Join Kevin Kirkpatrick, Solutions Architect at Advizex as he explains:
Recorded on Wednesday, March 20, 2019.
The Fortinet Partner of the Year Awards recognize dedicated and distinguished partners and distributors around the world. Fortinet’s channel partners play a critical role in helping Fortinet secure users, devices, applications, and edges everywhere.
The Growth Partner of the Year has demonstrated accelerated growth over the past year focused on customer success using Fortinet solutions. These partners have worked to address their customers’ digital acceleration requirements with a range of products and services while growing their own business.
Each year, CRN releases its list of top 500 solution providers, a ranking of the leading IT channel partner organizations across North America by revenue. CRN’s Solution Provider 500 list serves as the industry’s benchmark for recognizing the top-performing technology integrators, strategic service providers, and IT consultants, and as a valuable resource for technology vendors looking to partner with top solution providers.
This popular list identifies North American solution providers that deliver operational efficiencies, IT system improvements, and a higher rate of return on investments for their customers. These accomplished MSPs work tirelessly to guide their customers and create solutions for complex IT issues.
This annual list is divided into three categories: the MSP Pioneer 250 who are focused primarily on the SMB market; the MSP Elite 150, large data center-focused on- and off-premises; and the Managed Security 100 made up of off-premises-focused, cloud-based IT security services.
This annual list acknowledges the top tier of North American IT solution providers that have earned the highest number of advanced technical certifications from leading technology suppliers, scaled to their company size.
These organizations have differentiated themselves as premier solution providers, earning multiple, top-level IT certifications, specializations, and partner program designations from the industry’s most prestigious technology providers.
Each year, The Channel Company’s research group and CRN editors work together to identify the most customer-centric technical certifications in the North American IT channel.
Solution providers that have earned these elite designations – enabling them to deliver exclusive products, services, and customer support – are then selected from a pool of online applicants.
The MSP 500 list is released annually and recognizes the leading North American solution providers that have demonstrated innovative and forward-thinking approaches to managed services. These services help end users improve operational efficiencies and navigate the ongoing complexities of IT solutions, while maximizing their return on IT investments.
This annual list features IT solution providers of all sizes in North America that have earned cutting-edge technical certifications from leading technology suppliers. These companies have separated themselves from the pack as top solution providers, earning multiple, premier IT certifications, specializations, and partner program designations from industry-leading technology providers.
The women honored on this year’s list pushed forward with comprehensive business plans, marketing initiatives and other innovative ideas to support their partners and customers, helping them through the uncertainty brought on by the global COVID-19 pandemic. CRN celebrates these exceptional women for their leadership, dedication and channel advocacy.
The Power 60 Solution Providers are chosen by the CRN editorial team based on their contributions, expertise and dedication to building strong solution provider businesses. The award recognizes an exclusive subgroup of elite industry role models who continue to drive professional success through leadership and dedication to their own organizations and the entire IT channel.
The 2021 HPE Partner of the Year Awards recognize HPE partners from across the ecosystem for their incredible commitment to customer excellence, continued strong performance, focus on growth, and dedication to our mutual achievements. Winners were selected based on financial performance, innovative solutions, and ability to drive transformative business outcomes for shared customers.
Advizex has been able to help customers across various industries make the shift to an as-a-service cloud consumption model, thus allowing them to stay ahead of the curve with a customized IT solution. Customers such as W.R. Grace & Co, a global specialty chemical manufacturing company, needed a solution for growth that would align with customer needs and would scale as they continue to grow.
This list recognizes solution providers across the U.S. and Canada that have earned the highest level of technical certifications from leading technology suppliers such as Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Dell Technologies, Cisco and more. Companies chosen for the Tech Elite 250 list have distinguished themselves as dedicated and passionate solution providers willing to go above and beyond for their customers by ensuring they have the training and technical know-how necessary to provide expert-level service.
CRN’s annual MSP 500 list identifies the leading service providers in North America whose forward-thinking approaches to managed services are changing the landscape of the IT channel, helping end users increase efficiency and simplify IT solutions, while maximizing their return on investment.
The Myth that business continuity and disaster recovery planning is only for major disasters can leave you vulnerable to more common incidents. Protecting against threats is just one piece of the puzzle. Recovering from a threat in a timely, orderly manner is a bigger challenge. Advizex Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRAAS) is your solution.
