Comms Dealer

A trip to Iceland next March courtesy of Daisy Distribution awaits the highest sellers of 'premier' Samsung devices following the launch of a new partner incentive scheme.

The promotion builds on last year's Portugal incentive and runs from August until 31st January next year. The partners with the highest volumes winning a trip to Iceland in March 2017.

The partners will be split into four tiers with a number of spots allocated to each tier, allowing an equal chance to the distributor's partner base.

Julien Parven (pictured), Marketing Director at Daisy Distribution, said: "We ran a similar incentive last year and saw fantastic engagement from our partners, leading to 19% increase in unit sales volumes.

"We have a host of sales enablement material available to our partners but this time we will also be offering access to Samsung trial kit, allowing their customers to try before they buy. It's a great way to help seal the deal, especially when it comes to device sales."

Support materials include product guides, training and white label collateral. The demo kit, numbering 65 units is a mix of premium devices and tablets and will be available to those partners who have a fully-engaged relationship with a customer that is within the last six months of contract and is actively within a decision making cycle.

sipsynergy has appointed Steve Day as Sales Director and Ged Fitton as Chief Operating Officer. The new hires come hot on the heels of recent appointments Tom Kelly (Chairman) and Toby Gold (CEO) following a £2.75m investment from YFM Equity Partners .

Gold commented: "Steve and Ged bring invaluable experience, expertise and knowledge to the company and I have no doubt they will both make significant contributions in driving the business forward as we execute our business plan and continue to grow at pace to take advantage of the huge market opportunity we see for both ourselves and our channel partners."

Based on Cisco's Hosted Cloud Solution (HCS), sipsynergy has developed a white labelled channel offering which integrates back-end business processes - such as quoting, provisioning, billing and support - into a management portal, reducing cost and complexities and enabling partners to transition to an annuity based UC-as-a-service offering.

Steve Day, who formerly held senior sales roles at Westcon and Inclarity, will be responsible for driving channel sales, partner recruitment and helping resellers leverage the burgeoning market opportunity for hosted UC-as-a-service.

He added: "As a 100% channel business I can't wait to start engaging with partners to help them grow their businesses around hosted UC-as-a-service.

"My goal is to actively recruit, grow and enable partners to take advantage of this growing market opportunity."

Fitton joins having spent 16 years with Cisco where most recently he was responsible for supporting and developing its 'innovation-led' customers. He will be responsible for managing all aspects of sipsynergy's operations, services and customer support functions.

Fitton said: "sipsynergy has taken well proven collaboration architecture from Cisco and added incremental functionality that fits with the needs of channel partners targeting the SMB marketplace with a hosted UC proposition."

South West Communications Group has joined the top 5% of Microsoft resellers worldwide having achieved the Silver Small and Mid-market Cloud Solutions competency.

The Exeter-headquartered company is nearing Gold status having sold and installed multiple Office 365 solutions to businesses across its region since adding the product to its portfolio at the start of the year.

swcomms is also working towards its Silver Data centre competency to consolidate its ability to provide private cloud management and virtualisation deployment planning services.

John Holdstock, swcomms ICT Director, said: "Our team has worked hard to achieve this competency and has successfully resold and migrated Office 365 to existing customers and new."

TeleWare has been awarded Avaya accreditation and is set to join the Avaya DevConnect Program.

Nick Reaks, Chief Operations Officer, TeleWare, said: "This accreditation places us in an exclusive group of Avaya partners and will enable us to work with other companies and offer complementary products through partnerships.

"Each company will bring something new to the table and together we can grow organically and open new markets for each other.

"We're especially excited to be able to tap into the needs of small-and mid-size companies looking for contact centre solutions. This fits with our TeleWare Communications Manager (TCM) product and we're excited to be able to roll this out on Avaya."

TeleWare CEO Steve Haworth added: "Working with Avaya greatly supports our current strong growth phase. We look forward to generating leads and sales in a wide range of markets and delivering value to end users and resellers."

Content Guru has added workforce management (WFM) capabilities to its cloud contact centre solution following a link up with Teleopti.

John Rees, Chief Commercial Officer at Content Guru, commented: "WFM is an increasingly important element of the customer engagement hub and plays a vital role in driving staff efficiencies in combination with more traditional contact centre functions.

"Teleopti's ability to manage staffing on a per-country basis is a key element of the service and aligns well with our global growth model. The potential inherent across both the WFM and customer engagement markets is tremendous."

A custom-built integration connects Teleopti's WFM client with the dynamic agent environment within Content Guru's storm CONTACT solution, enabling contact centre and workforce managers to evaluate and adapt their resourcing and customer engagement strategies.

The partnership has already seen a number of key clients onboarded in the UK and looks to expand into a truly global collaboration.

