Chicago — Oct. 21, 2025 — AHEAD, a leading provider of enterprise cloud solutions, today announced that it has been recognized as the North America Partner of the Year by Grafana Labs, the company behind the open observability cloud.

AHEAD was selected from a competitive field for its role in helping joint customers achieve greater efficiency and insight with Grafana Cloud, Grafana’s fully managed observability platform, and for strong go-to-market alignment, professional services partnership and thought leadership.

AHEAD’s recognition also reflects significant year-over-year growth in Grafana resell and services, powered by dedicated teams with deep data center expertise. Its differentiated approach includes:

• Tool-agnostic, Framework-driven Approach: Helping clients rationalize and integrate Grafana alongside broader observability stacks, using proven scorecard and maturity models.
• Enterprise-scale Delivery Methodology: Repeatable, agile-aligned delivery frameworks for planning, execution, governance and closure that accelerate adoption and reduce delivery risk.
• Cross-domain Expertise: Strong credibility across observability, SRE, ITSM, AIOps and cloud, positioning Grafana within a broader operational intelligence ecosystem.
• Proven Client Outcomes: Documented success consolidating tool sprawl, reducing MTTR and improving service resilience through modernization programs.
• Strategic Partnership Enablement: Joint proof-of-value pilots, tailored architectures and executive-level roadmaps to drive faster time-to-value and long-term adoption.
• Training and Enablement: Onboarding and upskilling client teams with workshops, dashboards and role-based learning paths to ensure sustainable usage.
• Innovation Alignment: Early integration of Grafana into AIOps, telemetry pipelines and AI-driven analytics for predictive capabilities.

The recognition was announced at the inaugural Grafana Labs Partner Awards, which marked the start of the company’s flagship event, ObservabilityCON, in London.

“The future of observability depends on strong partnerships,” said Tom Kennedy, senior director, channel sales at Grafana Labs. “AHEAD exemplifies what’s possible when we work together in an open ecosystem—helping organizations adopt the latest in AI-powered observability and Grafana Cloud to drive smarter operations, faster innovation and scalable growth. Their collaboration has been instrumental in bringing the power of open observability to more customers around the world.”

“This recognition validates AHEAD’s investments in building specialist teams, proven delivery frameworks and cross-domain expertise that empower our clients to get the most value from Grafana,” said Ed Smoke, vice president of intelligent operations partner alliances at AHEAD. “Together with Grafana Labs, we’re helping organizations simplify complexity, strengthen resilience and unlock new innovation at scale.”

About AHEAD

We engineer integrated platforms, digital backbones that power the most successful organizations in the world. Our consultative approach, technical expertise and innovative solutions combine to accelerate the impact of technology in every client we serve.