Gen-i had a moment in the midnight sun, taking out the top New Zealand award at the Cisco Partner Insight Awards, held as part of Cisco Live in Melbourne overnight.

That's right, today Gen-i awakes as the Cisco New Zealand Partner of the Year.

Fifteen Cisco ANZ partners were recognised across 19 categories for ‘their innovation, leadership and best practice as a Cisco business partner’.

Award criteria include architecture-led approach successes, business differentiation and strategic outcomes and deep customer understanding, the company says.

“I’m delighted with this win," said David Crown, manager, Gen-i Strategic Relationships. "It reflects the fact that we’re not just the largest Cisco Gold Partner in New Zealand, but hold a unique position in the market through our reach and ICT capability, and our move towards managed services offerings such as the recently launched ReadyCloud Collaboration service.

"Our relationship with Cisco enables Gen-i to deliver the best of global thought leadership in a way that is accessible to New Zealand businesses.”

Other winners included Dimension Data, taking out data center partner of the year; Datacom for innovation partner of the year and Fujitsu for architectural excellence. NEC picked up the ANZ acceleration partner of the year 2012.

Last month, Gen-i announced it was teaming up with Cisco to bring the networking company’s hosted collaboration solutions – marketed as Gen-i’s ReadyCloud Collaboration – to New Zealand.

The offering allows services such as voice, instant messaging, presence and video calling to be accessed via desktop or mobile device.