Congratulations to the 2022 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards winners and finalists - Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program

Congratulations to the 2022 Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards winners and finalists

I am honored to announce our Microsoft Partner of the Year Awards winners and finalists. This year, our global and diverse partner ecosystem is helping to build a distributed computing fabric – across the cloud and edge – to help every organization build, run and manage their mission-critical businesses anywhere. Your stories showcase the success you’ve had building innovative solutions on Microsoft Cloud and platforms. We’re hosting Microsoft Inspire 2022 from July 19-20, where we will celebrate these incredible achievements from you, our partners across the globe. 

Over this past year, we’ve continued to see how businesses, individuals, and entire industries are using technology in new ways to address their specific and emerging needs. We’ve seen partners simplify and accelerate cloud migrations to help your customers in their digital transformation journey.

As the needs of our customers and the world continue to evolve, we added two new awards this year to recognize the important work our partners are doing to navigate today’s security and compliance challenges. We created an additional Security category, which includes the new Compliance award. For our partners who drive operational excellence in partner profitability and digital transformation, we created an Operational Excellence award, allowing partners to highlight their important work in those areas. Additional information about this year’s award categories is available here.  

We received more than 3,900 nominations across 126 countries/regions for this year’s Partner of the Year Awards. We were impressed by the breadth of nominated solutions and inspired by the success stories submitted this year – all were a reflection of the diverse and innovative solutions portfolio built by our partners, and a true representation of the global reach of our partner ecosystem.  

The meaningful impact our partners enable through these solutions is a compelling reminder of the importance of partnership. These partnerships and our continued mission to empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more are why we come together and celebrate this community every year. 

Congratulations to this year’s winners and finalists, and to all our partners who have demonstrated innovation, commitment to their customers, and care for our world over this past year. We are excited to virtually gather as a community to recognize and celebrate your achievements from the past year, and to share new opportunities to develop and expand your business. 

If you have not already registered for Microsoft Inspire, I encourage you to do so today! 

Author

  • Nicole Dezen
    Chief Partner Officer and Corporate Vice President, Global Partner Solutions

    Nicole Dezen serves as Chief Partner Officer and Corporate Vice President, Global Partner Solutions (GPS) at Microsoft. She leads the commercial partner business and is responsible for building and selling Microsoft Cloud applications, services and devices with partners. She collaborates with a broad set of commercial partners including Advisory partners, device partners, Global System Integrators (GSIs), Independent Software Vendors (ISVs), and services partners to drive digital transformation, scale, business growth and profitability with partners. Nicole believes in empowering people to drive growth. She works to help partners unlock the virtually limitless power of the Microsoft Cloud to provide solutions that create new value for customers. Prior to leading GPS, Nicole led the Microsoft Device Partner Sales organization, where she successfully drove business growth and innovation across the device ecosystem by developing strategies with the most innovative original device and equipment manufacturers, silicon partners, along with resellers and distributors. Under her leadership, the team delivered opportunity and growth across Microsoft’s device and edge partner ecosystem spanning Windows PCs, IOT, Collaboration devices, Servers and Mixed Reality. With more than 25 years of sales experience in tech, Nicole's innate curiosity has led her from several years in telecommunications, to leading tech start-ups as CEO, to driving Microsoft's multi-billion-dollar commercial partner business today. Nicole joined Microsoft in 2007 and served in multiple roles in the US, Asia and EMEA. Nicole is a proud Los Angeleno living in the Pacific Northwest. In her personal time, Nicole is a foodie, and loves cooking family recipes, or crushing a Peloton ride. She loves to travel and experience the local culture and food in the cities and countries she visits.