[sc]https://soundcloud.com/user-386956114/davyn-interview-12-08-2022[/sc] (Davyn's interview)  

Microsoft's Partner of the Year 2021 is Davyn, a gold-level cloud platform certified company with a 20-year track record of providing technology solutions in TT.

The company first transitioned from 100 per cent on-premise deployments of software in 2001 to an embrace of cloud solutions in 2017. By 2020, the company was registering 59 per cent of its business from cloud solutions and expects that to grow when Dynamics 365 Business Central is available in the region as a cloud solution.

The other major transition began five years ago, according to Derrick Villenueve the company's director of strategy.

"Most of our work for the first 15 years was mainly in Trinidad and we're doing work regionally on an opportunistic basis," Villenueve said on a Teams conference call last week.

"We changed that business model five years ago, investing significantly in hiring sales staff and focusing our efforts regionally and that has paid off significantly for us."

"We do work in almost all the English speaking Caribbean islands and in Suriname, Guyana and Belize."

"A little more than half our business, maybe 60 per cent, is regional."

Davyn works with over 150 clients across the English and Dutch speaking Caribbean and holds more than 70 certifications in Microsoft business software tools.

The projects that won the company the coveted partner of the year spot were executed for the Belize Social Security Board, Antigua Social Security Board, Turks and Caicos Islands National Security Board and the Caribbean Development Bank using a range of tools from Microsoft, including Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, Power Apps and Virtual Machines and VPNs deployed using Azure.

"It (the pandemic) has increased our business in some areas, and it's decreased our business in other areas," said Villenueve.

"Last year we didn't hit our sales targets, but we did okay despite the pandemic. We did work on government portals and work to use technology to overcome some of the covid problems."

"That helped, but then we do a lot of retail enterprise resource planning, developing systems for retail. We had projects that were placed on hold for months while they (businesses) were shut down during covid," he said.

"Things have picked up this year. We see companies investing again, those retail projects are happening again, so we do see some recovery happening."

"There has been a focus on other ways of reaching out to customers beyond stores, either mobile or online presence. E-commerce is something a lot of businesses have been investing in and (are) focused on," he said.

According to Claudia Monteiro, Partners and Small, Medium and Corporate Director, Microsoft Caribbean, "From a transformation perspective it (the pandemic) has worked like a catalyst."

[caption id="attachment_906875" align="alignnone" width="1001"] Claudia Monteiro, Partners and Small, Medium and Corporate director, Microsoft Caribbean. Photo co