Technology awards are the slightly flaky bonhomie padding that IT vendors roll out every year to sidle up a little closer to some of their key industry partners in a move to ingratiate themselves and, possibly, also impress their own roadmap direction and ideals onto some of the organizations that they work most closely with.
Except, in reality, they’re really honestly not.
Ask any key director of partnerships or partner VP and they’ll explain just how much thought, interaction and integration work goes into working with sister organizations. In terms of platform connection and alignment, joint customer approach and (very often) co-innovation processes, when an IT vendor works with a partner, it generally means that it’s serious about placing trust in the other firm’s platform and tools – and that’s generally a big deal.
As a trusted provider of infrastructure software, Progress takes its partner plaudits seriously and so, logically, the company used its Progress360 event in Boston, Massachusetts this month to deliver its 2022 Chef Partner Awards.
Now under the Progress parent umbrella since its acquisition in 2020, Chef is a policy-based configuration management and cloud infrastructure automation software system.
The awards recognize Progress partners with an extraordinary ability to deliver exceptional client outcomes using the Progress Chef portfolio. The winners were announced during ChefConf 2022, which now exists as part of the above-referenced Progress360 event.
For more than a decade, the Chef Partner Awards have recognized partners who have built strong and meaningful relationships with both Chef and its mutual customers. Through submissions and internal Chef nominations, the Chef Partner Award winners are recognized by their customers, peers and industry leaders in DevOps and DevSecOps.
This year’s recipients are as follows.
- Emerging Partner of the Year: Bluechip
This award recognizes partners for their commitment across technical, sales and marketing efforts to achieve high standards in DevSecOps solutions. Established in 2000, Bluechip focuses on delivering the latest IT products to a wide channel base while maintaining a dedicated commitment to first-class service. The key to Bluechip IT’s success is its strategic implementation of the latest technology, broad access to IT channels, and markets-driven, highly motivated sales team. By guaranteeing a full comprehensive understanding of products and target markets, it can provide cost-effective solutions to partners.
- Technoloy Partner of the Year: tecRacer
This award recognizes partners that have shown strong commitment to customer success and deliver innovative and impactful solutions to customers and the community. tecRacer is a modern and agile company with more than 150 employees in different European countries. It has been a Chef Principal Partner since 2017 and is also an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner. tecRacer employees are aware of almost every functionality in Chef and have the slogan, “Make impossible things possible.” They were one of the main drivers of the target mode and REST support. tecRacer is also actively contributing to a series of Chef projects like Chef® Automate™ HA, Chef® Infra®, Chef® InSpec® and kitchen-vcenter driver.
- Public Sector Partner of the Year: TapHere!
This award recognizes partners for their skills and ability to deliver valuable customer solutions by innovating and building the right combination of Chef solutions. TapHere! Technology (TapHere) provides systems and software engineering services plus mission support for federal government customers. Their expertise includes DevSecOps, software integration and deployment, software-defined radio (SDR), Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) and intelligence operations. TapHere! has operating locations in Virginia, Florida, Colorado and OCONUS.
“Progress is thrilled to announce this year’s Chef Partner Awards and recognize our outstanding ecosystem for their collaboration with us,” said Sundar Subramanian, general manager, Chef Business, Progress. “Our partners are an integral and strategic part of customer success. We’re proud to have such a strong partner ecosystem and look forward to achieving even more together.”
The Chef Partner Program (CPP) includes three tiers of partners – Principal, Senior and Junior—with the highest benefits and incentives applied to those who drive the strongest results for themselves and their mutual enterprise customers using the Progress Chef Enterprise Automation Stack (EAS).
Partners in each of the CPP tiers have the tools, training and incentives they need to engage existing and prospective customers to achieve success in using the full Chef EAS to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives.
