T R I P L E C R O W N AWA R D S
Crowning Achievement
By Rick Whiting
T
he last 18 months have been a major challenge for the IT industry and the channel as the global pandemic created wild economic swings and forced changes in how businesses operate. That’s led to big shifts in IT priorities and spending—including spiking demand for products and services to support millions of remote workers—and solution providers have scrambled to meet those rapidly changing needs. Amid the shifts and uncertainties, many solution providers rose to the challenge. Each year CRN publishes a number of solution provider lists and rankings including the Solution Provider 500, listing the largest solution providers operating in North America by revenue; the Fast Growth 150, ranking the fastest-growing solution providers; and the Tech Elite 250, showcasing those that have achieved the highest partner levels and certifications from leading IT vendors. And every year a number of solution providers go above and beyond to make all three lists. This year 45 solution providers achieved that feat to become the 2021 class of CRN Triple Crown winners. Making the Triple Crown list for a fourth year is Seattle-based 2nd Watch, which works with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and—starting this year—Google Cloud Platform to provide managed and professional services for business transformation, data center migration, application modernization and more. The upheaval of the past two years has accelerated demand
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for 2nd Watch’s cloud-based services, said CEO Doug Schneider. Businesses today more clearly see the benefits and flexibility of the public cloud, he said, and the “breadth and depth” of the public cloud services platform. “I think [the pandemic] has changed people’s mindsets, accelerated the change in mindsets, in terms of their becoming more comfortable with the public cloud as their core [IT] execution venue,” Schneider said. “We need to get out of our [on-premises] data centers.” DVBE Technology Group, making the Triple Crown list for the first time, is a Sacramento, Calif.-based provider of IT consulting and staffing services to government and business customers. The company’s IT architecture, integration and project management expertise spans such technology areas as cloud, DevOps, security, storage and telecommunications. The solution provider has seen strong—and growing—demand for its services despite the pandemic and economic uncertainty. “For the last couple of years we’ve been on fire,” said founder and CEO Richard McKinnon. DVBE, for example, is involved in three large health-care IT projects for the state of California worth hundreds of millions of dollars. What’s driving demand? “Anything in security,” McKinnon said. And demand for managed services is surging as government and business customers look to reduce capital spending for IT. “They don’t want to own anything anymore,” he said.
