Comms Dealer

Microsoft says it is boosting European cloud investment to $3bn as it adds a number of initiatives, including plans to bring Microsoft Cloud to France.

CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft has more than doubled its cloud capacity in Europe in the past year, noting that the company has invested over $3bn across Europe to date.

"We continue to invest heavily in cloud infrastructure to meet the growing demand from European customers and partners," said Nadella.

"Building a global, trusted, intelligent cloud platform is core to our mission to empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more. There's never been a better time for organisations across Europe to seize new growth and opportunity with the Microsoft Cloud."

Microsoft intends to deliver the Microsoft Cloud from data centres in France, starting in 2017 with Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and Dynamics 365 from multiple locations in France.

Microsoft Cloud services are already available from data centres in the United Kingdom (Microsoft Azure and Office 365) and Germany (Microsoft Azure with Office 365 planned for early 2017), with the latter offering a new model in Europe where access to customer data is controlled by a data trustee, T-Systems International, an independent German company and subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

The collective investments, including hubs in the Netherlands and Ireland, which continue to expand, together with locations in Austria and Finland, aim to enable Microsoft to meet anticipated customer demand in Europe.

 Huddersfield-based VoIP distributor ProVu has added two new apprentices to its Technical Support Team.

The company has now taken on five apprentices following a link up with a local college's apprenticeship scheme in early 2015.

New recruits William Dobson and Jordan Carr will undertake a two year course in IT, software, web and telecoms.

MD Darren Garland said: "So far our apprenticeship scheme has proved to be of great benefit to the company as we can help our apprentices identify their strengths and place them most appropriately according to their skills and the company's needs.

"We welcome our new recruits and look forward to seeing them develop their skills which will undoubtedly make a positive impact to the team.

"As we continue to grow year on year, it is vital that our team grows to reflect this. Through apprenticeships, we can nurture our own and help our staff to reach their full potential."

Team Virtual1 has completed the 2016 Windsor Park Spartan Race in aid of charity Restless Development.

The 20-strong group tackled the five mile Sprint race which includes over 20 obstacles (jumping through fire, wading through mud and crawling under barbed wire etc) in a bid to raise over £5k towards Virtual1's charity target.

Team member and CEO Tom O'Hagan said: "Virtual1 is a young, vibrant company, with a set of employees to match. Each day we face the 'it cannot be done' in our business lives, so tackling the Spartan Race was an obvious choice for us.

"The team wasn't made up solely of fitness enthusiasts, but the whole group worked to get everyone round the course, which is the way we approach our everyday business."

"We smashed our £5,000 target, with over £7,000 raised to date, which is a magnificent achievement and one which will benefit Restless Development greatly."

Telecoms firm NGC Networks has achieved £4.5m turnover after a strong performance across its products and services.

This year's results are up £0.5m on last year and the Wakefield-based business, which employs 30 staff, plans to hit £5m turnover in 2017.

NGC Networks provides business telecommunications and internet connectivity solutions to companies across the North of England.

Managed by directors Nikki Guest and Dean Harrop, the business has maintained profitability and attracted new clients both in the Yorkshire region and beyond.

These include Bradford-based mail order business Freeman Grattan Holdings, The Family Fund in York and First Choice Catering in Cannock, Staffordshire.

Harrop said: "We have enjoyed significant growth as a result of building our work with existing clients as well winning new ones.

"In addition, we have consolidated our position in some key sectors including education and health where we provide our bespoke telephony and internet solutions to a range of academies, schools and medical centres across Yorkshire."

NGC's network services division has seen considerable growth in the last 12 months - it is now routing 4.5m calls per month on behalf of clients, up from 1.7m a year ago.

NGC Networks is currently recruiting for various positions at its Calder Park offices.

IT and communication SMEs have the UK's second largest business savings pots, with telecom firms holding an average of £804,000 in their savings accounts, reckons Hampshire Trust Bank in a survey report.

Accountancy SMEs, which hold an average of just over £1 million in savings, are the biggest business savers. The national average for business savings is £556k, 57% of a SMEs total funds.

Following the outcome of the EU Referendum, almost half (45%) of businesses within the telecoms sector said they were increasing the amount of cash in their firms to build a cash buffer, higher than the national average of 38%.

This percentage of businesses building a cash buffer increases to 50% for charities and the construction industry.

Stuart Hulme, Director of Savings at Hampshire Trust Bank, said: "The organisations that have been stockpiling cash into current accounts should consider the opportunities to make more out of every £1 earnt. The benefit of making use of savings accounts is not only the interest rate return you get as a business, but also the knowledge that the money is being lent on to SMEs looking to grow, delivering double value and supporting investment in the UK."

Tech Data is aiming to recruit and on-board up to 30 new partners for the Microsoft Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP) programme by the end of the calendar year with its new CPS Accelerator initiative.

The company is looking to sign-up partners for the Tech Data Office 365, Azure and the Enterprise Mobility Suite (EMS) Accelerate Programs and will be providing three training streams - for sales, technical, and marketing - to help resellers get on board and attain the Silver- and/or Gold-level accreditations in Cloud Platform and/or Cloud Productivity that will help support and grow their Microsoft CSP business.

Dwayne Earl, Software Business Unit Manager at Tech Data, said that the programme was being launched in response to rising interest in CSP.

"We've been involved with CSP from the outset and over the past year it has really picked up. We are now seeing more Microsoft Partners wanting to get fully on board and taking it forward as a strategic part of their business," he said.

Earl said Tech Data would be seeking up to ten resellers for each product set - Office 365, Azure and EMS - for the current wave.

