Comms Dealer

The Pure Technology Group has been awarded gold accreditation against the Investors in People Standard.

Founded in 2007 the group has grown from zero to £20m and its 1,000-strong customer base includes global and national enterprises alongside SME and public sector bodies.

Paul Devoy, Head of Investors in People, said: "The Investors in People accreditation is the sign of a great employer, an outperforming place to work and a clear commitment to success. The pure technology group should be extremely proud of their achievement."

Michelle Lazenby, Group HR Director at the Pure Technology Group, said: "I'd like to thank each and every one in our team for taking the time to participate in the review of our Investors in People accreditation.

"This illustrates that through significant growth and change our team truly stand together and continue to appreciate and benefit the investment and development the group has to offer.

"We will continue to invest in developing skills, enhancing our working environment and ensuring we have a culture that is one which we can embrace and enjoy."

Virtual1's CTO James Hickman has been re-elected as Chairman of the London Central Branch of the British Computer Society (BCS).

He has been a member of the Society, which represents the IT profession to other professional bodies, the Government, industry and academia, since 1995 and was initially elected chairman in 2015.

The London Central Branch has over 8,500 members, drawn from both commercial and academic organisations and runs free talks every month on topics ranging from security to project management, and emerging networking technologies to problem analysis.

One of the key projects they are hoping to progress this year, is their Student Ambassador Programme, which looks to encourage more engagement with the Universities the Branch works with.

Another key initiative being planned is the Doctoral Consortium, which is designed to bring together PhD students working in similar fields, to enable them to network and share their experience.

On a broader level the Institute seeks to promote professional practice, tuned to the demands of business, by providing practical support and information services, to its members and volunteer communities around the world, while promoting professional development and the acquisition of respected IT qualifications.

The Institute collaborates with Government, industry and relevant bodies to establish good working practices, codes of conduct, skills frameworks and common standards, offering a range of consultancy services to employers to aid the adoption of best practice.

Hickman said: "I was delighted and honoured to be re-elected as Chairman of the London Central Branch of the BCS for the coming year. This gives me a wonderful opportunity to continue the work that we have been doing over the past twelve months, through our ambassador programme and free talks, whilst developing our membership."

Avaya's just-launched and streamlined Edge channel programme includes new gem designation levels - Diamond, Sapphire and Emerald - to reduce complexity and the resources needed for partners to manage the programme.

Partners are now compensated for a broader scope of revenue, including hardware/product sales and recurring services and software. New incentives will reward partners for strategic areas of achievement, such as customer value, growth and new product adoption.

Five partner tracks align with their go-to-market model, and maps partner revenue targets and rewards based on track and geographic region.

Steve Biondi, Vice President and Global Channel Chief, Avaya, said: "The strength of a channel programme is the degree to which it enables the success of its partners, recognises and applauds their capabilities as they apply them to serve our customers.

"This means the programme needs the flexibility within a supportive structure that reduces requirements to only those that are most essential."

GCI has become one of 25 organisations in the UK with a place on Lot 10 of the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) Network Services agreement.

The agreement will support GCI's ability to service a growing public sector customer base among central government departments, local authorities, NHS Trusts and government agencies.

The Network Services agreement provides customers with access to networks and telecommunications services, including PSN compliant services.

Mike Ayres, Chief Commercial Officer at GCI, said: "We see the framework as a key route to market which enables us to assist public sector organisations in realising the benefits of the latest unified communications and collaboration technology, while reducing procurement timescales and procurement costs.

"The Network Services agreement, with a focus on SMEs, has already played a significant role in breaking down the dominance of multinational IT suppliers in the public sector. It has, in particular, provided a new channel to allow public bodies to safely take advantage of new cloud-based communications technologies.

"When Outsourcery went into administration in the summer, GCI acquired most of the assets of the business. However, Outsourcery's position on the Network Services Agreement had been understandably suspended. I am pleased that after the relevant due process, Crown Commercial Services has felt it appropriate to now appoint GCI to the Lot."

The Government's beefed up National Cyber Security Strategy and the £1.9bn of financial support that will underpin it has been welcomed by ITSPA but the industry body has called for Parliament to put more flesh on the bones of its plans to combat telephony fraud. 

Eli Katz, Chair of ITSPA, said: "Telecommunications fraud in an IP world creates extra challenges for the industry and, while we welcome the proposal to develop a new 24/7 reporting and triage capability in Action Fraud, we believe that more needs to be done to both improve cross-border cooperation around cybercrime as well as commit greater resource to bring cyber criminals to justice."

