NetApp's inaurgural Australia and New Zealand Partner of the Year awards have seen a raft of channel companies and individuals recorgnised.

Telstra was named New Reseller of the Year, picking up the award for its NetApp and Cisco FlexPod productisation initiative and for ourstnding first year revenue growth.

Interactive was named Service Provider of the Year for its ongoing build-out of the largest exclusively NetApp powered cloud infrastructure in the Australian IT marketplace.

Platinum Reseller of the Year went to Dimension Data for its outstanding revenue growth, overall achievement across multiple geographies winning several of the largest sales NetApp had in 2015 and their class leading investment in technical skills.

Flexdata meanwhile scooped up the award for Gold Reseller of the Year with NetApp commenting on the resellers outstanding revenue achievement, outstanding levels of certification investment and support for NetApp on many solution wins in the Queensland marketplace.

Virtual Machine Technology took home the award for Converged Infrastructure Excellence – the first of two awards for the company. The Converged Infrastructure Excellence award came for Virtual Machine Technology's development of a FlexPod-based Metrocluster solution.

Jon Dawes picked up the second award for Virtual Machine Technology, taking out the individual award for Technical Excellence for his ‘extraordinary breadth of NetApp expertise, incorporating solution designs across Metrocluster, E-series and FlexPod, and equally across 7-Mode and clustered Data OnTap.

Westcon was named the winner in the Marketing Excellence category for its multi-faceted One-Source campaign promoting the single product initiative for FlexPod, while Nexon Asia Pacific's Agile Business Cloud initiative incorporating a unique approach to a combined Office 365 and telephony solution built on a NetApp powered cloud won the Outstanding Cloud Initiative for the company.

On the individual award front, Dawes was joined by Fujitsu Australia's Renee Chandler and NEC's Chris Anders in picking up individual gongs.

Chandler's award came for Sales Excellence, with NetApp noting her superior level of commitment and engagement with NetApp's sales team to work on and win major solution sales in Australia.

Anders' ‘extraordinary individual effort and contribution at championing, building and enabling a NetApp practice within a major Australian systems integrator' won him the Alliance Partner Champion award.