Spark Business Group Awarded 2022 Regional and Global AWS Partner Award

Spark Business Group recognized as AWS Innovation Partner of the Year Asia-Pacific and Japan winner, one of many AWS Partners around the globe that help customers drive innovation

Las Vegas, NV - November 28, 2022 - Spark Business Group is excited to announce it is a recipient of a 2022 Regional and Global AWS Partner Award, recognizing leaders around the globe playing a key role helping customers drive innovation and build solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Announced during a Partner Awards Gala at AWS re:Invent 2022, the Regional and Global AWS Partner Awards recognize a wide range of AWS Partners, whose business models have embraced specialization, innovation, and cooperation over the past year. Regional and Global AWS Partner Awards recognize 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 recognizes the outcomes for the customers of Spark Business Group and its subsidiaries CCL and Leaven. The group is recognized 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," said 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."

Video/machine learning road inspection technology epitomizes 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 assessor's 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 specialization 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 (APN), 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," said 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."

A panel of AWS experts selected the winners based on strict criteria. Spark Business Group is excited to announce it has received Innovation Partner of the Year Asia-Pacific and Japan, recognizing organizations that deliver innovative consulting, professional, managed, and value-added resale services. Winners have demonstrated proof in delivering outstanding customer experience via an integrated lifecycle of services, from initial assessments, architecting, developing and deployment of cloud environments to ongoing migration and management of cloud infrastructure and applications.