There were five distinct categories of awards, with one runner-up and winner in each category. The first category of awards was for the Fastest Growing SP. The SPs were judged on the premise of growth in the past three years.

The runner-up in this category was Omnitech InfoSolutions while the Gold award was bagged by Allied Digital Services, as the company registered a significant growth of around 87 percent in 2008-09. This was the first time that Allied Digital Services was considered for the category of fastest growing SP.

In the second category of awards—Best Service Volume—the jury opined that the winners should be judged and rewarded on the value of their service business. The runner-up for this category was yet again Allied Digital Services. The Gold winner in this category was Devendra Taneja of PC Solutions, which posted a revenue of whopping Rs. 139 crore in 2008-09. A major part of the aforesaid revenue was accounted for by managed services. The company’s 28 percent of total revenue came from these verticals.

The third set of awards was for the Most Comprehensive SP, where the Gold award was given to Frontier Business Systems. The company was nominated in almost all award categories. Some of the their prominent collaborations are with Citrix, VMware, PlateSpin, Marathon, Cisco, Tyco, Emerson, Lenovo, IBM, Sun, Oracle, Dell and others. The company is also one of two channel partners in India to achieve certification for Dynamic Infrastructure, IBM's Smart Planet initiative, besides being recognized by VMware as a first authorized consultant Gold partner in India and was honored as its Model Partner at VMworld in USA last year. The Silver award in this category was presented to Orient Technologies, which has been steadily increasing its services revenue, and contributed Rs. 21 crore to the overall revenue of Rs. 103 crore. Out of this, Rs. 7 crore came from facilities management, followed by network integration, Rs. 3 crore came from third-party maintenance and Rs. 2 crore from systems integration business.

The fourth set of awards were entitled Best Deployment, where the panel had to judged which SP had successfully deployed the most unique and innovative project in 2009-10. Dubbed the toughest category of awards, the Gold award in this category went yet again to PC Solutions for undertaking a Unified Communication project valued at Rs. 1.5 crore for a global offshore outsourcing company. PC Solutions configured a front server for audio, video and instant messaging integrating the OCS with PBX for 8,000 users. The Silver award went to Wysetek Systems Technologists for setting up a cost effective DR site with optimal performance using VMware and IBM Blade Center, which enabled it to consolidate and vitualize physical production servers to corresponding virtual machines. The value of the project was Rs. 2 crore.

The fifth and most awaited award was for the Most Successful Solution Provider, and the criteria for selection included low dependency on founders for business and a lot of autonomy built in to ensure smooth functioning even if there was a change at the management level. Additionally, the winners should have scalable business models, which are quick to adapt to newer verticals and opportunities as dictated by market dynamics. This year, the Silver category for the Most Successful SP was shared jointly by Frontier Business Systems and Team Computers, which had superseded others and were successful across all categories. Allied Digital Services was yet again awarded Gold, taking its award count to three this year.

Incidentally this year, another set of unique awards was given for the nation’s Best Automated Managed Services Providers. Constituted especially by Kaseya Software, the winners were chosen on the basis of their understanding of automated managed services, their business model, the number of endpoints they managed in an automated fashion, the number of AMS enterprise customers they had and how many employees were supporting the AMS offering. The Silver award in this category went to Team Computers while Allied Digital again won the Gold.

The awards presentation was followed by dinner and cocktails, which was immensely enjoyed by the attending SPs.