NEC XON has won both the Rising Star and Salesperson of the Year awards and was runner up for Technical Champion from F5 Networks after earlier in the year achieving Gold partner status through substantial, additional investment in technical skills.

Rising Star acknowledges the business partner that has made the swiftest and greatest progress of all of F5's regional partners, which NEC XON achieved through its investment in the technology and skills to support large customer rollouts in the sub-Sahara Africa region. Jurie Cordier, key account executive at NEC XON, won Salesperson of the Year for his outstanding contribution to F5's regional revenues.

"F5 is a strategic partner for NEC XON because they provided the exceptional platform that allows us to meet customer requirements in demanding environments," says Cordier. "It would not have been remotely possible without the dedication from NEC XON in moving the partnership forward by ensuring there is a solid baseline to meeting the business and technical requirements to providing these capabilities and opportunities."

F5 provides application services that range from high availability, or load balancing, to application security, Web fraud protection, and mitigating distributed denial of services (DDoS) attacks. These services facilitate customers undertaking a digital transformation journey in multi-cloud environments, essentially by enabling central application service delivery across disparate clouds and networks.

F5's solutions enables both telecommunications and Internet service providers as well as enterprises and F5's South African office handles 50 countries of the sub-Sahara Africa region supporting 146 partners including NEC XON.

"Jurie was awarded Sales Champion of the Year due to his attentive customer engagement, pipeline generation, and his major contribution to F5's revenues in 2017," says Simon McCullough, channel manager of F5. "NEC XON is an extremely valuable and strategic partner to our growth and development plans for the sub-Sahara region due to their extensive reach and their strengths and capabilities in the service provider and enterprise spaces. Considering their overall skills, competencies, and services bouquet, they're trusted security and IT infrastructure advisors to some of Africa's top telecommunication service providers and financial services organisations."

F5's awards judged participants by revenue, reach throughout the year, pipeline growth, technical competence, sales capabilities, architectures, and successful deployments to shortlist finalists before judging winners.

F5 hosted the awards ceremony at the Maslow Hotel in Sandton on Thursday, March 2, 2018. The two companies, F5 and NEC XON, will continue this successful collaboration by hosting customer events in Nairobi, Kenya, and Port Louis, Mauritius, later in the year.