Making all the right moves. Long View wins Microsoft Canada Partner of the Year 2019!

Making all the right moves. Long View wins Microsoft Canada Partner of the Year 2019!

by Suzanne Gagliese on 7 June 2019 Vice President OCP, Microsoft Canada

This time of the year is always exciting at Microsoft, as we get ready to gather in Vegas at Microsoft Inspire, to celebrate all of our amazing partner community achievements at Canada’s own IMPACT Awards celebration.

The best part of the award season for us is catching up on all the amazing stories of what partners do. And this year has been no different. We received over 2,900 nominations from across 115 countries for the global partner of the year awards. Finalists and winners were selected based on their commitment to customers, market impact, and exemplary use of Microsoft technologies.

Mind you, it’s no easy feat selecting winners! Every day, across Canada and the world, Microsoft partners make a dramatic impact on their customers’ businesses in transformative and vital ways.

Partners help shape their customer’s business strategy, providing the technical vision to enable them to transform and achieve their business goals and objectives. Our partners help customers to leverage Microsoft’s technology, including powerful platforms, like Dynamics 365, and emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence.

Some of our partners use Azure and Microsoft development technologies to become independent software vendors (ISVs). They build and market their own intellectual property, with great success, to empower our customers to transform!

In short, the partner opportunity has never been bigger, richer, or more exciting. And Microsoft is as committed as ever to empowering every partner to “reach for the stars” and realize the full potential of their business, just as Long View Systems has.

In the past 20 years, Long View has built an international reputation for innovation and its progressive business culture, emerging as one of North America’s biggest and best IT powerhouses. In the last year, Long View’s sales in Microsoft technology and services represented a staggering CAD $268 million. They earned Canada Partner of the Year 2018 and, now, officially Canada Partner of the Year 2019! Read more here

The Partner of the Year award is the top partner prize celebrated every year at Microsoft Inspire! Highly prestigious, the Country Partner of the Year award, recognizes the best technology powerhouses worldwide, as examples of excellence for every partner. So, what’s Long View doing that’s making such a difference? And what can other technology companies learn from them?

Read last year’s blog post about Long View: “Taking the Long View -The forward-thinking IT company and Canada Partner of the Year reflect on their 20-year journey to the top”

Why Long View? Last year, we explained how Long View’s success has everything to do with their approach to their employees. The company goes out of its way to invest in its 1,200 employees. In return, Long View’s employees dedicate themselves to wowing customers with clever solutions and flexible services.

Long View’s leadership team implemented a strategy for their sales and pre-sales resources to adopt a new way of thinking “Challenger Sales Training” initiative which included a combined with M365 and Azure product training to increase the value delivered to clients. They also embarked on a very aggressive “Project 148”, which trained over 193 technical consultants on Azure Technical content. At the same time, Long View made the bold decision to go all in with “TEAMS” to walk the walk and talk the talk. What follows are just some couple of examples of the many transformational solutions Long View has implemented this past year, empowering their customers to do more!!

Zero-to-cloud for private equity firm

One of Canada’s largest midmarket private equity firms with billions in assets needed to make some technology magic happen. Recently divested from its parent company, the new company needed a technology solution for its 100+ employees. Faced with investing in costly on-premises infrastructure (and the employees to manage it all), the firm called on Long View for assistance.

One of Canada’s largest middle-market private equity firm with over $3 billion of assets under management, was under extreme time pressure to fully deploy a modern productivity solution for their employees. “In just three months, Long View implemented a flawless Modern Workplace solution including Microsoft 365 & Voice. They are fully deployed on Azure and are using Power BI for their executive dashboards. This has allowed them to scale quickly, make verifiable decisions using critical field data to meet their aggressive growth expectations. In short, Long View provided a robust, secure, and compliant IT solution, in record time, with the Microsoft Cloud. “As a result of our work with Long View, we’ve managed to setup our entire collaboration and productivity suite in just three months – and it’s running flawlessly.” – IT Director, national private equity firm.

Transforming an organic food leader

One of North America’s largest certified organic breakfast and snack food companies operates three manufacturing facilities on the west coast of Canada and the US and have plans to open a fourth facility in Vancouver. However, like many fast-growing companies, this food company outgrew its legacy IT and the on-premises infrastructure running it.

They called Long View, who, in just eight months, migrated the company to Office 365 and Power BI and moved their ERP, IFS, and manufacturing workloads to Azure. These modernization efforts helped their client dramatically reduce their energy use and avoid a million dollars in infrastructure costs—all while greatly improving the manufacturer’s business resiliency. “As we’ve grown, Long View kept us future-focused by moving our IT infrastructure to the cloud, reducing our energy consumption by 27% and increasing our productivity by 20%.” – CFO, organic food company.

Where-to-vote in the Province

A Canadian province needed a new application to ensure its constituents could find the closest and most convenient polling location for the upcoming elections. They wanted to ensure maximum voter turnout by providing constituents with instant access at all voting station locations. They also needed greater resiliency and a pay-as-you-go solution, as they only required a solution for four months every few years.

Long View developed a “Where to vote” application service, delivering high-availability access to the cloud and lightning fast response times. 99% of requests where served in less than 100ms and over half a million people hit the app in the last few hours before the polls closed. Thanks to Long View and Microsoft, the polling locator application remained 100% available leading up to and including the provincial election.

Taking the “Long View”

Long View’s unrivaled business performance, track record of innovation, and consistent commitment to delivering client value—all without compromising their corporate vision or values—makes them an example for partners in Canada and worldwide. I encourage every partner to get to know—and to get inspired by—Long View’s story.

“We love where Microsoft is headed—all cloud, all mobile and globally secure with scale. We’ve built our five managed services offers on the foundation of Microsoft technologies and roadmaps” – Brent Allison, CEO, Long View On behalf of everyone at Microsoft, our sincere congratulations to Long View for its many successes. We can’t wait to see what this two-year Country Partner of the Year accomplishes next!

Team Long View accepting the 2018 Country Partner of the Year Award. Sean Culbert, Sarah Morreau, Brent Allison and Rod Morreau.