Ed Pruett, VP and GM Southeast
Ed Pruett is a technology and engineering leader, steering change adoption and architecting strategies to achieve business objectives. Ed excels in design, implementation, administration and ongoing support of information systems whether on premise or within the cloud. Ed is a motivational manager, coaching IT sales and engineering teams to ensure success is tied to business outcomes. He is a trusted advisor melding sales, engineering, and operations acumen to achieve corporate goals and provide superior client support.
Dave Gibbons, VP and GM Ohio Valley
Dave Gibbons is a motivating leader and enthusiastic sales executive with 39 years of industry experience in the U.S./Latin American markets.
Dave’s selling and channel experience consists of Wide Area Networking, Data Storage, Backup Solutions and Services. Dave builds and leads teams that are strong customer advocates with a solution-selling focus.
Scott Downing, VP and GM North Coast
Scott Downing is an experienced Sales and Management leader with over 24 years in the IT industry. Prior to his tenure at Advizex, Scott utilized his strategic and technical excellence to lead teams at various organizations.
Scott’s skills and technical understanding has enabled him to create a customer focused, solution solving environment in the North Coast Region. His years of experience in this region has allowed his team to contribute to the sales success at Advizex.
Steve Kucker, VP and GM Northeast
Steve Kucker is a highly qualified, capable, motivated Sales Management/Sales professional with a valuable blend of experience in direct/indirect and channel sales. Steve's background has consisted of startups, VAR’s and large manufacturers. His expertise and focus over the last 20 years has been in the storage industry, focused on SAN’s, Software, Disaster Recovery, Business Continuity and service components. He is action oriented and enthusiastic, managing a team through profitability and productivity.
Jeremy Wood, Chief Transformation Officer
Jeremy Wood is the Chief Transformation Officer of Advizex. In this role he works as part of the executive team to harness organizational change to drive net new growth. Jeremy is also responsible for growing key partner relationships to help drive Advizex’s infrastructure, managed services and cybersecurity practices. Prior to joining Advizex, Jeremy had a successful 18-year career with ComDoc & Xerox. He started as an entry level account executive and most recently held the role of Regional President of Xerox Business Solutions & ComDoc, where he was responsible for all company sales and operations. Jeremy earned a BSBA from Miami University (Oxford, OH) with a focus on Finance, Marketing and Accounting. Jeremy, his wife Lauren and three daughters live in Northeast Ohio.
An accomplished IT leader, Kevin oversees the company’s Professional Services practice, helping customers modernize and automate, as well as enabling digital transformation to deliver true value to their users and organizations.
Kevin joined Advizex in 2016 as National Practice Director before becoming Vice President, Professional Services in 2019. As National Practice Director, he oversaw several nationwide practices, including IT Modernizations, the Oracle Business Unit, ServiceNow, and Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery.
Cindy is a highly skilled operations professional experienced in process improvement, team building, partner relationship management, contract negotiation, and cost reduction. She ensures the Advizex product business runs efficiently, providing structure, process direction, and support to a variety of teams to better enable them to serve customers. She also serves as the Advizex expert on the inner workings of the IT channel business.
Leveraging his over 20 years of experience as a diverse technical architect, Chris joined a technology firm as a senior consultant for 6 years prior to joins the Advizex team as a presales architect in 2011. Chris has been helping customers solve business problems and assisting customers with aligning IT and business strategy to produce beneficial business outcomes.
Kurt Schnieders has worked internationally for over 35 years providing executive leadership, business strategy and technology solution delivery across multi-cultural landscapes. Kurt brings a deep understanding of the retail and financial services sectors as he served as CIO for Dick’s Sporting Goods, L Brands and ING Latin America. Having been a customer for 15 years prior, Kurt has long been an advocate of Advizex’s experience, superior customer care and technical abilities.
C.R. Howdyshell is an accomplished executive with a proven track record of building strong teams, while establishing excellent customer and partner relationships to exceed business goals.
Since joining the company in 2003, C.R. has led several technology initiatives broadening the Advizex value proposition to our customers.
With threat attacks increasing in frequency and scale, Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans are crucial for all businesses. the BC/DR Advizer® assesses where you are today and gives us the next steps ensuring you’re safe today and tomorrow.