Nick Smith, Business Manager UK & Ireland at Teleopti, added: "The workplace is constantly changing and as customer demand continues to evolve is becoming an increasingly complex and dynamic environment.

"The workforce is no different. Not only customers but now colleagues bring expectations of interacting anywhere, any how and at any time, making WFM more important than ever in responding to these unstructured demands."

Independent consultancy Telematics Pro has linked up with GreenRoad Technologies to leverage anan app that modifies driver behaviour and improves fleet management.

GreenRoad Mobile acts as a 'coach in the cab' alerting drivers when they undertake risky manoeuvres such as harsh braking, swerving, or sudden acceleration, by monitoring 150 different vehicle movements.

The consultancy, which covers Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Northamptonshire and surrounding areas, has joined GreenRoad's new reseller partner programme.

Ben Peters, Director of Telematics Pro, said: "Health and safety is the key driver now for installing telematics systems.

"GreenRoad Mobile is an interesting alternative to the hard-wired system as it offers flexibility and ease of use."

Chris Hoborwyj, Director of Sales UK for GreenRoad Technologies, added: "GreenRoad mobile brings the advantages of our wired-in solution into a mobile format."

GreenRoad Mobile works on smartphones or tablets and there is no need to install any equipment in the vehicle, as drivers download, install and run the app on a smartphone or tablet then place that device in the cockpit of the vehicle.

US-based Equinix has completed the second phase expansion of its LD6 International Business Exchange (IBX) data centre in Slough.

With £26m of capital investment the second phase of LD6 will add 1,385 cabinets, bringing the total operational capacity of the data centre to 2,770 cabinets.

Equinix UK MD Russell Poole said: "As one of the most pivotal connection points in the world, London continues to play a significant role in facilitating the flow of data that supports the digital economy.

"With the completion of the second phase of LD6, Equinix will bring to market more opportunity for interconnection to connect companies to their customers, employees and partners and to ultimately accelerate their business performance."

Tintri has registered record Q2 sales in EMEA driven by demand for all-flash and scale-out storage.

"The ability of VM-aware storage to slash management effort and guarantee performance has attracted more than 1,000 customers. Our success spans regions-both EMEA and APAC set sales records in the quarter," said Ken Klein, chairman and CEO of Tintri.

"Our customers are trusting Tintri with mission critical virtualised applications, and increasingly often as a backbone of their private or hybrid cloud strategy."

US-listed cloud customer collaboration specialist Interactive Intelligence has reported rapid expansion of its partner ecosystem.

Since the first of the year, the company says it has signed 50 new partners with indirect sales accounting for nearly half of new customer deals. In Q2, an Interactive Intelligence channel partner closed the largest indirect deal in the company's history, worth more than $12.5 million.

"We overhauled our Global Partner Program late last year to make doing business with us simpler and to give partners new revenue opportunities within the cloud market," said Darren Gill, Interactive Intelligence vice president of channels.

"Our recent results show that partners are benefitting from these changes, and we'll continue to find ways to support their business."

The Interactive Intelligence ecosystem now comprises nearly 440 companies worldwide and includes EMEA firms Advania, Altea, Bizmatica, Capita, KPN International, Maintel, MTM, NTT Data, OBS, Procat International, QPC, Telefonica and Wren Data.

Traditional barriers to hosted telephony adoption such as security and resilience concerns have been 'smashed' according to Chris Goodman, MD of Shoreham-based Focus Group. "Almost 70% of systems sold last month were hosted," he said.

"Connectivity is cheap, the commercials are strong and you can reduce outbound call spend at the same time.
"We now have plenty of case studies and reference sites across all market sectors."

Witney-based STL has witnessed a bigger leap in hosted sales, noted MD Brendon Cross. "Hosted accounts for 75% of our sales," he added. "The proposition is better understood because buyers are more aware of the cloud and their IT is probably hosted, and the opex model is more attractive."

This trend has resulted in a record entry for the 2016 Comms National Awards with a 60% increase in submissions for cloud-based solutions.

Chair of the judging panel Paul Cunningham commented: "The number, variety and quality of entries in the Cloud Solutions and Hosted categories has underlined the extent of the opportunity in this marketplace.
"The Cloud SME Solution category in particular yielded over 20 award submissions of consistently high quality and with demonstrable business impact, not just in terms of cost of ownership but in driving transformations in the businesses where they were deployed.

"Not only do leaders of these channel businesses 'get cloud', they have set out to excel in the delivery of these solutions."

Research by trade body the Cloud Industry Forum also reflects a transition towards hosted services during 2016, revealing that over four in five UK organisations have formally adopted at least one cloud service.

The Comms National Awards finals night will be held on October 13th at London's Hilton on Park Lane Hotel. www.cnawards.com