NewsGator names PointBridge (now @Perficient) Partner of The Year!

I’m super excited to be attending the NewsGator Collective User Group Meeting in Denver Colorado today where NewsGator Partners and clients are sharing Best Practices on how to drive Social Business value and understanding.
The PointBridge (now part of Perficient) team was awarded NewsGator’s 2011 Partner of The Year Award!  In announcing the award NewsGator President and CEO JB Holston shared that there are 3 key things that the NewsGator team looked at when deciding who to select as Partner of the Year.
 
1. That the Partner was using NewsGator’s technology internally, as using the technology leads to greater understanding and a drive towards Best Practices.
2. That the Partner had a deep understanding on the Microsoft product stack.
3. That the Partner was expanding their expertise beyond the technology itself -> really driving Social Business value.

From the Press Release which can be found here
“PointBridge epitomizes what we consider a terrific partner for social business,” said JB Holston, president and CEO of NewsGator. “They have become expert at everything from the underlying technologies through best business practices around enterprise social, including the user experience. PointBridge goes the extra mile, knows how to work with Microsoft, and ultimately always does what’s best for the client. We are honored to award them this distinction and look forward to a mutually beneficial relationship going forward.”
This year’s Collective User Conference marks the debut of the NewsGator Partner of the Year award. NewsGator will honor one system integrator partner every year whose efforts have been key to the strategic advancement of enterprise social computing technology using NewsGator’s Social Sites. The award recognizes excellence based on the quantity, quality, and speed of deployments in strategic vertical markets and geographies as well as development and delivery of the highest-quality integrated solutions utilizing Social Sites.
“We’re delighted to be NewsGator’s first ever Partner of the Year. PointBridge and NewsGator share the core values to which we run our businesses; this allows us to communicate and work together as one while providing a seamless experience for our clients,” said Mike Gersten, general manager of Perficient’s Microsoft East division and former PointBridge CEO. “Today, as we join forces with Perficient, we’re able to deliver a more robust offering to our clients that impacts their business—for the better—on a daily basis. I look forward to growing our partnership further and continuing our successes. I’m excited to see what the future holds for collaborative technologies and what we can together bring to the market.”
Jones Lang LaSalle, a financial and professional services firm specializing in real estate services and investment management based in Chicago has benefitted from the tight partnership between NewsGator and PointBridge. The company integrated the NewsGator Social Sites activity stream with the events happening in its Microsoft Dynamics CRM system to give its more than 40,000 employees around the world an integrated view of information they didn’t have before.
Gregory Adams, EVP, managing director for Global Information Technology, at Jones Lang LaSalle said, “In a fast-paced business like global real estate and investments we don’t have a lot of extra time to spend researching and implementing the technologies we need to make our business more efficient. PointBridge brought in NewsGator to fill an important need without any delay in our project and the two worked seamlessly together to make our integration happen so we could keep satisfying our clients – that to me is the true essence of partnership.”