Being separated from each other is no reason to put off celebrating
Awards continue to be an integral part of how many tech vendors are benchmarked against the competition. Of course, award ceremonies offer an unrivalled opportunity to bring teams and clients together to celebrate success.
The pandemic continues to offer challenges about how best to represent benchmarking, and offer that unmatched in-person experience.
With this year's Cloud Excellence Awards taking place on the 23rd of September, we asked last year's Cloud Vendor of the Year, Red Hat, about their experience. Martin Lentle, Red Hat's Director of North West Europe, kindly responded to our questions.
How important is winning an award like Cloud Vendor of the Year?
It's always a pleasure to win an award, but being acknowledged as the Cloud Vendor of the Year is an exceptional honour. With more and more companies seeing that the future of their IT infrastructure lies in the cloud, the cloud vendor market is very competitive. Winning this award is fantastic evidence that Red Hat is doing pivotal work in driving industry digital transformation initiatives and adoption of the hybrid cloud.
After winning the award, what were the ‘next steps' in terms of publicising the success?
Sharing the good news across the business was our first priority, celebrating and thanking our colleagues and teams who made the win possible. We shared the news on our social media channels.
The Cloud Excellence Awards are a fantastic independent endorsement that what we are doing is making a difference, so we encourage all of our associates to share the news on their own social media channels and with their customers too.
What do you think made the submission stand out?
I believe we stood apart from the rest because of two things: the sheer depth and breadth of our product portfolio, and how open source is at the heart of our solutions.
Our portfolio is developed the open source way, with our solutions originating in the open source community. We owe our success, ultimately, to thousands of contributors who are pooling their knowledge to help advance the state of cloud infrastructure. As customers use our software, they provide feedback and request additional features. This input guides Red Hat's development.
And, most importantly, we contribute all of these improvements back to the original project for the benefit of the community. Our open development model is unique, iterative, and drives technology innovation in the cloud, enabling the portability and flexible solutions to address the challenges that our customers face.
This doesn't just mean exceptional solutions; it also means that our cloud products possess that aforementioned depth and breadth. Every engineering, marketing, and partner decision at Red Hat is filtered through the lens of the value we bring to customers on their cloud journey. Red Hat's vision of the open hybrid cloud is any application, in any environment, on any cloud, portable and operated consistently.
In this way, we provide customers with a confident and experienced partner to help them on their digital transformation initiatives and in making the hybrid cloud a reality.
How do you think the award will help you? Have you seen results so far?
This award means a great deal to our team, through celebrating their hard work. The motivation, energy, and acknowledgement alone is priceless.
But alongside the motivation and energy it brings to the Red Hat team, this award highlights to our partners and customers the value and innovation offered by our products and team. It shows that we're continuing to drive the industry forward and leading the way on vital open source projects, and that our own products are continuing to be fundamental parts of the enterprise stack.
Given that the 2020 Cloud Excellence Awards were held virtually, how did Red Hat celebrate?
Multiple internal newsletter emails highlighted the announcement across the organisation - praise was widely due, and shared with gratitude. When we get our hands on the trophy, we'll make sure to put it in a place of honour - and give everyone a chance to get some pictures taken with it!
Social posts were created for colleagues to share or send out from their personal accounts, and quite a few extra corks popped and cans opened across the teams' virtual Friday afternoon drinks!
And finally, what does the future hold for your organisation - what are your priorities?
What's great about Red Hat is that we know what we're about. Our strategy, priorities, and approach have remained consistent for many years: we're all about helping guarantee the delivery of the open hybrid cloud. To deliver the open hybrid cloud our teams are focused on building on our existing work with container platforms, environments for cloud native app development, and capabilities to help businesses with automation and management.
That's at the core of our focus on our open source solutions and tools. Along with providing key elements in the open hybrid cloud journey, their open nature means that our solutions provide teams with the flexibility and portability they need to tackle their business challenges.
For further information on the following Computing Award programs going live in the latter half of 2021, please contact Rubie Romanay @ [email protected]: Cloud Excellence, Digital Tech Leaders, UKIT IT Industry, Women in Tech Excellence, Technology Product and the Security Excellence Awards.
