Comms Dealer

Kent-based True Telecom has gone into administration following a series of run-ins with the authorities.

The company was fined £85k by the Information Commissioner's Office for making illegal nuisance calls.

True Telecom was also under investigation by Ofcom for breaching a number of consumer protection rules and it was also reported that the HMRC intended to take court action againstTrue Telecom.

T C H Ball and M I Field were appointed Joint Administrators of the company on 27th October 2017. In a statement they said the business continues to trade while the Administrators explore the most suitable options for the future.

A Halloween inspired theme day put Nimans' Manchester HQ in high spirits as staff dressed up in scary costumes and took part in ghoulish party games, including a Murder Mystery challenge. The day was declared a 'spooktacular' success, raising hundreds of pounds for a local school.

Level 3 Communications has appointed Julia Fraser as Vice President of Sales to lead the business across UK and Ireland.

She will oversee the strategy to deliver Level 3's network solutions portfolio to new and existing customers in the enterprise and wholesale space.

Fraser originally joined Level 3 in 2012 as Commercial Directo and progressed to Vice President of Access Management in EMEA in 2014.

During this time she was responsible for the commercial relationship with all network providers into the Level 3 business in EMEA.

Earlier this year Fraser returned to the sales division as Vice President of Professional Services and Specialist Sales to lead on growing the company's strategic product set, including security, voice, UCC, content delivery network and professional services across EMEA. 

Arrow Electronics has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Commtech, a value added distributor specialising in infrastructure and security solutions for an undisclosed fee.

Commtech celebrates its 20th anniversary this year and currently operates in the UK and Ireland from offices in London, Belfast and headquarters in Dublin where it was founded in 1997.

It deals with more than 20 global vendors, including Dell EMC, Nexsan, SolarWinds, StorageCraft, Quest and Rubrik.

With a focus on the enterprise data centre, Commtech says it specialises in solutions for the rapidly moving private and hybrid cloud environments.

The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals and is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2017.

Westcon-Comstor CEO Dolph Westerbos has left to take over as CEO of Dutch office equipment retailer Staples.

With the $2 billion Americas business now sold to Synnex, the distributor is much smaller than a year ago.

Westerbos will be taking over as CEO of Amsterdam, Netherlands-based Staples Solutions, the operating name for Staples' European business, which has sales of around €2bn.

Jens Montanana, CEO of parent Datatec, has assumed the role of Westcon-Comstor's executive chairman says the company's website.

Citrix Systems has kicked off a restructuring programme to support its previously announced transformation to a cloud-based subscription business.

The programme includes cutting full-time positions and consolidating existing facilities. The company has more than 8,000 workers worldwide. It has already started laying off staff in the US, and the cuts are expected to hit most functions, although the indication is of a shift from SMB to enterprise-scale products, with the closure of some product lines

Citrix expects to record between $60m to $100m in pre-tax restructuring charges with $55m to $70m in pre-tax charges related to employee severance and $5m to $30m for facility consolidation.

Citrix anticipates completing most of the restructuring activities during Q4 and during FY18.

Citrix has sold off assets in recent years, and the entire company was rumoured to be for sale at certain points in 2016 and 2017. In mid-2017 it replaced its CEO for the fourth time since 2015.

Datatec has issued a poor trading statement for the six months ended 31 August 2017.

Underlying earnings per share will be between 1 and 2 US cents - 84% to 92% below H1 FY17 (12.5 US cents).

Consolidated revenue for H1 FY18 is expected to be $2.99bn (H1 FY17 $3.04bn), with a gross margin of 13.3% (H1 FY17 13.8%).

The year over year decline in earnings is primarily as a result of a worse performance in the group's Westcon distribution subsidiary, said Datatec.

Westcon-Comstor continued to experience disruption to the business as a result of a final SAP implementation across the EMEA region.

Earnings for H1 FY18 were further impacted by higher finance charges, amortisation expenses and effective tax rates compared to H1 FY17. The company sold its Westcon North America and Latin America businesses to SYNNEX with effect from 1 September 2017.

For the half-year, Westcon-Comstor saw a drop in revenues of $51m compared to last time. The drop in revenue resulted in a reduction in gross profit of $19m in the EMEA region, representing the bulk of the drop in gross profit in Westcon-Comstor. Revenue for Westcon in Europe alone was down $30m to $730m for the period.

The Logicalis IT services business saw sales fall to $694m from $757m and 'flat' gross profits of $175m. Datatec expects to release its full interim results for H1 FY18 on 13 November 2017. The SYNNEX sale is set to raise $630m in cash on completion and up to $200m payable as a cash earn-out, subject to Westcon Americas meeting certain agreed gross profit performance targets.

