This year, for the first time ever, Sonar6 entered the Writemark Plain English Awards. And we won!

At the swanky awards ceremony on Friday, Sonar6 CEO John Holt accepted the Best Plain English Document award for our color paper series.  The judges were extremely complimentary and really got our whole ‘making performance reviews seem less evil’ vibe, which we’re pretty stoked about.

So if you haven’t taken a look yet, you might like to check out our Award Winning(!) Color Papers…

Remember last year, when we were named in the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Asia Pacific  top 50? We thought you might like to see the award itself, as cheerfully accepted by Sonar6 Finance Manager Amy Booth (R).

Sonar6 has been recognized as one of the fastest-growing technology companies in the Asia Pacific region, thanks to a whopping 704% revenue growth over the past three years.

The Deloitte Fast 500 Program recognizes those technology companies with the fastest rates of annual revenue growth from 2006 to 2008.  At number 40, Sonar6 came in third out of 51 New Zealand companies named in this year’s list. Congratulations to our fellow Kiwi top-50ers: NextWindow, Telesmart and TracMap!

It’s a fantastic result – Sonar6’s phenomenal growth has been both exciting and challenging, so our ongoing success is a great testament to the team’s hard work over the past few years (and proof that our commitment to providing really useful performance reviews is paying off!)

It’s great to be recognized: we’ve added a lot of new clients in 2009, and our 2010 forecast shows excellent opportunities to continue our success in the USA and Australasia.

Can we get a w00t?

Exciting times: we’ve been named finalists in the IRL Emerging Company, Recruit IT Innovative Software Product and HiFx Innovative Services Product categories in the 2009 PricewaterhouseCoopers Hi-Tech Awards. This is the only awards program focusing on NZ’s tech industries, so it’s a big deal and a huge honour to be selected for the finals.

Awards night is May 1st -  wish us luck!

The design in business awards celebrate companies that have used design to build competitive advantage. In fact their website states: There is growing evidence that companies who strategically use design perform and compete better than their rivals. At Sonar6 we love design! We love evaluating our progress from a user experience standpoint, rather than just measuring the length of our feature list… so we are stoked to be a finalist in the Design in Business Awards.

Traditionally these awards have been dominated by manufacturers – great companies designing bathroom fittings and clothes and furniture and baby buggies – so it is unusual for a software company like Sonar6 to feature, but even more unusually our friends at the very cool online accounting company Xero are also a finalist. Seven finalists in a design awards and two of them are SaaS companies… the world really is changing!

Sonar6 founders Mike Carden and Mark Hellier have won the Bayer Innovators Award in the Information Technology and Communications category.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sonar6 founders Mike Carden and Mark Hellier have been nominated as finalists for the Bayer Innovation Awards for their contribution to innovation in Information Technology and Communications. Bayer have teamed up with the National Business Review to find New Zealand’s leading innovators – those who use their knowledge and commitment to improve the lives of New Zealanders and the wider world.

Apart from Sonar6’s two inventors the list of finalists includes innovators from several companies that we admire here at Sonar6, including 1000 Minds (who have very cool decision making technologies) and VortexDNA (whose software predicts human intentions). “It’s nice to recognized amongst compatriot innovators.”

The winners will be announced on August 5. Good luck to all the finalists.

In the media this month: Sonar6 features in the 100th issue of Unlimited Magazine, one of two ‘cool companies’ profiled in the magazine’s Big Pitch promotion.

And in Startup magazine, Sonar6 has been named one of NZ’s top 10 online startups – companies that “have what it takes to succeed on the world stage.

Also this month, Sonar6 was named by CIO Magazine as one of 25 rising stars in the 2007 MIS Strategic 100: “companies that are already impressing savvy CIOs, who locally and internationally keep a tab on cutting-edge companies set to make a difference in ICT.”

Read the CIO “Fast Movers, Clever Disrupters” article >>

Sonar6 has been named as one of the ‘Top 10 HR Products of the Year’ by international magazine Human Resource Executive for its unique contribution to the field.

In announcing the award, HRE magazine commended Sonar6 for its unique ability to ‘engage’ users.

…thanks to its intuitive and inviting user interface, it delivers to the market a solution that addresses one of the more formidable challenges facing HR departments – engaging managers in the process. ”

Given that HRE is the leading HR magazine in the United States and has a large international following, we’re delighted at the increased exposure this award brings to Sonar6. It’s also proof – if it were needed – that by using Sonar6, our clients are at the leading edge of international talent management best practice.

Read the full HR Executive Magazine Top 10 >>

Thanks to those of you subscribed to Gartner for the heads up – we were pretty chuffed to be one of the four “Cool Vendors” in their recent Finance and HCM research:

http://www.gartner.com/DisplayDocument?id=502272&ref=g_fromdoc

Apologies to those who don’t subscribe to Gartner – we will have a release out shortly once it has been approved.

It’s also interesting to see that the others listed all have some potential synergy with the talent management field, especially when you take into account the Talent Science approach we have been proposing (Talent_Science.pdf )