Customer experience management company Sitecore, along with partners Avanade, Accenture and Tata Consulting Services (TCS), has been awarded a ‘Winning Together Award’ at this year’s 2015 Microsoft Australia Partner Awards gala event.

The ‘Winning Together Award’ recognised a digital business transformation program for AGL Energy, one of Australia’s leading integrated renewable energy companies.

A critical aspect of the ‘Winning Together Award” is collaboration between Microsoft partners, where they leverage each other’s diverse strengths to solve increasingly complex customer problems. The award is designed to showcase how Microsoft partners, by working together, have built positive and profitable businesses and how the breadth of Microsoft’s products and the solutions built upon them, can combine to create unique and differentiated solutions and practices that allow them to compete and thrive.

The solution for AGL combined the leading-edge technologies of Microsoft Azure and the Sitecore Experience Platform, with the agile design, digital and strategic expertise of Accenture, Avanade and TCS.

Through repeated iterations of usability testing, Accenture, Avanade and TCS refined a number of prototypes to get to an easy-to-understand www.agl.com.au web site that customers could rapidly grasp. Creative and brand elements, including colours, were then added on and further refined.

By migrating all AGL.com.au websites onto the one Sitecore platform and hosting a solution that enables them to scale quickly and easily as needed, AGL have reduced time, resources and costs previously being spent on managing their many subsites.

AGL customers are now able to access and navigate the online environment, to pay their bills, research energy products and services, and report an outage or emergency.

Steven Goddard, senior vice president Greater Asia, Sitecore said, “We are delighted to have won such a prestigious Microsoft award. By working together with our industry partners and leveraging each other’s diverse strengths, we have been able to develop a solution that has addressed AGL’s challenges and objectives.”

“Working together with such professional and inspirational partners has been an education in what can be achieved when innovative people and products come together to develop solutions for customers.”

Sarah Adam-Gedge, general manager of Avanade Australia, commented, “At Avanade, we help clients realise results in a rapidly changing digital world through business technology solutions, cloud and managed services.”

“Avanade is a Platinum Sitecore partner in Australia and the ‘Winning Together Award’ is testament to our commitment to jointly providing innovative solutions that benefit our clients and their customers. Avanade is delighted with this award, and privileged to have also been recognised by Microsoft Australia with the Excellence in Cloud Customer Relationship Management and Excellence in Cloud Platform awards.”

Deborah Hadwen, CEO of TCS Australia & New Zealand, commented: “Partnerships are an integral element of TCS’ recipe for success, whether client partnerships such as with AGL, or technology alliances as with Sitecore. It is pleasing to be recognised with this key award from Microsoft.”

Phil Goldie, director, partner business and development, Microsoft Australia said, “Congratulations to Sitecore Australia and its partners Avanade, Accenture and TCS on being recognised with the ‘Winning Together Award’ at this year’s Australian Partner Conference. This tightly contested award recognises Microsoft partners who have leveraged their respective strengths to develop an impactful solution for their customer. In this case, it’s the work they did for AGL that is being recognised as well as the way they worked together which truly embodies what this award is all about.”