new value-added services to our clients,” said Manish Patil, vice president of leverage services at NTT DATA. “Choosing the right monitoring and analytics solution was a high priority. With Zenoss, we now have a single partner that makes it easy to isolate and root cause issues and resolve them faster than ever through automation. Regardless of our clients’ size or industry, Zenoss means faster time to value, reduced costs and improved customer experience.”
Technology Partner of the Year: LayerX Technologies
LayerX Technologies is a leading provider of advanced data analytics software. Their solutions are used across multiple industries and domains to provide rich insight into business and operational performance.
Zenoss Insight — for unified communications, log analytics and NetFlow — was launched in 2016. Today, it's integrated with the Zenoss platform, including visualization, single sign-on and bidirectional event handling.
Services Partner of the Year: SoftServe
With over 20 years of experience in digital software development and consulting, SoftServe has transformed the way thousands of global organizations do business by developing the most innovative technologies and processes in big data, the internet of things (IoT), security and experience design.
Managed Service Provider (MSP) 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. Their unique industry-based, consultative approach helps clients envision, build and run more innovative and efficient businesses.
Rookie of the Year: Grainger (Zenoss Service Dynamics)
Offering consolidated purchasing of over 7,000 quality brands, with 1.5 million products and services to choose from and delivery to over 160 countries, Grainger is the leading broad line supplier of maintenance, repair and operating (MRO) products serving businesses and institutions.
Rookie of the Year: Juniper (Zenoss as a Service)
With global sales of $4.8 billion in fiscal year 2016, Juniper Networks is the industry leader in network innovation. Juniper strives for solutions that give their customers true advantage over their competition, whether that’s bringing new, revenue-generating services to market in minutes instead of months, reducing network costs, enabling smarter, more efficient business processes, providing security and protection for their most valuable assets, or delivering a richer end-user experience.
Vision and Innovation - Technology: Acxiom
Acxiom Corporation is a leading global marketing technology and services company offering marketing and information management services, including multichannel marketing, addressable advertising and database management. Acxiom collects, analyzes and parses customer and business information for clients, helping them to target advertising campaigns, score leads and more.
Vision and Innovation - Financial: Charles Schwab
The Charles Schwab Corporation provides a full range of brokerage, banking and financial advisory services through its operating subsidiaries. Its broker-dealer subsidiary, Charles Schwab & Co., Inc. (member SIPC), offers investment services and products, including Schwab brokerage accounts.
Charles Schwab was built around a simple idea: put the client first!
Vision and Innovation - Education: University of Maryland University College (UMUC)
UMUC is the largest public online university in the United States, serving more than 93,000 students worldwide on four continents. They have over 40,000 concurrent daily users and are truly a global 24x7x365 operation.
UMUC has a strong history of educating veterans. UMUC has enrolled almost 52,000 active-duty military, reservist, dependent and veteran students worldwide. In addition to distance learning via the web, the university offers on-site, instructor-led classes at 130 overseas U.S. military bases in 22 countries throughout the world. In 2015, UMUC was voted the “Best for Vets Colleges” award.
Vision and Innovation - Health Care: Surescripts
Surescripts is turning health data into actionable intelligence delivering 9.7 billion transactions annually and over 1.4 billion e-prescriptions annually. Superscripts connects health care entities nationwide, led the movement to turn health data into actionable intelligence, and is credited with being a pioneer of their field.
ZenMaster of the Year: Jason Stanley, PNC
At the heart of Zenoss, we are an open-source company and we couldn't be more committed to our Community and those who support it. ZenMasters are those community members who have a deep understanding and grasp of all things Zenoss, author and update Community ZenPacks, add to the expanding knowledge base, contribute sample code, and are extremely active helping others in the Zenoss Community.
Each year, we recognize a ZenMaster of the Year who has stood by his/her activity and contributions since our previous GalaxZ. This year's ZenMaster of the Year is present daily on the Community forums and IRC chat, has developed many new ZenPacks, and contributed to the requirements and testing of the new Community platform launching this quarter. He is viewed as a pivotal Zenoss expert resource by Zenossians and Community members alike and steps up to mentor those new to Zenoss daily. This year's ZenMaster of the Year is Jason Stanley from PNC.
New ZenMaster Jackets: Bryan Irvine & Andrew Kirch
Each year Zenoss honors one or more community members with the title of ZenMaster. This year we presented this title and coveted ZenMaster jacket to two very active, knowledgable and helpful members of our Zenoss Community. This year's new ZenMasters are Bryan Irvine and Andrew Kirch.
Zenoss operates by its core values — and one specifically, "Customers for Life," is the premise behind the Z Awards. GalaxZ is the IT monitoring conference of the year, focusing on trends occurring in the ecosystem and providing insight for new ways to monitor and analyze the complex infrastructures that drive business success.
Congratulations to all of our winners this year from the entire Zenoss team and community!!!
GalaxZ17 sponsors included: SOPRIS Technologies, LayerX Technologies, ServiceNow, Cascadeo, Big Panda, Higher Logic, SaltStack, VictorOps, Verinon, SoftServe, NTT DATA, Everbridge and Broadsuite Media Group.
