Spark Business Group has announced it is a recipient of a 2022 Regional and Global AWS Partner Award, recognising leaders around the globe playing a key role helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on Amazon Web Services.
Announced during a Partner Awards Gala at AWS re:Invent 2022, the Regional and Global AWS Partner Awards recognise a wide range of AWS Partners, whose business models have embraced specialisation, innovation, and cooperation over the past year.
Regional and Global AWS Partner Awards recognise partners whose business models continue to evolve and thrive on AWS as they work with customers to achieve business outcomes through the successful delivery of technology and transformation services.
Spark Business Group was awarded AWS Innovation Partner of the Year for Asia-Pacific and Japan. The award recognises the outcomes for the customers of Spark Business Group and its subsidiaries CCL and Leaven. The group is recognised for its proven technology and deep expertise to deliver innovative consulting, professional, managed, and value-added resale services.
"Spark Business Group is proud to receive the award for AWS Innovation Partner of the Year for Asia-Pacific and Japan," says Richard Adams, CEO of CCL. '
"Our team is dedicated to helping New Zealand organisations achieve business outcomes through fostering innovation to help drive business change, as well as the successful delivery of hybrid cloud technology and transformation services that solves complex challenges in ways that go far beyond process efficiencies that cloud technologies typically provide," he says.
Video/machine learning road inspection technology epitomises the innovation
Spark Business Group has demonstrated proof in delivering excellent customer experience for its customers. For example, when Australasian infrastructure company Fulton Hogan asked Leaven to reimagine time consuming and high-risk road inspections, the company developed a solution that combined video of road surfaces with a machine learning platform in AWS to deliver an AI-capable road inspection model.
Leaven developed an AI-based observation platform in AWS, taking video footage of road surfaces captured by a video camera fixed to a road assessors vehicle. Developed and trained on AWS machine learning platform SageMaker and powered by AWS Lambda, the platform reviews millions of images of road surface damage, classifying defects and providing a maintenance schedule and severity rating to estimate the scope of repairs. Real-time processing in AWS ensures data sets for each piece of road can be assessed and compared as road inspectors capture video.
Adam Humphries, Fulton Hogan's National Manager Asset Management, said the company looked internationally for suitable technology, and trialled several solutions before agreeing to work with Leaven to develop its ML platform.
The extensive data-set specific to New Zealand's unique road environment is high quality, quick to turn around, and cost effective. AWS is accelerating our road assessments and providing greater understanding of changes in road surfaces and necessary repair work.
For the first time, Regional and Global AWS Partner Awards included a self-nomination process across a number of award categories and specialisation areas awarded at both the regional and global level where all AWS Partners were invited to participate and submit a nomination.
The AWS Partner Network, is a global program, focused on helping companies build successful AWS-based businesses or solutions by providing business, technical, marketing, and go-to-market support. The APN includes independent software vendors (ISVs) and systems integrators (SIs) around the world, with AWS Partner participation growing significantly during the past 12 months.
"AWS Partners are at the center of unlocking value for global customers, across a wide range of industries," says Ruba Borno, vice president, Worldwide Channels and Alliances at AWS.
"We are honored to launch the inaugural Regional and Global AWS Partner Awards, and thank all the nominees and winners for accelerating our customers cloud transformation journey."