Aisling Curtis
Former Director of Strategy & Sustainability
Our valued partner ecosystem in Ireland has seen one of the most transformative years, supporting our customers during unprecedented times.
Adapting to new ways of working for employees and businesses accelerated this year, whereby the support and collaboration of our partner ecosystem was more evident than ever, delivering meaningful technology solutions to our customers at pace.
As part of our global Microsoft Inspire event, we host the Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards to recognise and celebrate partners who demonstrate excellence in innovation and implementation of customer solutions based on Microsoft technology.
The key attributes and qualities of which are: innovation, culture and excellence in execution that is on par with the best in our global network.
The Country Partner Award is the most prestigious category and this year, I am delighted to announce that Avanade Ireland has won the coveted Microsoft Ireland Country Partner of the Year Award for 2021.
Avanade Ireland is a leading global provider of innovative digital and cloud services, business solutions and design-led experiences. Avanade provides a high calibre of professionals that bring bold, fresh thinking combined with technology, business, and industry expertise to help make a positive and transformational impact on their clients, our collective customers, and their employees since its formation in 2018.
Technology innovation coupled with a security-first mindset, rapid deployment, and employee adoption of technologies is invaluable to large organisations. The success delivered by the Avanade team demonstrates true leadership in the market and fundamentally has enabled our customers to achieve more during an extremely challenging year for everyone.
Similar to our own values here at Microsoft of empowering people in adopting a growth mindset, Avanade Ireland has mirrored these values in their Irish organisation from day one. By investing in developing culture-rich environments and building comprehensive training and accreditation programmes for their people. Other values, particularly in relation to people, which we at Microsoft aspire to embody every day, have been demonstrated by Avanade Ireland in terms of their focus on championing employee health and wellbeing throughout this year. This was recognised earlier this year when they received Top Employer of 2021 by the Employers Institute.
Avanade has huge ambition to build a truly diverse workforce in Ireland as they continue their rapid expansion and grow their employee numbers. This is driven by a desire to better reflect diversity in society – and the organisations they work with. Avanade currently has 25 different nationalities employed in Ireland and has increased female hiring from 24% to 47% (and counting) in this financial year. Customer-first mindset and exceptional client relationship delivery was evident when we worked collaboratively with a significant number of enterprises this year in Ireland, including AIB (read more here: Allied Irish Bank Client Story | Avanade).
On behalf of the entire Irish Subsidiary leadership Team at Microsoft Ireland, we would like to congratulate Graham Healy, Country Manager and the entire Avanade Ireland team on this accolade and we look forward to working together with Avanade in the future to support Irish organisations in their digital transformation journey. We wish Avanade continued growth and success.
Aisling Curtis
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