Microsoft has officially announced the finalists for the 2020 Microsoft New Zealand Partner Awards, and we are incredibly excited to announce that Aware Group is a finalist in three categories: Azure Innovate, Azure Migrate, and Optimising Operations!
Aware Group has had the opportunity to work with many amazing customers over the past year, and we are very proud of how we have been able to help so many different organisations achieve their goals. We are also especially grateful for everything our customers are teaching us on a daily basis. We have such a remarkable team here who work hard every single day to provide real, concrete outcomes for our customers, and the work they produce for those customers is precisely what goes on to qualify for awards like this.
Azure Innovate Award
Our submission for the Azure Innovate Award detailed our work with Lincoln University to better monitor building utilisation across campus. Tertiary institutions across New Zealand struggle with providing accurate and timely data regarding facilities utilisation. This data is core to running campuses as efficiently as possible. They sought our help in automating their reporting system and providing information to optimise space usage. Aware AI for Facilities Utilisation turns raw camera footage into data visualisations that are presented on a dashboard in a clear and digestible way, providing Lincoln with 24,000 times as much data as was previously available. There are several projected benefits that Lincoln has to gain from this solution. By automating people counting, they have been able to repurpose the employee previously tasked with manual counting, saving on salary costs. With better optimisation of their facilities usage, they can now take on more students in the existing space. With more accurate, up-to-date information, Lincoln University can make fact-based decisions to reduce operating costs.
Optimising Operations Award
For the Optimising Operations Award, we are being judged on our work with Hamilton City Council (HCC) to create a digital twin of the Hamilton City Traffic Network. Within city councils, responsibility for managing different parts of the traffic network is spread across several departments. Unfortunately, this can make collaborating to solve problems much more difficult, with staff having to manually collate data from different systems and information often getting lost as it travels through departments. To solve this, Aware Group partnered with Hamilton City Council on a project that focuses on automatically collecting and consolidating traffic data across the organisation into a single system – Transport Data Analytics Platform (TDAP). Since TDAP was introduced, HCC has seen a dramatic increase in the efficiency of the city’s transportation management operations, as the system has allowed HCC to respond to traffic incidents as they occur. In fact, the average incident response time went from 102 minutes to just 5, a 2,000% faster response time.
Azure Migrate Award
Unfortunately, for the Azure Migrate Award, we aren’t able to share much information about our solution due to the current levels of confidentiality surrounding it. But we can’t wait to see what more we can tell you about this awesome project at a later date.
2020 has been a challenging year for all of us globally, which makes the work that all of Microsoft NZ’s partners have done so much more important. Almost every aspect of how businesses are expected to operate has changed, and each of the partners has pushed past that to uplift customers through the innovative use of Microsoft technology. We want to send our congratulations to each of the finalists in this year’s awards. All of them have provided immense value to their customers, and we can’t wait to celebrate our collective hard work at the awards ceremony on November 27.
