Above: Derrick Villeneuve, chairman of Davyn. Photo by Rawle Thornhill, courtesy Davyn.

Originally published in Newsday’s BusinessDay for August 18, 2022

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

The company has continued the regional expansion it began over the last five years, 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 their case study for a new project for the Caribbean Development Bank, for whom the company is developing a new operating platform based on Microsoft’s Power Platform, which knits Power BI, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure tools into a flexible resource.

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

“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 Villeneuve describes as a low-code platform suitable for doing custom development for dynamic business environments.

“Microsoft wants to see growth in partner business [for awards evaluation], but they also want to see impact in customers as well,” Davyn’s chairman and Director of Strategy Derrick Villeneuve said.
“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 eighteen months to 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.

According to Villeneuve, the company has a big team special 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 sector in digital transformation initiatives and continued interest in using technology that allows organisations to better interact with customers online.

“Customers and stakeholders want better ways of interacting; they 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 is that there was a distinct preference for flexibility in work arrangements.

“We have too much 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. It doesn’t make any sense getting a bigger office if people don’t want to come in, so we’re just going to retain the office and reformat it for when some people want to come in for meetings, so we’re going to be 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?”

“It’s certainly not us imposing this on our staff, it’s our people telling us this is what we want. Nobody wants to spend 2 hours on the road every morning driving into Port of Spain. I had 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 that person, you start to ask, why am I in the office? Why do I need to be here?”

“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.”