Planet Technologies - Four Time Winner of Microsoft Federal Partner of the Year Award
Planet Technologies Vice President, Andrew Norris recently visited Redmond to talk with Channel 9 host, Charles Torre. Planet Technologies is a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, and international IT consulting and services company with industry expertise in Microsoft technologies, architecture, security, and management consulting. They were recently awarded, for the 4th year in a row, the Microsoft Federal Partner of the Year Award. Below are a few highlights of this interview.
Andy Norris: We’re a systems integrator, but the specialization we have is really taking all of the different pieces of the Microsoft technology stack and combining them, augmenting them, to deliver business solutions to a broad range of customers, everything from the hosting community and the service providers to the U.S. Federal Government and of course, commercial clients.
Charles Torre: Interesting, now I notice, having read just a little bit about your company before this interview, I normally don’t do that too much to make it more conversational. You won the Microsoft federal Partner Award. What does that mean?
Andy Norris: Actually we won that 3 years running.
Charles Torre: Nice.
Andy Norris: In ’05, ’06 & ’07, we won Federal Partner of the Year Awards from Microsoft, and in ’06 we won the Public Sector Partner of the Year Award from Microsoft. So, it’s a series of awards given out by the Federal Sales organization from Microsoft and for a number of different things, including helping to drive a bunch of software pull through. So, as a company that doesn’t resell licenses, we sell a lot of licenses. So, it’s very easy for us to show through the work that we do the amount of new licensing that’s been sold to various different agencies, that kind of thing. One of the really interesting ones we did on the technology side is what probably won us the Public Sector Partner of the Year award, was when Microsoft was struggling to compete with Google in the Federal space on the search side of things. We built an appliance called the Prospector on SharePoint 2003, which we’ve updated to 2007, which was a search appliance predecessor to Search Server Express. That gave all the reps out there in the market a competitive product they could put out.
Charles Torre: Excellent. So let’s talk a little bit about the domain that I usually spend most of my time in - the developer domain. Most people I interact with are software engineers and we get geeky about platforms, .APIs and stuff like that. What do you mean by, who’s your audience when you say business customer, what does that mean?
Andy Norris: So, we have a lot of Fortune 500 very large companies that we’ve worked with. We actually find ourselves working a lot with companies that are growing very, very quickly, and really need a platform that can be flexible and extensible to meet that requirement.
To view the full interview, click here.