Comms Dealer

Sennheiser has unveiled its 'Rolls Royce' of business headsets to address knowledge workers who need peace and quiet when talking on their desk phone or mobile in open plan offices.

The business-grade MB 660 Series is designed specifically for knowledge workers in noisy open offices. The solution features adaptive ANC (active noise cancellation), UC certified communication abilities to ensure crystal clear speech during voice calls and Sennheiser's superior audio quality for music and multimedia enjoyment.

Uniquely, the MB 660 does not have a boom mic - the headset cups contain three digital microphone arrays to deliver superior voice quality - regardless of how noisy the environment is. Sennheiser says battery life is 30 hours.

"Today's open office environments have been shaped to facilitate fast, flexible collaboration. But there will always be times when we need to reclaim space for ourselves - either to fully concentrate, communicate and collaborate in mobile work environments or simply to relax while listening to music," said Andreas Bach, President at Sennheiser Communications A/S.

"With MB 660, we can now upgrade the work experience for office workers, help them take control of their environment and create a disruption-free workspace for increased productivity and well-being."

The product will roll out to the UK channel via UK distributors Corporate Telecom, Duplex, Nimans, Tech Data, Westcoast and Westcon.

Converged Communication Solutions has snapped up Aberdeen-based IT provider Century Business Systems (CBS), its first acquisition.

The deal, valued at circa £500k, strengthens Converged's in-house service operation.

CBS was established in 1999 by Brian West and Kevin Sinclair and supplies computer hardware, software and technical support to businesses across north-east Scotland.

The firm's entire team will transfer to Converged and relocate to its premises, increasing the workforce at Converged to over 25.

Neil Christie, MD at Converged, said: "This is a notable move for us. To date, we have grown and expanded naturally, so our first acquisition is a major step.

"Brian and Kevin, supported by a talented team, have built a strong business and its integration into Converged will enrich the service that we offer to clients.

"Purchasing new premises, expanding our connectivity network and increasing our skilled technical support team illustrate our commitment to the north east and ensuring that businesses have access to a range of network connections to operate efficiently in it."

Channel M&A and finance specialist Knight Corporate Finance sponsored the 'Corporate Challenge' at this year's annual English Half Marathon in Warrington and netted £800 for Comms Dealer charity Sparks.

Other industry teams participating included VoIP hardware distributor ProVu.

"It was a privilege to be involved in such an amazing event and congrats to all the industry teams that took part," said Knight CF Director Paul Billingham.

Picture shows the Knight CF runners Sam Davies, Tom Jones (in the Knight costume), Rupert Mayo and Paul Billingham.

BT's Adastral Park technology and research campus (based near Ipswich) is home to a new higher education ICT training institute named after computing pioneer Tommy Flowers (pictured).

The institute will focus on bringing ICT sector organisations together with academic researchers to solve some of the challenges facing UK businesses, exploring areas such as cyber security, Big Data, autonomics and converged networks.

Dr Tim Whitley, Head of Research for BT and MD of Adastral Park, said: "This institute will bridge the gap between industrial research and the fantastic talent that exists in the academic sector.

"It's appropriate that it is named after Tommy Flowers, a true pioneer of computing and communications technology, who brought together the best of industry and academia to create the world's first Electronic Programmable Computer."

A charity walk organised by Watford-based Telecom Resource raised over £3,000 in aid of Watford Workshop, an organisation that helps disabled and disadvantaged people to gain work experience, skills and employment.

The 5km walk featured Telecom Ted and other Telecom Resource employees who caught the attention of passers by and met with strong demand for selfies near local landmarks.

Entanet is bringing its partner and end user management portals together in its new ?synergi portal which has been re?written and re-platformed to work on desktop and mobile devices. Partners can also white­ label the management interface.

"We are always working to make improvements for customers and while the emphasis will always be on personal service, partners also value having direct access to core functions such as availability checking and ordering, and to information about connections and traffic," said Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing at Entanet.

"This is very important now, especially to resellers who are growing their customer base and their partnership with Entanet. It is also important for them to be able to have access to the full capabilities of the portal, 24/7/365 and on any kind of device."

"The new synergi gives them - and their customers - much more visibility and control. They can see exactly what is happening, which means they can work with our team in a completely open way to maximise service levels for customers."

The new synergi combines into one interface a number of tools that were previously available to partners and customers. Resellers can only see information about their own connections and general network performance. A simple permission-based system allows resellers to control who can see information about orders, accounts and connections.

The initial release of the new synergi will provide all core features, including the ability to manage portal users and permissions, create and view customer records, check single DSL and EFM availability using CLI and address matching, create and view orders, re­grade connections, log faults and complaints, view and download commission records, access detailed reports on all connections, access the Entanet knowledge base, and the ability to receive NOC, operational and commercial alerts.

Additional functionality is being released on a phased basis over the coming months. This will include the white-label capability, support for VoIP and SIP ordering, real-time agent interaction, enhanced tools for providing feedback to Entanet, and integration of ebilling and VoIP user portals. Entanet expects to make the full release available to all partners in early November.

