Davyn is Microsoft's 2022 Trinidad and Tobago Partner of the Year

For the second year, Davyn, a Microsoft solutions partner, has won the Partner of the Year (POTY) award for TT.

The company has continued the regional expansion it began over the last five years (https://bit.ly/3QFpO26), building a specialty in developing social security platforms, completing work on a system in Belize and winning contracts to implement equivalent projects in St Vincent and in the Turks and Caicos Islands.

Davyn won the POTY in 2022 for its case study for a new project for the Caribbean Development Bank, for which the company is developing a new operating platform based on Microsoft's Power Platform. It knits Power BI, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure tools into a flexible resource.

Claudia Monteiro, Microsoft's Global Partner Solutions lead for Central America and the Caribbean, said, "Davyn's dedication to technological advancement has placed them firmly at the forefront of the region's digital transformation.

"Their award-winning project for 2022 introduced Microsoft's Power Platform as the solution to the region's most relevant banking challenges.

"This year's awards consisted of over 3,900 nominees across 126 countries, a true showcase of the global outreach of Microsoft's partner ecosystem."

Davyn has been doing more work with Power Platform, which Villenueve describes as a low-code platform suitable for doing custom development for dynamic business environments.

Davyn's chairman and director of strategy Derrick Villeneuve said, "Microsoft wants to see growth in partner business (for awards evaluation), but they also want to see impact in customers as well.

"You can't get there without both of those."

The bank went live with some of the modules developed and implemented by Davyn over the last eight months, though most project implementations will run between 18 months and three years.

With the end of restrictions, the company is also seeing growth in the enterprise resource planning space, particularly in the retail sector, and has a growing business in cloud migrations, helping companies move from on-premises infrastructure to cloud services.

Villeneuve said the company has a big team working on social-security solutions and is ramping up more solutions using Microsoft Business Central, which launched in TT and Jamaica as a software as a service (SaaS) platform in May.

"In the Caribbean, we can't specialise too much, we have to be more horizontal.

"Customers that are successful are the ones that really want to transform, and they approach projects in the context of partnership. When you are implementing complex business systems you can't do it in a vacuum.

"If you're putting in a social-security platform, you are replacing all the software that everyone in the organisation uses every day, so if you don't get buy-in and acceptance from the people working there, it's going to fail."

Over the last year, Davyn has also seen a steady increase in interest in both the public and private sectors in digital transformation initiatives and continued interest in using technology that allows organisations to interact better with customers online.

Customers and stakeholders, he said, "don't always want to have to come in (to the store)."

Davyn had that experience first-hand with its own staff, which grew by 20 per cent over the pandemic.

"One of the things we've done in the last couple of years is really try to listen to our staff," Villeneuve said.

One of the things that came through clearly and early when work-from-home came up for discussion among the Davyn team was that there was a distinct preference for flexibility in work arrangements. The company has responded accordingly.

"We have too (many) staff now to go into the office. If we have an all-hands meeting, we have to do it at the Hyatt, because we don't have enough space." However, he pointed out, it made no sense acquiring a bigger office if people would not be coming in. So Davyn will retain its office and reformat it for use for meetings and hot-desking.

"I was thinking, we're out of the pandemic restrictions, it would be nice to get people back into the office for maybe a couple of days a week. Maybe that's old-school thinking?"

He said the arrangement was driven by the staff.

"It's our people telling us, 'This is what we want.' Nobody wants to spend two hours on the road every morning driving into Port of Spain."

He recalled having "my whole Power Platform team in the office on a Monday and the morning went really well – but in the afternoon I had people in the office having Teams meetings with each other and clients externally...

"If you're going to be having your people coming into the office, it should be work that requires a team, where there's value in having an interaction.

"Otherwise you're just annoying people."