CAMPBELL, CA -- (Marketwired) -- Feb 18, 2016 -- Today, Panzura®, leading the charge in removing the barrier to the cloud, announced the winners of the inaugural Panzura Customer Innovation Award, highlighting advanced projects that conveyed a unique use of cloud technology to drive innovation. Recipients include projects from Thomas & Hutton, Entuitive, NELSON and OHM Advisors. Each project was selected by a panel of judges from more than 50 entries this year. The AEC firms used a combination of Panzura's Global File System Controller and a cloud storage partner like Amazon Web Services to provide users across distributed locations collaborative access to files.

The following projects were selected based on achieving project innovation and impactful business results using cloud storage technology to collaborate across offices:

• First place was awarded to NELSON for the project "GAF Campus"
  GAF, N.A., North America's largest roofing manufacturer, enlisted NELSON to design their new corporate campus, a 377,000 square foot location in Parsippany, NJ. This project was not only commissioned to create a new innovative, scalable workspace, but to redefine their identity. NELSON collaborated across four locations in New York City, Harrisburg/Philadelphia, Chicago, and Los Angeles, using multiple applications, including Revit, AutoCAD, Sketchup, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe Photoshop, to complete this project in just six months.
  
• Second place was given to OHM Advisors for the project "Newark Streetscape and Transportation Plan"
  OHM Advisors led the planning and design for an innovative and unique streetscape and transportation improvement project in historic downtown Newark, including a complete roadway reconfiguration, which required the OHM team to utilize resources from three offices to provide the insight needed to seamlessly deliver a successful project. This project not only updated the city's aging infrastructure, but also reimagined the look and function of the downtown to drive economic development.
  
• A third place tie was shared between Entuitive's Project "Calgary New Central Library" and Thomas & Hutton's project "Seneca Rail Site"
  A significant amount of engineering innovation is behind the design and construction of this new landmark civic building which incorporates striking signature design. It is being constructed over one of Calgary's busiest LRT lines, which required special efforts to avoid any disruption to the existing service. Panzura is one of the single most important technology enablers of Entuitive's 'One Company' philosophy and allowed them to collaborate between their two geographically dispersed teams. Applications included: Tekla, Rhino, Grasshopper, Revit, AutoCAD, CSI Suite of analysis tools, MS Office, Blue Beam Revu and Navisworks Manage.
  
  Thomas & Hutton worked to create an innovative 3D video depicting a flythrough of the rendered site. The video was shown to the prospective client so they could envision how their plant would look. It acted as part of a recruitment effort by Oconee County and the South Carolina Department of Commerce to bring high quality manufacturing jobs and investment to the area. Using applications from Autodesk Civil 3D to Adobe Creative Suite to Sketchup, they used Panzura to share the incredibly large files instantaneously.

"We are honored to award these high-caliber projects through Panzura's Customer Innovation Awards. These forward-thinking companies and the projects they accomplished clearly demonstrate a growing demand for innovation and speed in the AEC industry," said Barry Phillips, chief marketing officer at Panzura. "It's more important than ever that architects and engineers are able to work together across distributed locations to take advantage of the scale and economics provided by cloud storage. A strategy based on cloud computing demonstrates that this is achievable: project members can span the entire globe but feel that they work in a single location."

About Panzura
Panzura makes the cloud seamless by solving the last mile of hybrid cloud. By making the file system transparent across the cloud and corporate datacenters as well as eliminating the barriers of connectivity and authentication with the cloud, Panzura enables applications to run without a single change in the cloud, on-premises, or both.

Panzura transforms the cloud into another corporate datacenter, transparently blending the scale and economics of the cloud with the performance and flexibility of the corporate datacenter.

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