The international element involved in cyber crimes such as telecommunications fraud is an important area to consider. Cross-border cooperation is required to effectively tackle this crime, which continues to be used by criminals and terrorists as an important revenue stream.

Katz added: "ITSPA believes the option of communication providers refusing to pay for call traffic that originates from fraudulent sources needs to be explored further.

"We believe the necessary regulations are already in place but not currently enforced. Current estimates put the global cost of telecommunications fraud at $46 billion, adding 2% to the average user's phone bill. This solution would require improved cross-border cooperation but would effectively help resolve the problem in one fell swoop."

Equally ITSPA believes the extra funding announced today should in part help with greater resource and coordination within Government. Whilst ITSPA has developed good relations with the current organisations involved in tackling telephony fraud, more manpower is needed to encourage the industry to report fraudulent activity and in turn enabling law enforcement bodies to make successful prosecutions.

Katz stated: "It is difficult to bring a successful prosecution in telephony fraud and other cybercrime cases. We need to break the cycle of non-reporting. Equally, more resource within Government should help their liaison with industry to enable more prosecutions in the future. We look forward to a constructive future working relationship."

TeleWare has announced that, at midnight 1st November 2016, it achieved another milestone and successfully migrated its TeleWare Hosted Service fixed line call recording functions completely onto Microsoft's Azure cloud platform and data centres.

This was made possible after TeleWare made the world's first call completely routed, recorded and analysed through Azure on 13th September 2016.

The complete migration of the TeleWare Hosted Solution was achieved with no significant disruption to customers' normal service.

Calls will now be routed through the TeleWare London data centre and then directed onto the Microsoft Azure cloud for recording.

All fixed line call recordings will then be passed back into the TeleWare data centres for secure and compliant storage.

The move comes following rigorous testing and work to ensure reliability of service is the same as, if not better, than TeleWare's current solutions.

TeleWare worked with service providers to ensure a strong, reliable connection has been created so that call quality is not lost during the process.

Using Microsoft Azure's UK data centres also eases concerns regarding data sovereignty - data never leaves the UK. During routing, recording and analysing testing, TeleWare placed more than 10 times usual amounts of traffic through the platform, making sure that it was able to cope with abnormal demand levels.

Rob Corrigill, Chief Technology Officer, TeleWare said: "We have been through a steep learning curve to get to this point and there was a widely held belief that it wouldn't be possible at this stage of the cloud's development.

"From March to October we've gone from an idea to reality and are proud to be driving the industry one more step forward.

"Migrating onto the cloud will enable TeleWare to offer a service to customers which is scalable and will flex with their demands on a minute-by-minute basis.

"It also gives us the ability to leverage the full potential of the cloud. Above and beyond flexibility and other cloud benefits, both TeleWare and our customers will be able to take advantage of tools such as machine learning, Power BI, Streaming Analytics and, of course, our customer experience analytics."

Steve Haworth, CEO, added: "TeleWare was built on our fixed line recording products and it's fitting that this is the first product that is completely migrated onto the cloud.

"Earlier this year we achieved a world first call routed, recorded and analysed through Azure and that has paved the way for this momentous achievement. However, we won't be resting on our laurels and will swiftly be seeking out the next innovations and breakthroughs."

The Institute of Telecommunications Professionals (ITP) is encouraging all telecoms companies to prepare for the April 2017 apprenticeship levy deadline, following the Government's confirmation of the final details.

Launched to fund three million places for apprentices by 2020, the levy will commence on 6th April 2017 and will require employers with a wage bill of over £3m to contribute at a rate of 0.5%. Following its launch, and a period of consultation, the final plans have now been revealed.

The key details are:
• Employers not eligible to pay will receive funding towards the costs of training an apprentice.
• The government will provide an additional 20% payment to train 16 - 18 year olds whilst a ring-fenced amount of £60m will be kept to increase funding in disadvantaged areas.
• For those with less than 50 employees, 100% of the training costs will be paid by the government if taking on apprentices between the ages of 16-18.
• The same will apply to smaller employers taking on 19 - 24 year olds in care, or with an education and health care plan.
• Employers agreeing to train 16 - 18 year olds on apprenticeship frameworks will be offered an additional payment, equal to 20% of the funding band maximum, to help them adapt to the new funding model.
• The government has increased the amount of time businesses have to spend their funds from 18 to 24 months.
• Businesses will now also be able to transfer their digital funds to other employers in their supply chain or sector in 2018.

