Partnering for the Journey to Modernize Enterprise Collaboration
In previous blog posts, I’ve written about how the Microsoft SharePoint marketplace continues to grow and evolve, especially in this age of high technology disruption. It makes for exciting and dynamic times here at AvePoint as we continue to build upon our legacy of delivering SharePoint solutions that enable enterprise collaboration at all ends of the organization. Today I will explain why AvePoint’s core message provides a firm foundation for the future-looking initiatives enterprises are undertaking today with regard to information management – across on-premises and cloud environments as well as mobile devices.
For the second consecutive year, we are a Microsoft Partner of the Year Award Winner. Last year we won for Public Sector: Public Safety and National Security. This year, we took first place in the Collaboration and Content category. Chosen from a set of more than 2,300 entrants from 108 different countries worldwide, our commitment to providing our original platform, DocAve, for the entire range of SharePoint management, optimization, and productivity – including on premises, cloud, and hybrid deployments – helped clinch the victory for us. We’ve been a Collaboration and Content partner with Microsoft for over a decade, so this is a fantastic win for us. Microsoft is recognizing our core solutions aren’t just helping customers solve their specific problems today, but are well-positioned to grow with our customers as enterprise collaboration continues to evolve.
We’ve also made great gains in extending our traditional strengths to cloud and hybrid environments. Microsoft officially recognized those investments by awarding us the Gold Cloud Platform competency, making us a certified Microsoft Cloud vendor. Our Azure-based AvePoint Online Services solution will continue to extend its reach into Microsoft data centers worldwide, putting us in a very selective group of partners that have the complete range of on-premises, hybrid, and cloud solutions that help customers with their information management journey every step of the way.
In my travels to the five major continents in the past several months, this “cradle to grave” information management approach resonates with our customers, prospects, and partners. It really boils down to two main points:
- Traditional document management, enterprise content management, and records management systems are essentially just black boxes for filing documents. They sit on shelves and are used by a few people in the back office, like records managers. Even worse than wasteful shelf-ware, they don’t take into account 90 percent of the content used every day by the business – such as information shared through email, instant message, and light document sharing apps. Being able to integrate legacy systems with the reality of how people collaborate today – where and how they prefer to do so – is essential to information management.
- SharePoint = Office = Collaboration & Productivity. In Microsoft’s cloud-first, mobile-first productivity company pitch, SharePoint is essentially becoming the fabric for Microsoft Office in order to truly enable productivity. Having a solution that optimizes SharePoint as this central hub, across physical and virtual boundaries, is instrumental in any information management solution.
Our ability to extract information from Office, Outlook, and Windows Explorer – in tandem with our integrated solutions for data governance, file analysis, taxonomy management, policy enforcement, and compliance – allows our customers to shine a light on those legacy black boxes of content while unifying information management across the other 90 percent of content legacy platforms they don’t address today using the Microsoft stack.
We’re not just stopping there. We have a tested, proven, and validated solution that meets the strictest electronic records management rules worldwide. Our core solutions are fully equipped to help our customers better integrate existing information management best practices while at the same time achieve actual user participation and adoption in the process. Now, business users can take advantage of technology without sacrificing their day-to-day familiarity (and productivity). We’re making technology that works for business users, instead of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole – that’s the simplest way to describe our commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) approach.
Through our core products, our historical strength – in tandem with extending that approach to cloud environments – we have become the strategic partner for customers and Microsoft in the journey toward modernizing enterprise collaboration. After supporting the platform for more than 14 years, it’s truly exciting to see that the SharePoint marketplace is more vibrant than it’s ever been with no signs of slowing down. We look forward to continuing to deliver the management, optimization, and productivity solutions that organizations depend on as they continue to embrace this new era of working better together.
As AvePoint’s Chief Executive Officer, as well as a member of the Board of Directors, Dr. Tianyi Jiang (TJ) is responsible for the overall strategy and direction of AvePoint, which includes product innovation, investor relations, and business development. He is focused on delivering value to customers, partners, shareholders, and the AvePoint team, every day.
TJ was named 2023 CEO of the Year, in the Information Technology Products or Services category by the Globee Awards and is a recipient of Ernst & Young’s 2010 Entrepreneur of the Year award in New Jersey. He received both B.S. and master’s in electrical and computer engineering from Cornell University, and a Master of Philosophy and PhD in Data Mining from Department of Information Systems, Operations Management, and Statistics, Stern School of Business, New York University.
