Asking for your vote again, for the 2017 UKOUG Partner of the Year Awards.
Certus have been very successful in these awards, but not only do I think they deserve them, I think it tells their story.
When Certus was born in 2012, the intent was to be a Cloud Applications partner. A new product, a new company, a new partnership and above all a new community of customers.
Their first year with UKOUG PYA gave them silver for Cloud and it was a great start but even better they got Gold for training. In 2013 there were hardly any Cloud customers and a lot of the work they did was training for and on behalf of Oracle. In fact when I joined in 2014 the first thing I did was deliver partner UX training for the partner enablement group.
The following year they won gold in both categories as their reputation grew and customers started to share their Certus stories. I remember hearing Lavendon talk at a UKOUG event before I joined.
The PYA portfolio grew and in 2015 there were a couple of new categories, we entered the emerging technology category to showcase what we had done with #PaaS4SaaS and won silver, again Certus stepped up early and deserved this. By then we were doing less training and our silver award reflected this. Another new category was SME PYA, most Oracle Cloud customers had been SME, and the shared stories from JT Group at UKOUG, Oracle UK and Open World events helped us to win this.
Last year it was almost an embarrassment of riches, England Rugby, ONS and Save the Children all talking about how Certus had delivered for them. It was great to win our third straight Cloud PYA award. #PaaS4SaaS gave us another Gold, and a third in the new category of digital transformation, helped by the very public ONS advocacy.
So now as we ask for your votes in 2017 is it just the same stories? No, this year we have delivered projects in HM Treasury, MHRA, Home office as well as starting a second phase at ONS. We are not simply public sector we have also delivered the Financials phase of England Rugby this year and one of our current other customers DHL will be sharing their story at Open World.
Quite a surprise this year was to be given an Oracle UK Partner Award for HCM Cloud. A surprise because in the past Oracle awards were often linked to sales and Certus haven't traditionally been a reseller. But as Oracle have realised Cloud is about successful implementations and happy customers, we were really proud to be recognised this way.
It has been an incredibly busy but fun year in Certus, numbers are up again and there are so many people having fun with so many different clients and projects. They work hard, and it would be amazing if again, you would vote for Certus and the team that deserve these awards so much.
The awards this year are slightly different. Cloud is divided into the pillars and we have been shortlisted for both HCM & ERP. In the last 12 months we have had 3 of our own customers go live with combined HCM & ERP, ONS, HMT & England Rugby. We have assisted with several other projects and delivered more HCM implementations. These are the two awards that mean the most to us. We work with Oracle through development and testing, this year R12 beta testing was big investment for us, and then we deliver the results of that investment to our customers.
Training is a funny one, we don't deliver direct training outside of projects today, but we do deliver training to customer support teams, in many cases so they can continue the rollout of their phased implementations themselves. This knowledge sharing approach was key to ONS as they shared in this Oracle Scene article and what DHL will be talking about at Oracle Open World. The transformation from on premise to Cloud is something support teams worry will lose them their jobs. We believe it gives them more opportunities.
The transformation is not just the system but the organisation something Save the Children were rewarded for in the Oracle Rubie awards this year. Our founder and CEO Mark Sweeny also wrote about this transformation in Government
And the #PaaS4SaaS machine marches on, as we start to adopt the low code Application Builder Cloud Service I helped to launch at OOW last year, and through initiatives like the Digital Mission we ran jointly with Oracle for central government last month which again I hope to share more details with at OOW and UKOUG.
Working for Certus is fun, I love it, and the people here deserve your vote.
Someone asked me if Certus do so well in the UKOUG Partner Awards because I am on the board. I have to say the reverse is probably true. I have nothing to do with selecting the nominations, in fact as a partner I am allowed nothing to do with the process at all. My boss asks me if we are being shortlisted and I'm not convinced he believes me when I say I don't know. Voting is then overseen scrupulously again by no partner volunteers.
Only customers can vote, but if you are one of our own customers, or have been impressed with the case stories we and our customers have shared, then please vote.
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