Ann Potterton, CEO of the ITP, commented: "Following the launch of the levy earlier in the year, many businesses have been anxiously waiting to learn the finer details and understand how this will impact their business.

"It's good news for smaller organisations, with access to more funding than we had originally anticipated. We have been running an apprenticeship scheme for the industry for the past three years, and have seen the benefits apprentices can bring to grow new talent within an organisation. We would encourage all telecoms companies to get prepared now in order to meet the April 2017 deadline."

The ITP is offering an exclusive consultancy service for the telecoms industry to help businesses get ready for, and understand, the implications of the levy.

It has been running its telecoms apprenticeship scheme of its kind since 2013 creating more than 60 roles during that time.

Following independent audits of its information security management systems (ISMS), supplier of billing and provisioning solutions, Union Street Technologies, has been certified by the British Standards Institution (BSI) for the ISO/IEC 27001 standard in Information Security Management.

The internationally recognised ISO 27000 family of standards provides organisations with guidance on how to manage data assets securely and ISO 27001 provides a rigorous set of requirements for ISMS.

By adhering to these requirements, organisations are able to establish highly organised, risk-based methods of managing personnel, IT systems and processes in a way that ensures sensitive data is protected.

MD Tony Cook said: "Over the past few years there have been a number of high profile data breaches all over the world. These led us to completely re-evaluate our approach to data security. Protecting our partners' data is of critical importance to us and we have an absolute desire to adopt best practice in this area."

According to Cook, complying with the standards set out by ISO 27001 required significant investment.

He explained: "Qualifying for ISO has required us to make some big investments into our security and hardware infrastructure. This has included the deployment of new firewalls, multi factor authentication and building a completely new cloud environment to host our solutions.

"We have also appointed a dedicated Standards and Security Officer to continually assess our security processes, to ensure they are followed correctly and to make certain that our organisation operates to the highest standards for data security.

"Perhaps the biggest investment of all was in training our 90 staff on our ISMS processes. Getting all staff involved and training them effectively is absolutely the key to success in this area. It won't matter how robust your security processes are if your team are not adhering to them properly."

Juniper Bridge has launched Sonar 2.0, the first piece of software within its updated product portfolio.

Sonar 2.0 is configured connectivity monitoring software that manages and monitors any IP device, on any network, anywhere in the world.

It allows the configuration of specific reporting using SMTP and is secure by protecting individual ports in the device.

Sonar can also be combined with Juni24/7, by outsourcing the configuration to Juniper Bridges's 24/7 technical support team to ensure that end users can view, manage and modify the alerting and reporting at anytime.

Sonar works by utilising an operational dashboard that displays geo locations of client UK and global sites.

Central administrators have visibility and the connectivity status of all live sites in real time, if any of these sites go down, proactive email and SMS alerts are automatically distributed to key personnel, to get these sites up and running as soon as possible.

Sonar can be used for both voice data monitoring and fully scalable allowing for additional sites and employees for monitoring purposes.

Founder Steve Larkin said: "2016 has been landmark year for Juniper Bridge and we're excited to finally launch Sonar as the first piece of software within our new product portfolio.

"Sonar is a versatile platform that proactively manages the network and customer sites using simple protocols. It not only provides an overview of what's happening now but also helps businesses improve performance by analysing data."

ITS Technology Group has won a contract with Herefordshire Council to provide a high-speed fibre network on Skylon Park, Rotherwas, the region's first high technology-enabled business park.

The services will be delivered using Fibre to the Premises (FTTP) along duct infrastructure already developed around Skylon Park.

Bill Jackson, Chairman of the Enterprise Zone, said: "We, with council backing, have already invested in ducting, around 4.5 km so far, in preparation for fibre based broadband services to be installed.

"ITS will add to that network, and install fibre through it to provide services to customers.

"Businesses need superfast and ultrafast broadband if they are to compete with other companies across the globe.

"It helps level a playing field for our investors, many of whom are dealing in complex and sensitive information, which they need to share across multiple sites around the UK and the world in different time zones. They simply cannot wait for hours to download or upload data."

Roy Shelton, CEO at ITS, added: "ITS has now signed a number of similar agreements to extend and commercialise councils' assets in order to provide competitively priced and swiftly deployed high speed broadband services.

"This agreement to design, build and operate Skylon Park's high speed fibre network will enable businesses to have further competitive advantage and support Herefordshire Council's vision of a truly technology enabled business park."