Laura Veness has been named as a finalist for a prestigious Women in ICT Award

• 20.11.2020
• 530

Network Solutions Group’s (NetSG) co-founding director, Laura Veness, has been selected as a finalist for the 2020 ARN Women in ICT Awards (WIICTA), under the Entrepreneur award category.

Now into its ninth year, the WIICTA program promotes the professional achievements of women who are making a notable contribution to the Australian ICT landscape. The finalists of the Entrepreneur category have been selected for their courage in taking risks and using their proven initiative to challenge the status quo with successful new technology ventures, products and services.

This years’ award program has seen hundreds of submissions from more than 50 organisations, in what was the most competitive line-up in the history of the WIICTA program. Laura and her fellow finalist submissions were selected by a shortlist panel consisting of ARN Editor Leon Spencer and ARN Senior Journalist Julia Talevski. Laura says she is thrilled to be listed as a finalist:

“The ICT industry in Australia is an exciting space to be working in at the moment. It is an honour to be up for this award, especially as a member of the Entrepreneur finalist cohort, who I believe are some of Australia’s most passionate and hard working women in ICT. I’m so proud to be part of NetSG, working with such a talented team of individuals, both male and female, who constantly support each other to innovate, transform and achieve.”

“I am a passionate advocate for workplace equality, inclusion and diversity and this is the culture at NetSG,” says Laura. “We’re an anomaly in that we’re an ICT organisation with a fully gender-balanced staff ratio, and one that also promotes local talent, with all our full-time staff being based in Australia. I firmly believe that NetSG’s support of flexible working arrangements helps ensure our women in technology can stay engaged long term in the industry, all while balancing the challenges of work and family commitments if they choose to.”

In 2016, Laura co-founded NetSG. Four years on, our dynamic sales growth of 131% year on year and high levels of continued MSP satisfaction continue to show that this was a risk worth taking. This is a testament to her entrepreneurial spirit and innovative approach to both ICT capability, business management and the building of a strong workplace culture.

Since establishing NetSG, Laura has honed her expertise in high-end network engineering to deploy the Single Trusted Partner (STP) model. This innovation enables us to supplement the pervasive legacy MSP capability gap – a feat that has seen the NetSG program rolled out to over 34 MSPs in the last year and a half alone.

With her relentlessly innovative approach, Laura has helped streamline our telecommunication processes, develop close partnerships and stand out from organisations with slower IT project delivery. She was also instrumental in the recent certification of NetSG as a CSP vendor for Tradewinds. This leading-edge approach has led us to become the very first Australian-based company invited into this notable program. We’re so proud to have a female frontrunner like Laura Veness leading the charge in our organisation.

On Friday, November 20, the winners from each category will be selected by a panel of more than 40 industry judges, acknowledging the remarkable creativity, innovation and excellence on display. We wish Laura every success and congratulate her on this major accomplishment.