A “complex, creative” project for a large corporate contributed to Gareth Tucker’s win in the inaugural Rising Star award category at the second annual Microsoft Partner Awards.
Tucker, who is Complete Solutions’ professional services manager, has spent the majority of his 10 years in the industry working on Microsoft’s CRM and ERP platforms.
Over the past two years he has been a solution architect in a team implementing a CRM system for Fonterra, saying he has enjoyed the challenge of continually adding functionality during the project.
“It’s the complexity and scope of what we’ve done up there and being challenged by what they want CRM to do. We had to get creative in how we delivered to their requirements and you don’t get that in smaller projects.”
Advocacy for Microsoft technology was also a factor in being nominated, Tucker says. Complete Solutions is a Microsoft Gold partner and Dynamics CRM specialist.
After graduating from Waikato University in the late 1990s, Tucker moved to Auckland and worked for DataGroup, which subsequently merged with Complete Solutions.
He has also worked on Siebel and SalesLogix platforms and was with OneSource in the early 2000s.
In addition, he assisted Microsoft with its deployment of CRM last year.
The Rising Star award was open to both individuals and companies, with the other finalists being Altaine, CodeBlue and Enlighten Designs.
Microsoft partner group manager Nick Fletcher says the category was added as a way of celebrating individual or company partners “who are doing great things and who we can expect more from in future”.
“The idea of company and individual submissions is when you think of a company, it tends to be the owner who is the entrepreneur driving it. In an established organisation that person may be an individual and that’s where Gareth fitted in.”
The winning individual had to show leadership in implementing technology for a customer, Fletcher says.