Resellers will be required to put at least two members of their team forward for the technical track and one for both the sales and the marketing tracks. "The aim will be for resellers to have the marketing capabilities ready at the point that the individuals in their business have gone through the sales and technical tracks to help generate revenue to support attainment of the Silver or Gold Cloud Competency."

Earl expects the resellers that go onto the programme to gain the accreditations within a six month time frame. Tech Data will also provide support to each partner through named Business Development Executives, Solutions Architects, and its own CSP Specialists.

The programme will be repeated on a six-monthly cycle with the aim to recruit more partners each half. Tech Data has already had a lot of success with the Microsoft CSP programme and now has a ten-strong dedicated team in place providing support to CSP Partners. The team consists of three CSP Specialists, three Business Development Executives, two fully-qualified Microsoft Solutions Architects, one administrator and one manager, all of whom are 100 percent dedicated to the programme.

Following Maintel's acquisition in May this year of Azzurri Communications the organisation will operate as a single integrated business across all functions of sales, operations and finance under the single Maintel brand.

Maintel has also introduced an updated web presence with all customers accessing a single Maintel customer portal.

Maintel's CEO Eddie Buxton said: "The integration of Azzurri into Maintel has continued at pace and we're pleased that everything is going to plan."

Rufus Grig, Maintel Group Strategy Director, said: "As you can imagine, integrating two companies with their individual processes, systems, locations and teams has been a challenge, but one we've enjoyed tackling.

"This latest phase in the integration process will see our people aligned under the single Maintel brand, and from today our customers will be able to access an updated service portal too.

"It's also worth noting that while we've been cracking on with the integration, we've also won significant contracts from right across the business and continued the growth of ICON, our cloud communications platform. It's certainly an exciting time for us."

Maintel recently announced Group revenues of £38.1m for the first half of 2016, an impressive increase of 54% from the same period in 2015 (£24.8m) underpinned by the strategic acquisition of Azzurri Communications, which contributed £15.4m to the revenue.

Onecom has signed three new launch partner agreements with CityFibre committing a minimum of 300 business connections on three of CityFibre's existing metro networks - Coventry, Leicester and Nottingham.

The deal enables Onecom to take full advantage of CityFibre's national network and brings into commercial production the Nottingham and Leicester assets acquired by CityFibre in January 2016.

The five-year agreement, with an initial contract value of £3.2m, represents a substantially increased commitment to Onecom's existing CityFibre partnership in Southend.

In early September it agreed a £1.7m deal to deliver at least 150 business customer connections on CityFibre's new pure fibre network currently under construction in Southend-on-Sea.

As the largest operator in the Vodafone Partner Programme, Onecom will be leveraging its expertise in the business connectivity market to offer ultra-low-latency services to business customers in four CityFibre cities, allowing them to access cloud-based services, IP voice, video conferencing, and remote backup at speeds up to ten times faster than equivalent services, at lower prices.

Access to CityFibre's metro local access fibre networks makes the delivery of these services possible and will help Onecom to dramatically increase its market share with a differentiated fibre connectivity offering.

Darren Ridge, CEO at Onecom, said: "Businesses increasingly need ever faster, more resilient connections to allow them to increase productivity and to give them an edge over their competitors.

"Using CityFibre's ultra-fast networks puts us in the position of being able to deliver all business communications needs over a network that offers ultra-low latency, high speed and reliability.

"This works perfectly in tandem with Onecom's cloud, mobile, systems and professional IT services and allows freedom for businesses to use data-heavy applications such as video conferencing and remote backup at lightning speeds and at lower cost than equivalent services."

Greg Mesch, Chief Executive of CityFibre, added: "In less than a month Onecom has expanded its presence on the CityFibre footprint to four cities - the fastest multi-city ramp-up of any of our partners to date.

"In the short time we've been working together, Onecom have realised that our growing network footprint allows them to address their large and diverse national customer base with innovative and differentiated new gigabit fibre connectivity options at highly attractive prices."

London-based Beta Distribution plans to lift storage to around half its £200m a year sales, having agreed new targets with vendor FalconStor to boost sales.

Beta Distribution claims 2,500 registered customers and says that storage is growing fast: "With data rapidly expanding, storage is in high demand and we have altered our business model to support this," said Tony Howard, Business Development Manager.

"Our aim is to make storage account for at least half of our business by the end of this year and we believe an SDS layer such as FreeStor can drive this and help us meet customer demand."

Tony Martin, UK & Ireland Managing Director, FalconStor, added: "2016 is an exciting year as we expand in the UK and Beta aims to increase the distribution of its storage solutions. The storage market is thriving at the moment and it is crucial for distributors like Beta to help deliver the benefit of an SDS layer that can help organisations avoid vendor lock-in, whether in the cloud or on-premise."

Avast Software has acquired a majority stake in AVG Technologies, creating a $700m revenue business headed up by CEO Vince Steckler.

AVG's CEO Gary Kovacs will be departing, but will be available on a consulting basis throughout the transition.

"The combined company now has over 400 million users, more than 40% of the world's consumer PCs outside of China and the largest consumer security installed base in the world," claimed Steckler.

"The US is now our number one market with 58 million users. We truly have global reach and are proud to be the most popular choice for security in the world."

With the acquisition Avast expands its SMB business and adds AVG's reseller base, enabling Avast to support more and larger organisations.

Avast is also gaining Location Labs and its carrier business, which it plans to invest in and expand overseas.

As a result of the acquisition, Avast holds approximately 87.3% of AVG's outstanding shares acquired upon the closing of the initial offering period for the tender offer.

Avast also announced that it has commenced a subsequent offering period to provide AVG shareholders who have not yet tendered their shares the opportunity to do so.