By Kat Willson
It’s that time of year again! Microsoft’s 2012 Worldwide Partner Conference (WPC) is just around the corner, this year in Toronto. With WPC comes the opportunity to have your company and sustainability solutions recognized with a Partner of the Year Award.
The Sustainability Partner of the Year Award recognizes an exceptional partner for delivering software and technology innovations built on the Microsoft platform that help people, organizations, or governments reduce their impact on the environment. Winning the Award can create new business and customer opportunities, generate press coverage, and lead to more market recognition.
You’ll recall that last year OSIsoft won the inaugural Sustainability Partner of the Year Award for the PI System®, an enterprise infrastructure for management of real-time data and events, used by over 8,000 customers in 110 countries to drive continuous improvement in operational performance and resource efficiency.
What does a winning nomination look like? We recommend you start by reviewing tips from last year’s judges on the WPC web site.
For the Sustainability Award, we are looking for a thorough and compelling story of positive business and environmental impact. Submissions that earn higher scores will provide measured evidence of benefit. Examples might include reduced resource consumption (energy, water, etc.), reduced carbon footprint, or reduced waste streams. They might also include increased operational efficiency or changes in customer business model that enable new growth opportunities. Whatever the benefit, submissions that provide evidence will score better than those that do not.
Successful submissions will also illustrate how Microsoft’s platform technologies enabled you to develop and deliver your innovative solution. Given the momentum developing for cloud services, solutions that leverage the Windows Azure platform and illustrate the value of turning data into actionable intelligence may also earn higher scores.
And finally, solutions that have delivered broad impact across multiple customers or multiple industry sectors, such as IT, buildings, power generation and grid, transportation and resource management, will generally earn higher scores.
Where to get started? To win, partner solutions must first be nominated. The WPC 2012 Awards web site has all the information you need to submit a nomination. The submission deadline is April 15, 2012, so now is the time to prepare that winning nomination. Our last recommendation is to get started early. Don’t wait until the last minute. We are looking forward to hearing about your sustainability solutions!
Registration for WPC 2012 is now open at www.digitalwpc.com. We hope to see you in Toronto July 8th-12th!