Solution Provider 500 Awards: Rewarding Excellence

And The Winner Is ...

The nation's top IT solution providers descended on Tampa, Fla., this week to attend the Best Of Breed conference, a thought leadership event for the most progressive and influential executives in the IT channel.

The event -- hosted by CRN publisher The Channel Company -- concluded with the 14th annual CRN Solution Provider 500 Awards ceremony. The awards, which span eight different categories, are meant to recognize and applaud those solution providers who have evolved (often more than once) and thrived in today's cloud- and services-driven IT era.

Here are this year's SP500 Awards winners.

Survive, Evolve, Transform

The Channel Company CEO Robert Faletra kicked off the awards ceremony by speaking to the fast-changing nature of the IT landscape, stressing that the channel's most elite solution providers are always those that can keep pace.

"Only 30 percent of the companies on this year's list were on the SP500 one decade ago," Faletra said. "The rapidly accelerating pace of change recasting the solution provider business model and the technology services choices facing the channel is exactly why we at The Channel Company started the Best of Breed conference three years ago."

A Few Choice Words

Pete Peterson, senior vice president, U.S. sales at Tech Data, sponsor of this year's SP500 awards, echoed Faletra's sentiments before thanking the many Tech Data partners in the room for their hard work and leadership in 2013.

Quest

Quest took home this year's SP500 Cloud Elite Award and was recognized for providing customers with the full spectrum of cloud products and services, whether in public, private or hybrid cloud environments.

Quest, which today has 22 secure global delivery centers under its belt, has been helping IT customers for an impressive 31 years, with CEO Tim Burke at the helm from the start. The Sacramento, Calif.-based company ranked No. 161 on the 2013 SP500 list, up from 192 last year.

Quest's Burke accepted the award from The Channel Company's Robert Faletra.

Denali Advanced Integration

Mobility rivaled cloud this year in driving one of the biggest shifts in the way businesses consume and access information.

That's why Denali Advanced Integration, which just launched a state-of-the-art mobile devices integration center in Plano, Texas, particularly shone this year, and it was crowned winner of the 2013 SP500 Mobility Elite Award. Denali's new 20,000-square-foot facility will focus first and foremost on mobility services, but the Redmond, Wash.-based company will also use the space to handle all of configuration and data center services.

Denali ranked No. 116 on CRN's SP500 list.

Accepting the award is Denali founder and CEO Majdi "Mike" Daher (center) from The Channel Company's Robert Faletra and CRN Editor, News, Steve Burke.

Datapipe

Datapipe's industry-leading managed services and cloud computing offerings, which also landed it a spot on Gartner's 2013 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hosting in North America, helped it secure this year's SP500 Managed Service Elite Award.

Datapipe, headquartered in Jersey City, N.J., has been steadily climbing CRN's SP500 list over the past five years, landing this year at No. 165.

Datapipe was recently recognized for its remarkable record of seven years of continuous uptime, and doesn't show any signs of slowing down; the company recently expanded its Asia Pacific footprint to Singapore, and it acquired cloud optimization startup Newvem.

Accepting the award is Datapipe Vice President Chris Mooney (center) from The Channel Company's Robert Faletra and CRN's Steve Burke.

Carousel Industries

Carousel Industries, ranked No. 74 on the 2013 Solution Provider 500 list, was recognized as this year's SP500 Unified Communications Elite Award winner.

In addition to its leadership position in UC, Exeter, R.I.-based Carousel also stands out for its recent investments in the telecom space. The company last year created a dedicated Carrier Services business unit and saw sales for that division shoot up 42 percent in the second quarter, and it reported a new recurring revenue record for the group in August.

Richard Turner, sales director at Carousel (center), accepts the award from The Channel Company's Robert Faletra and CRN's Steve Burke.

Lumenate

Lumenate's keen focus on acquiring some of the top technology businesses and talent in the industry paid off big time this year, with the Dallas-based solution provider climbing from No. 298 on last year's SP500 list to No. 122 in 2013.

Lumenate, which was crowned this year's winner of the SP500 Storage Elite Award, also placed No. 2 on CRN's Fast Growth list with a two-year growth rate of 362 percent.

But, the accolades don't stop there; Lumenate has won the EMC Velocity Quality Services award for six years in a row, along with the Hitachi Data Systems Partner of the Year for the Red River district for five consecutive years. Lumenate principal Collin Miles (center) accepts the award from The Channel Company's Robert Faletra and CRN's Steve Burke.

MCPc

MCPc took home this year's SP500 Business Transformation Elite Award and was recognized for its Anyplace workspace BYOD offering, a solution that helps enterprise users harness the power of the cloud to work from anywhere, on any device, at any time.

Cleveland-based MCPc, ranked No. 89 on this year's SP500 list, is a major HP and Cisco partner and has placed itself at the forefront of both the cloud and mobility era.

Jed Ayres, senior vice president partner management and marketing for MCPc (center), accepts the award from The Channel Company's Robert Faletra and CRN's Steve Burke.

Dimension Data

Dimension Data, one of the channel's most innovative and hard-charging solution providers in the cloud services era, walked away with one of this year's most prestigious SP500 awards: Company of the Year.

And when you take a close look at the global systems integration giant, ranked No. 11 on the 2013 SP500 list, it's easy to see why. Dimension Data has invested significantly to establish its own branded cloud services, which are supported by its own multivendor systems and a workforce of roughly 21,000.

What's more, Dimension Data, whose infrastructure-as-a-service offerings secured a spot on Gartner's Magic Quadrant, doesn't plan to lose momentum anytime soon; the company is looking to double its sales over the next five years to $12 billion.

Dimension Data North America CEO Jere Brown (center) accepts the award from The Channel Company's Robert Faletra and CRN's Steve Burke.

Harry Zarek, Compugen

Harry Zarek, CEO and founder of Compugen, a Richmond Hill, Ontario, solution provider and No. 58 on the 2013 SP500 list, was honored as this year's SP500 Executive of the Year.

Since founding Compugen in 1981, Zarek has transformed the solution provider into a $455 million business and one of the most respected technology services companies in the world. Zarek, who built the foundation for Compugen by building PCs in his Toronto basement, says the secret to Compugen's success in today's "golden age of technology" is its culture. Zarek strives to promote open-mindedness and transparency, values that have culminated in Compugen's many long-lasting customer and vendor relationships. Zarek is also an avid community advocate, having raised over $600,000 through the Green4Good program, which recycles IT assets and gives the proceeds to charity.

Zarek accepts the Executive of the Year award from The Channel Company's Robert Faletra.