Datatec says it intends to retain $130m for 'various operational and working capital and expansion funding requirements'. Datatec 'will consider' returning the majority of the remaining $500m to shareholders by way of share repurchases and/or a specific dividend.

Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba is scouting locations for a second European data centre to better compete in the cloud services market dominated by Amazon Web Services.

The first data centre was opened in Frankfurt last November - leading locations for the new data centre include London and somewhere in Sweden, it is reported.

The company currently has 14 data centres and has already announced new ones in Indonesia and Malaysia.

Alibaba held onto 2.6% of the cloud infrastructure services market in Q2, according to reports. The company is narrowing the gap with Google's 5.9% share but falls far behind the 30.3% AWS market share.

JPMorgan analysts Alex Yao and Gokul Hariharan think the division could account for 15% of Alibaba revenues by 2021.

BT Agile Connect brings next generation control, agility and cost efficiency to enterprise networks
 
BT has launched BT Agile Connect, a new software defined wide area network (SD-WAN) service designed for large organisations.

According to BT, customers using this new service will benefit from greater control and understanding of their infrastructure and traffic flows, a much faster, simpler and more secure way of setting up new sites, reduced network complexity and lower costs.

Agile Connect is built on technologies from BT and Nuage Networks from Nokia, and comes with the security and resiliency of BT's global network infrastructure.

Agile Connect equipment is currently live within the networks of several large global organisations and is now ready for volume deployment for existing and new customers.

Agile Connect uses software-defined networking (SDN) on a national or global scale to dynamically determine the most effective route for traffic to take across a customer's wide area network. 

Its dynamic routing allows organisations to meet bandwidth demand by making it significantly easier to introduce new access services to their network or by making better use of what previously were back-up connections. 

It also ensures that traffic from high-priority business applications always takes the best performing route.

Customers prioritise applications or manage use of access services via an interactive portal. They also gain an improved visibility of application performance. Changes are implemented centrally without the need for expensive local technical support. 

Agile Connect includes a BT pre-built controller infrastructure hosted on the internet and on BT's multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) network.

It also uses BT pre-built MPLS Internet gateways to offer simple cloud-based connectivity between Internet-connected and MPLS-connected sites.
And it benefits from BT's investments in the security of both the controller and gateway infrastructure.

Together, these features save customers from having to undertake time-consuming and costly design, delivery and on-going maintenance of controllers, interconnection gateways, security and monitoring systems critical to the performance of a SD-WAN.

Through a touch-control interface on the self-service portal, customers can set up new sites in minutes rather than months without costly, on-location, technical support.

The service can also be used to aggregate network connections, bringing together services from different providers and different network types. This feature is particularly valuable for companies integrating networks following a merger or acquisition.  

Agile Connect is part of BT's Dynamic Network Services programme, which brings together BT's global network infrastructure with the latest network technologies, including SDN and network functions virtualisation (NFV) to underpin large organisations' digital transformation. 

Agile Connect is delivered as a single box located on the edge of their network, with further services added as additional devices. 

In the future, Agile Connect will support virtual network functions (VNFs), with new services deployed virtually to the Agile Connect device, removing the need to install multiple boxes.

Worldwide server shipments grew 2.4% annually in the second quarter, while total revenue went up by 2.8%, according to Gartner.

Jeffrey Hewitt, an analyst at Gartner, said the growth was down to a strong regional performance in Asia/Pacific as a result of data centre infrastructure build-outs - mostly in China - and global ongoing hyperscale data centre growth.

As organisations continue to turn to hybrid cloud deployments and increasingly use on-demand software and services through managed service providers, the data centre server growth may well continue.

Gartner said shipments for x86 servers increased 2.5% and 6.9% in revenue terms. RISC/Itanium Unix servers fell globally for the period, down 21.4% in shipments and 24.9% in vendor value terms. The other CPU category, which is primarily mainframes, showed a revenue decline of 29.5%.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) continued to lead in the worldwide server market based on revenue. Despite a decline of 9.4%, the company posted $3.2bn in revenue for a total share of 23% for the second quarter of 2017.

Dell EMC maintained the number two position with 7% sales growth and 19.9% market share, although it was slightly ahead of HPE when it came to shipments.

Huawei experienced the highest revenue growth in the quarter with 57.8%.The total global server market for the second quarter was worth just under $14bn, and the total number of shipments was 2.8 million servers.