ACCOLADES: Personal Innovation Awards, Sales Excellence, Kirsten Hunter

Each year ARN recognises the personal achievements of some of the channel’s brightest personalities. Across three categories – Customer Service, Sales Excellence and Technical Excellence, this year’s finalists and winners went above and beyond to help their organisations succeed.

Cisco takes relationships with its channel partners seriously. Not only was it deserving of a win for the Best Emerging Technology Initiative (Managed Services) award, its partner account manager, Kirsten Hunter, also won an award for personal innovation in the sales excellence sector.

Hunter has been a veteran of the Australian IT channel industry for over 15 years. According to Cisco, she has unfailingly attained remarkable results with her partners over the years. This year, she forged better relations with her partners in the managed services sphere.

The company recommended her ability in understanding market dynamics, converting it into a market requirement and defining the partnership value proposition to the success of her partners and their customers.

“I think I won the award because of the innovation that myself and my team were able to show in the Cloud market,” Hunter said.

Hunter is excited by the collaboration with the partner community in addressing the significant Cloud opportunity in Australia, which still in its early adoption phase, focusing on infrastructure as a service (IaaS).   In the years to come, she expects that focus to shift to focus on business relevant applications, namely Software-as-a-Cloud (SaaC) such as SAP.

She said from her end, this will require more successful teaming up with channel partners, software application providers, such as SAP and Oracle, and vendors – namely EMC and NetApp for storage and VMware and Citrix for virtualisation.

“By bringing this total end-to-end solution to our go-to-market channel partners, customers will benefit from an easy to deploy, business relevant cloud solution,” she said.

While the award was based on individual effort, Hunter wanted to acknowledge her fellow Cisco team members as well as her channel partners for her successes within Cisco and in winning the award.

“Only together with our partners can we bring a value proposition that’s compelling to customer to market,” she added. 

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