Last summer, eSmart Systems was presented as the Norwegian ISV of the year by Microsoft. Tuesday, the prize was handed out – and the company celebrated with cake.

On Tuesday, three representatives from Microsoft Norway showed up at eSmart Systems’ offices in Halden to present and hand out the physical proof of the award ISV (independent software vendor) of the year 2017 – revealing that the prize was won in competition with more than a thousand companies.

“It was really easy to draw the conclusion that the prize for 2017, as it was for 2015, again is given to eSmart Systems”, says John Henrik Andersen, Senior Director Business Development at Microsoft, before handing over the glass framed and engraved award to Johansen.

Digitally disruptive

The idea behind the award is to recognize the Microsoft partners which lead the way in the industry’s digital transformation.

We want to recognize Independent Software (ISV) partners for the outstanding job they are doing to help companies globally move to cloud and digitally disrupt their industry

He adds

“Well deserved”

Shafique’s job is to help companies such as eSmart Systems to succeed commercially and help grow the company’s business on Microsoft’s cloud platform. For the past three years, he has helped to build eSmart Systems’ solution, both from a business and a tech side.

Shafique makes clear that eSmart Systems is a very deserving prize winner, and has few problems explaining why:

“In just four years, they have accomplished something most tech startups only dream about; they have paying global customers across several continents.”

He notes the fact that the industry is known for being conservative, but now faces challenges to its business model and needs to meet with the new demand from the environment aware prosumers.

“eSmart Systems has solved this new change by using the world’s most advanced technology while building a viable business. The company truly understands the customer’s need and have priced their product based on the value that they are generating for their customers”, Shafique emphasizes.

More hard work

Erik Åsberg, CTO at eSmart Systems and Microsoft Regional Director, is pleased with both the award and the fine words.

If we can follow up with more awards, it will have an even stronger effect. For example, we can get better at promoting ourselves in the market and in recruitment processes

he notes

As for now, the hard work towards developing and improving the celebrated software solution continues.

We continuously work on developing our cloud-based platform further, and we can see that our products are starting to get more and more attention in the market

says Åsberg