Networks often become complicated and downright messy. Our highly specialized engineers are skilled at assessing networks and resolving issues to ensure they’re as secure as possible.
Tap into our proven method for helping you map out exactly where you need to go. Every organization is different, and our goal is to make recommendations based on yours. With so many options, security strategy can be overwhelming. With the Security Advizer, it doesn’t have to be.
As networks become increasingly complex and threats become increasingly savvy, your organization needs to be proactive in finding the danger, and fast in remediating it. XDR provides holistic visibility into traditional endpoints, network, and cloud services.
Thanks in large part to cloud-based technology, remote access has never been easier. We’ll work with you to determine the best way to combine a positive user experience with a security policy that protects your organization.
Giving you the ultimate in access control, next-generation firewalls are essential for any security strategy. Leveraging the technology to support your organization needs a specialized team. It needs Advizex.
When someone can’t get into their email because of a forgotten password, it immediately impacts their productivity and leads to frustration. Prevent seemingly small tasks from quickly becoming time losses with our plug and play Help Desk solution. Keep your IT team focused on projects and strategic initiatives and eliminate the distractions that prevent them from continually improving your organization.
Rather than employ multiple people — around the clock, every day of the year — and invest in continual education and training, choose Advizex Monitoring as a Service. Artificial intelligence and machine learning-based algorithms detect warning signs and symptoms, giving you time to fix a problem before it causes an outage.
While crucial, backup and recovery solutions are all too often a struggle. It’s a full-time job, and IT departments cannot always prioritize it above other business-critical initiatives. This is where Advizex comes in. Our Backup, Storage & Disaster Recovery Cloud Managed Services combine backup and recovery expertise with application, data, and other infrastructure skillsets to help make sure you’re always ready. No matter what.
Successfully managing and supporting your servers plus Linux, Unix, or Windows operating systems requires someone to be on-call around the clock every day. Rather than staff multiple people, let us do it for you. Our capabilities span across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid deployment models. We’ll monitor, administer, patch, maintain, and enhance, freeing your team to focus on their projects and initiatives. 
The network is the backbone of your IT operations, and keeping it running successfully requires someone to be on-call around the clock every single day. Rather than divert multiple people from projects and initiatives, let us monitor, administer, backup, maintain, and patch your network systems as needed. 
When it comes to monitoring, administration, and management of your virtual environment, Advizex Cloud Managed Services has you covered. Our team is experienced at in-depth server virtualization services to ensure the underlying platform allows your applications — and your business — to run efficiently.
Thanks to cloud computing, organizations expect new business applications and services to be deployed faster than ever before. While IT departments want to move to a hyperconverged or converged infrastructure or to a complete software-defined data center, planning and deployment can present several challenges. Not to worry. As an extension of your IT department, from implementation and monitoring to maintenance and optimization, Advizex can help.
Get your time back. Successfully managing and supporting your databases requires someone to be on-call around the clock every day. Rather than staff multiple people, let us do it for you. We’ll monitor, administer, backup, maintain, and enhance, freeing your team to focus on their projects and initiatives.
Part of IT Service Management, IT Operations Management (ITOM) is managing the production environment of IT that offers the services that their consumers utilize. Delivery automation, experience management, performance analysis, and everything in between comes under this umbrella. It’s important to be on top of your game, and Advizex helps ensure you are. 
Services include:
Planning Services | Design | Jumpstart | Design & Deploy | Implementation | Residency | Optimization Services | Custom Scoping 
Whatever your cloud platform of choice, it needs to be properly managed to be effective. Traditional tools aren’t usually built with comprehensive cloud management in mind. Each cloud comes with its own system, leaving IT departments burdened with learning and maintaining multiple systems. We can fix that. 
Services include:
Planning Services | Design | Jumpstart | Design & Deploy | Implementation | Residency | Optimization Services | Custom Scoping 
IT departments are at the hub of business. Any time there’s a new idea — from small to big, from products to services — delivering results depends on IT’s ability to make it happen. Through better design, delivery, and support practices, IT Service Management (ITSM) helps IT departments reach their full potential, so the business can reach its full potential. 
