DSA Awards 2023: Dell, Microsoft Headline New Cast of Winners

The votes have been cast. They have been tallied. They have been checked and rechecked. Now, all that’s left is to announce the winners of the DSA Awards 2023—as chosen by you, our dear readers.

As in past editions, we retained a couple of perennial categories that we believe are the heart of data and storage. But we also added a few that reflect the evolving world of enterprise tech in general.

So, without further ado, we present to you the winners of the DSA Awards 2023:

This award honours the standout enterprise storage vendor that provided the top storage systems, software, and services for 2023.

The nominees are: Dell Technologies, PureStorage, Huawei, IBM, NetApp and Lenovo.

Winner:

There will be no back-to-back-to-back wins for NetApp, who won Best Enterprise Storage Vendor in 2021 and 2022. Instead, it will be a return to the mountaintop for Dell Technologies, who took home this award in 2020.

This choice is hardly surprising given how Dell continues to upgrade and update its already industry-leading storage portfolio. Proof of this is the beefed-up PowerStore, Dell’s intelligent all-flash data storage array that delivers increased security, and the upgraded PowerMax, the world’s most secure, mission-critical storage. That’s on top of the next-generation PowerEdge servers Dell unveiled in early 2023 that positioned the company quite nicely for a banner year, especially in the region.

Suffice to say, it will be interesting to see how Dell keeps up this momentum.

This award recognises the data analytics vendor that pushed the boundaries of Big Data and helped enterprises leverage the power of data the most.

The nominees are: Cloudera, Oracle, Snowflake, SAS and Microsoft.

Winner:

Microsoft continues to be at the forefront of innovation, and it is doing so on all fronts it seems—even in the world of data analytics. No surprise then that our readers chose Bill Gates and Paul Allen-founded company as the Best Data Analytics at Scale Vendor.

The distinction is well-deserved, and the enhancements Microsoft continues to make to its proprietary Power Platform are no doubt helping the company win over more customers in the region. It also introduced the AI-powered Microsoft Fabric in early 2023 and made it generally available later in the year to provide companies with end-to-end value propositions when it comes to analysing their data.

With Microsoft making tremendous leaps in data analytics, it just might be a perennial contender in the years to come.

One of the four new categories, the Best Ransomware Recovery Vendor award gives due recognition to the vendor that best helps organisations deal with the threat of ransomware through data management, cybersecurity, and data recovery.

The nominees are: Rubrik, Dell Technologies, Zerto, Malwarebytes, Kaspersky and Veeam.

Winner:

Last year’s Most Transformative Data Protection Vendor, Veeam, is continuing to provide enterprises with best-in-class data protection—and a crucial aspect of it is ransomware recovery. Little wonder then that 2023’s Best Ransomware Recovery Vendor is . . . Veeam.

Veeam, of course, has always been a leader in ransomware recovery. But the Veeam Data Platform the company released in 2023 took this capability to an even higher level, delivering more advanced data security, recovery and hybrid cloud capabilities than previous platforms. It even includes the trusted Veeam Backup & Replication™ (VBR) v12, which provides best-in-class secure backup and fast reliable recovery that keeps business running.

Given Veeam’s standing in the data protection sphere, awards like this figure to be the norm moving forward.

Another new category, the Best Cloud Service Provider gives much-deserved props to the vendor that provides the best, most comprehensive cloud services—a must for an increasingly cloud-reliant Southeast Asia.

The nominees are: Searce, AVM Cloud, CloudMile, Cloud Kinetics, Globe Business and Awantec.

Winner:

Cloud use is firmly in the mainstream now, with as much as 94% of enterprises already in the cloud in some way or form. This increasing reliance on the cloud, in turn, has magnified the growing importance of cloud service providers, who give customers a variety of choices with their cloud usage. And, this year, our readers voted CloudMile as the Best Cloud Service Provider—by a mile.

This win is a fitting end to a banner 2023 for CloudMile, who also won the Cloud – Transportation category at the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards back in May for its Google Workspace (GWS) Migration Project in collaboration with Malaysia Airports Holdings (MAHB).

A relative newbie in the cloud industry, having been founded only in 2017, expect CloudMile to only grow from here.

The third new category this year, the Best Identity Protection award, recognises the tech vendor that provides the most comprehensive and encompassing identity protection across the enterprise, thus preventing compromised credentials to ensure security.   

The nominees are: Okta, Ekata, CyberArk, ForgeRock and SailPoint.

Winner:

Identity protection has become a talking point in the evolving world of cybersecurity—and CyberArk is among those leading the way on this front. Needless to say, our readers voted it as the Best Identity Protection for 2023 in the region.

Proof of CyberArk’s growing role in identity protection is last year’s launch of CyberArk Secure Browser, a first-of-its-kind identity security web browser that enables organisations to better protect against attacks with a flexible, identity-based approach. Its CyberArk Identity Security Platform was also chosen by Singapore-based Managed Security Service Provider ONESECURE to help protect organisations in the region from identity-based attacks.

Headed by industry veterans, there is a good chance CyberArk will enjoy customers’ trust in the years ahead.

The last of the four new categories, the Best Textual Generative AI award, is a nod to the rise of generative AI this year. It specifically honours the most innovative, comprehensive, and feature-rich generative AI provider in the region.

The nominees are: ChatGPT, Bard, Phrasee, Bing Chat, Huggingface, PanGu Chat and Jasper AI.

Winner: 

It was the year of generative AI in 2023, and OpenAI’s ChatGPT was the pioneer of it all. Our readers also named it Best Textual Generative AI—and deservedly so.

Put simply, ChatGPT led the generative AI revolution. It pushed the innovation to the mainstream with ChatGPT-3 in the latter part of 2022, built on its success with GPT 3.5 early in 2023, and took it to a whole new level with ChatGPT-4 by March of last year.

Moving forward, generative AI will continue to rewrite the rules of creativity, and we reckon ChatGPT will be playing a major role in that.

For this year’s special category, we will honour the individual who has pushed IT forward the most this year. This award will be an acknowledgement of the winner’s tireless efforts to drive IT to the forefront in this digital age

Winner!!

Cybersecurity is more relevant than ever, and Datuk Alan See’s tireless work in advocating for it was duly recognised by our readers. See, the co-founder of and CEO at FIRMUS, has been an influential voice in the industry, making it his life’s work to impart critical cybersecurity knowledge to all those who care to listen.  

While every one of the nominees for the IT Influencer of the Year award was deserving, See proved to be just ahead of everybody else.

When we came up with the DSA Awards nine years ago, we wanted our readers to have a voice in choosing the region’s best. And, ever since the start, you have all come through for us, casting those all-important votes year after year after year . . . until we got to this ninth edition.

For that, we say thank you—from the bottom of our hearts! 

And as we move forward, both in 2024 and in the years ahead, we know we can always count on you, our dear readers, to make the next iterations of the DSA Awards a success.

Congratulations to the winners, and Happy New Year to all!