Winners meet losers at UK channel awards

AN ASTONISHING 1,800 people tipped up in Battersea last night to see the winners of the UK channel awards, demonstrating there's still a lot of life left in the distributor and dealer world, thank god.

Astonishingly, this is the 13th channel award and your INQUIRER staff truly have only missed a couple in those years. It is a must event for channel watchers and gets bigger every year, thanks to VNU and top editor of Computer Reseller News, Sarah Driscoll.

Very witty comedian Bill Bailey announced the winners in heaps of categories and continued being witty for the entire 34 categories up for grabs. Even when Microsoft won an award, Bailey did not flag but was up for a quip.

Here are some of the winners, in short. Fujitsu Siemens was vendor of the year; Enta was distributor of the year; corporate reseller of the year was Logicalis and networking vendor of the year was Netgear.

Net distie of the year was Azlan C2000, SME reseller of the year was Blue Chip and software vendor of the year was the Vole while Bell was software distie of the year.

Software provider of the year was Eurodata Systems, while HP was storage distributor of the year. Security distie of the year was Computerlinks, while Kelways was reseller of the year.

The INQ was there thanks to the good graces of AMD, and Intel was there as well. We're pleased to say the INQ and Intel's UK MD Graham Palmer thrashed the competition in a later death table football match against AMD and Martin Veitch. This was a friendly table football event in which INQ columnist Martin Lynch also proved himself a great sport.

A load of people then departed for a very very late or perhaps very very early party, while we made our excuses and left, clutching our snaps, one of which is below. µ