Exponential-e has been accepted on to the G-Cloud 8 framework, approved to deliver IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and other cloud services.

"The cloud plays an integral role in enabling the public sector to achieve its vision for becoming digital by default," said explained David Lozdan, Head of Public Sector at Exponential-e.

"Yet despite total spending on the G-Cloud reaching £1.2 billion since its launch in 2012, less than half of that figure has been invested in cloud computing services.

"We want to support the public sector in transitioning towards modern, cost effective cloud architectures that provide the backbone for the digital transformation of public services.

"With public spending experiencing cuts of 8.3% since 2010, the G-Cloud framework sets out to deliver better public services for less cost and to implement technologies that increase public sector productivity.

"We want to ensure that government departments develop an effective approach to the cloud, which allows them to benefit from shorter procurement cycles and quicker deployment to achieve efficiency savings and support the rapid deployment of new online services."

The largest system produced by Panasonic has been unveiled, scaling from 50 to 2,000 users across 32 sites. The KX-NSX comes in two versions and can manage multiple devices simultaneously and route office calls to a mobile using a single number.

The system features collaborative functions between multiple devices, presence management, audio, text or video chat and synchronisation with Outlook Calendar.

"We recognise that today's workforce is increasingly mobile and fragmented," explains Carlos Osuna, Panasonic Marketing Manager for Communication Solutions.

"The KX-NSX is a flexible system that can be adapted to different situations and environments and one that's capable of meeting the demands and expectations of customers whenever and wherever they arise.

"The KX-NSX is our largest system to date and makes our communication server technology suitable for virtually any business, regardless of its size."

Rural ultrafast broadband provider Gigaclear is carrying out a pilot project using Affinity Water's redundant pipes in an area of Hertfordshire between the villages of Furneux Pelham and Little Hormead.

Gigaclear is investigating the feasibility of using disused water mains to house the cables needed to deliver its fibre-to-the-premises broadband services into or within rural environments.

The project aims to establish the overall feasibility of the concept and its scalability, as well as testing the technical aspects of how to install the fibres through the pipes.

Chris Harrison, Gigaclear's Head of Design, stated: "On paper, the concept of using existing infrastructure to deliver the latest technology direct to homes makes perfect sense. This feasibility study will help us understand if we can turn a great idea into reality.

"If it's successful, it will bring significant benefits to our customers. Because Gigaclear is building completely new broadband networks, putting our fibres through the disused pipes would mean we don't have to dig new trenches to lay cables - minimising the disruption to the rural communities in which we work. 

It would also speed up our build programme, particularly in areas where we would otherwise need to dig in or beside roads as the permitting and traffic management planning process to enable this can be mean lengthy delays in the implementation of the network.

"As an innovative company, it seems only right that we should consider innovative ways of delivering our technologically advanced product and this has the potential to do just that."

If the final outcome of the trial proves successful it could mark the start of similar partnerships with other suppliers throughout the country.

The global Call Control (PBX/IP PBX) extensions and licenses market (excluding Micro PBX products) in the calendar year (CY) Q2 2016 continued to follow the expected downward trend and fell by 2% year-on-year, reports MZA.

The greatest declines were seen in the SME market (solutions ?100 extensions/licenses) as it fell by 3% year-on-year, compared to a 2% decline in enterprise (solutions >100 extensions/licenses).

MZA's analysis suggests that globally small businesses employing ten people or fewer are moving away from CPE systems and towards multi-tenant hosted services* at a faster rate and this was emphasised this quarter with the largest declines seen in solutions ?10 extensions/licenses, as it fell by 7% year-on-year.

Contrastingly in enterprise, growth was seen in solutions >1000 extensions/licenses, up 6% year-on-year, partially driven by virtualised platform sales to large enterprises that have multiple sites. For these types of businesses, single system solutions held in data centres* are projected to increase, according to MZA's recent forecast publication, and replace the combination of CPE Call Control (PBX/IP PBX) deployments multi-site enterprises previously deployed. Such enterprises are seeking to benefit from the technological advancements of virtualisation such as simpler centralised management and a single common platform.

*Note: All extensions/licenses deployed on premise or within a public or private multi-instance or single instance environment are counted within MZA's Call Control (PBX/IP PBX) analysis, multi-tenant services are excluded. An additional service on Hosted/Cloud Business Telephony will be published later this month and provides insight on trends for deployment models for single-instance and multi-instance call control solutions together with multi-tenant services.

Despite the proliferation of pure mobile and multi-tenant cloud services, it is important to stress that any directly related significant declines observed due to these technologies have been generally restricted to certain mature developed markets where these services have been launched and promoted by network operators.

Although harder to quantify, MZA's analysis suggests that continued economic and political problems have played a greater part in the falls in the global Call Control (PBX/IP PBX) market in recent years, with business investment in the regional markets of Latin America and Eastern Europe hit the hardest.

