ACG Announces 2014 Omega Award Winners

ACG Research announces the 2014 winners of the company’s first ever Omega Awards. The award honors excellence in two categories: message marketing with HotSeat, Whiteboard and Spotlight Innovation videos and operational excellence.

Juniper Networks earned the award for its HotSeat video “Defining High IQ Networking.” Rami Rahim, EVP/GM of the Juniper Development and Innovation team at Juniper Networks, and Ray Mota, CEO of ACG, discuss the definition of a high IQ network architecture and the significance to service providers and their customers. They recap Juniper’s recent announcement of new solutions that will help service providers automate networks, enable them to scale and dynamically create new services. The new NorthStar Network Controller is highlighted with use cases, as well as Juniper’s position and market differentiation on open standards.

Whiteboard Winner Nuage Networks was awarded the Omega for its “Seamless enterprise networking; data center to branch” video. Sunil Khandekar, CEO, Nuage Networks, and Ray Mota, CEO of ACG, discuss how the cloud is changing the way businesses consume and share information: for internal use or for sharing information with customers and business partners. The trouble with the cloud is it’s not ubiquitous; it is made up of distinct islands of capability. The compute resides in the data center, and the consumers reside remotely. Nuage Networks has shown that with SDN we can remove the static constraints within and across the data center to unleash the speed of consumption of information within the cloud. We now need to provide the same seamless environment for the branch environment and to improve the dynamic nature of the wide area network.

Trusted Vendor Award went to Cisco. The company continues to demonstrate operational excellence as measured by ACG’s financial index. Some of Cisco’s strengths include:    

• Very high operating margins because of sales, solid gross margin, & expense  discipline; operating margin increased by 47.3% 
• US commercial and enterprise orders increased by 10% YoY
• Highest R&D potential (31.6%); allocated more than $1.4 B to R&D each quarter in past two years
• High receivables efficiency ratio: 2.6; aligned credit policy
• Effective asset utilization yielded $3.5 for each fixed-asset dollar
• Dependency on debt is low; can acquire less expensive loans
• QoQ Operating income jumped 52.5% in 3Q

The vendors’ performance scores are calculated using 11 ratios and Z scores, subdivided into two categories: sustainability and operational; the data originates from annual reports, and quarterly filings. The index examines standard financial ratios related to profitability and liquidity, which are validated by Wall Street. An average of all ratios across all vendors was defined as the index. The goal of the index service is to create an industry baseline that takes all of the vendors in targeted sectors and creates an industry average to determine vendors’ risk levels.

Check out the video of Ray Mota, CEO of ACG, giving out the awards.

Interested in becoming a star in your own video? Want to find out which vendors demonstrate operational excellence and sustainability? Check out our services or contact ACG at sales@acgcc.com for more information about services and products.

Congratulations to the 2014 Omega Award winners!

Ray Mota

rmota@acgcc.com
www.acgcc.com