Services include:
Planning Services | Design | Jumpstart | Design & Deploy | Implementation | Residency | Optimization Services | Custom Scoping 
Getting it right is never more important than it is in Identity & Access Management. While the basic idea is simple — make sure people are who they say they are and give them access to what they need — the maintenance can be extraordinarily complex, especially as your user base increases. From the back-end configurations to the front-end user experience, management is a priority. It’s a matter of accuracy and trust.
Services include:
Planning Services | Design | Design & Deploy | Implementation | Optimization Services | Managed Services | Custom Scoping
Modern business requires modern communication, and the need for efficient internet-based group collaboration tools has exploded. Conversations (two-way and group) represent just one aspect of the overall collaboration landscape. Collaboration also includes asset management, online services, and automated workflows, all of which can vastly improve productivity and increase the speed at which your business can move.
Services include:
Planning Services | Design | Design & Deploy | Implementation | Managed Services | Custom Scoping
For IT departments, the Digital Workspace provides a single pane of glass for consumed IT services and management. For your employees, it lets them work from anywhere and on any device. When planned and implemented strategically, the Digital Workspace can save time and increase productivity.
Services include:
Assessments | Planning Services | Design | Jumpstart | Design & Deploy | Implementation | Residency | Optimization Services | Managed Services | Custom Scoping
Modern business requires reliable and transparent networks. Over time, networks can easily become neglected, putting the business at risk for unplanned downtime or risk to their security posture. Advizex Network Solutions can help design, implement, and manage your network regardless of its current state.
Services include:
Assessments | Planning Services | Design | Design & Deploy | Implementation | Managed Services | Custom Scoping
Whether you’re a large business or a small one, data directs nearly every decision. Databases are a critical component of the overall infrastructure, impacting performance and availability. From database architecture planning to project implementation, Advizex ensures that your databases are resilient, cost effective, secure, and functioning as they should.  This is where Advizex shines. We bring knowledge and experience to give you unparalleled insights.
Services include:
Assessments | Planning Services | Design | Design & Deploy | Implementation | Optimization Services | Managed Services | Custom Scoping
Abstracting software from hardware gives organizations the ability to meet their ever-changing business needs more efficiently. Leveraging the intelligence in software, organizations gain key features that enable them to provide consistent results while scaling, as needed, at a rapid pace. Digital transformation, here we come.
Services include:
Planning Services | Design | Jumpstart | Design & Deploy | Implementation | Residency | Optimization Services | Managed Services | Custom Scoping
From on-premises to the cloud and vice versa, our Public Cloud Managed Services help ensure that your platform and/or infrastructure serve your business needs. Most IT departments know the benefits of a cloud strategy but seek outside expertise to make it happen as efficiently and with as little disruption to their already busy staff as possible. Advizex has that expertise — and experience.
While the legacy security approach was to protect your organization from outside threats, Zero Trust architecture provides a holistic approach to protecting against all threats regardless of origin. Zero Trust isn’t one product but rather a set of principles and architectures. It’s multiple capabilities working together simultaneously.
The key to creating agile, innovative IT operations comes down to automation followed by orchestration. Removing human intervention removes human error and inconsistency while freeing that person to focus on continual improvements for the business. Not sure where to start? We can help
Services include:
Planning Services | Design | Jumpstart | Design & Deploy | Implementation | Residency | Optimization Services | Custom Scoping 
Public, private, or hybrid — whatever your cloud platform of choice it needs to be properly managed to be effective. Traditional tools aren’t usually built with comprehensive cloud management in mind. Each cloud comes with its own system, leaving IT departments burdened with learning and maintaining multiple systems. Advizex can fix that.
Services include:
Planning Services | Design | Jumpstart | Design & Deploy | Implementation | Residency | Optimization Services | Managed Services | Custom Scoping
Matt Gaudio is an experienced lead of technology companies, strategies and people. Matt is currently managing the managed services business unit, marketing and partnerships at Advizex.
Prior to Advizex, Matt was the CTO for Findaway World where he led the ideation and creation for Findaway’s digital platform and mobile apps, as well as creating a modern and robust technology infrastructure and strategy. He also spent time in the venture capital and private equity space with a stint at Morgenthaler Partners where he rebuilt their technology infrastructure while interfacing with portfolio companies.
Matt is a graduate from Penn State University and holds many Penn State Big Ten honors related to his time spent on the Penn State basketball team.
