Woolworths awards the cream of its IT suppliers

Supermarket and petrol giant Woolworths has thanked its best IT suppliers with a round of awards aimed at encouraging them to continually deliver a higher level of service.

The company has, for the past six years, awarded the pick of all of its suppliers - be it the food and product suppliers that fuel its business or the equipment manufacturers that help it run the business.

Woolworths crowned Telstra the king of its service provider suppliers, pipping Indian outsourcers HCL Technologies and Tata as well as local supplier Vectra.

On the applications front, Woolworths chose to award local transaction processing supplier FIS over international giants Oracle and SAP.

VMware was crowned in the 'infrastructure' category over finalists EMC, Citrix and Red Hat.

Woolworths chose CA as its software infrastructure supplier of the year after adopting the vendor's mainframe tools and service desk management products, beating out Software AG, Informatica and SAS.

It awarded Israeli supply chain software vendor Retalix over fellow finalists NCR, Datalogic, Trax and Wedderburn in the point-of-sale category. NCR, however, was nominated for an 'optimisation' award by Woolworths CIO Dan Beecham.

"For the last six years, Woolworths have held annual awards to acknowledge the work that its IT partners contribute to the successful delivery of the business," said David Williams, Service Delivery Manager at Woolworths in a statement.

"Vendors involved in every part of Woolworths' business, from the check-out to logistics, to weighing machines, and all front and back end support systems are acknowledged and recognized."

The company also handed out individual awards to supplier representatives that had excelled in their service to the customer.