Business confidence in emerging markets picked up a little in Q2 2016. Anxieties about a short-term downfall in China's growth have diminished and the related rise in commodity prices in Q2 2016 has taken some of the worry off commodity-producing economies, particularly in MEA. In developed markets, however, business confidence fell again in Q2 2016 and the UK's EU referendum was an important influence, even before the vote itself. Business confidence in the UK in Q2 2016 was at its lowest levels in over four years, and the uncertainty appears to have affected the rest of Western Europe as well.

The pick-up in business confidence in emerging markets, however, has not been matched by an improvement in capital expenditure and in every region there are far more firms scaling back capital investment rather than increasing it. For many vendors recurring revenue is more commonplace even for on premise deployments and essential in order to arrest continued CAPEX revenue declines. As a consequence of global Call Control (PBX/IP PBX) market value declines, as projected in MZA's recent forecast analysis, further consolidation in the Call Control (PBX/IP PBX) market can be expected in the coming years.

In recent quarters, business investment has been hampered further by price rises due to exchange rate fluctuations, and largely any significant growth in the leading global manufacturers' shipments witnessed in Q2 2016 was constrained to vendor's home markets.
Sequentially, the market rose by 9% quarter-over-quarter, although this should be of little consolation to manufacturers hoping for a recovery to the higher historical volumes of the past. Seasonality tends to mean stronger volumes in the second quarter of the year compared to the first quarter. In the case of Q2 2016, volumes were set against significantly low quarterly volumes in Q1 2016**.

For the first half of the year, global volumes are down 4% year-on-year, closely in line with MZA's forecast analysis published this August.

**Note: Q1 2016 volumes were the lowest global volumes since Q2 2009

In EMEA, Call Control (PBX/IP PBX) market volumes fell by 7% year-on-year. The increasing political and economic uncertainties in Western Europe helped to drive the regional volume levels downwards once more with extensions/licenses falling by 5% year-on-year. Middle East and Africa, notably affected by recent declines in oil tax revenue in the Gulf region and falls in tourism in North Africa, saw volumes fall by double-digits. The Eastern European market fell again against extremely low historical volume levels in Q2 2015. The Russian market continued to drive the decline, as it fell by 20% year-on-year, with international vendors witnessing greater declines in the country, as the Russian government continued to push the platforms of local vendors.

Following a slow start to the year, strong sales in solutions >100 extensions/licenses for market leader Cisco and top three vendor Mitel in the United States helped to see the North American market grow by 4% year-on-year. Within the enterprise market in the United States, growth in the established virtualised platform market helped to drive overall market growth in the quarter. Asia Pacific enjoyed a third successive quarter of year-on-year growth, driven by NEC and Huawei who enjoyed double-digit growth in the region. Price fluctuations, inflationary pressures and high interest rates continued to impact the Latin American market, as it fell by 23% year-on-year.

Competitive Landscape - Q2 2016
With Q2 2016 marking of the end of Cisco's fiscal year Cisco's collaboration revenue grew by 6% year-on-year, when adjusted for the sale of its SP Video CPE business last year. In terms of Call Control licenses, Cisco witnessed a strong uplift in the United States as it retained its 12% share and the first position it held in Q2 2015.

Against Q2 2015, NEC again witnessed strong double-digit growth in its home market of Japan, as it gained a percentage point in global market share to supplant Avaya to take second position and an 11% market share.
Home sales in home markets was an especially significant factor in the performances of the leading vendors, with Avaya dropping a position with a reduced 10% share, down one percentage point. Despite a better performance against the market internationally than both Cisco and NEC, Avaya's overall volumes fell in the United States. Meanwhile, Huawei overhauled Mitel and Panasonic, largely through increased sales of its eSpace platform in China.

Mitel had a good quarter in its core markets outperforming the market and retaining fifth positon, notably its volumes in North America and Western Europe grew as a consequence.

Panasonic remains a true global player with one of the most extensive distribution networks globally and witnessed decent growth in Q2 2016 in a number of emerging markets in MEA and Asia Pacific. Panasonic repeated its Q2 2015 share of 8%, despite falling to sixth position. Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Unify, Microsoft and Samsung completed the global top ten.
In solutions ?100 extensions/licenses (excluding Micro PBX products), NEC overhauled Q2 2015 market leader, Panasonic, to take first position although both vendors collected 15% market shares. Avaya, Mitel and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise remain in third, fourth and fifth positions respectively.

Cisco comfortably led the >100 extensions/licenses market in Q1 2016, with a market share of 20%. Huawei supplanted Avaya for second position as it took a 14% share up two percentage points.

World IP Extensions/Licenses Market
IP extensions/licenses grew by 4% year-on-year with TDM extensions falling by 8%. Global IP penetration (% of IP extensions to the desktop out of total extensions) rose to 53% in Q2 2016 from 50% in Q2 2015, aided by strong growth in North America and Asia Pacific. IP penetration fell against Q2 2015 in MEA leaving the region with the lowest IP penetration rate globally at 35%.

Cisco continued to lead the global IP licenses market with a 20% share, with Avaya in second position on 14%. Mitel retained third position ahead of Huawei and Microsoft.

Note: This analysis refers to user license/extension volume performance, due to the fact that this is the key performance indicator provided by all contributing parties, with no vendor providing sector specific analysis of revenue performance.