Comms Dealer

Pure fibre broadband providers CityFibre and Gigaclear have joined forces to bring ultrafast pure fibre broadband services to rural areas. With metro fibre networks in over 37 towns and cities and over 1,100km of long distance network, CityFibre's national footprint will be used to facilitate Gigaclear's deployment of rural pure fibre networks.

CityFibre's long distance network will provide a new backhaul option for future Gigaclear deployments while its metro networks and POP facilities will facilitate connectivity to nearby rural areas.
  
Greg Mesch, Chief Executive of CityFibre, said: "Gigaclear shares a complementary agenda. We have long been aware of the huge levels of demand for better Internet connectivity in rural areas surrounding our urban network projects. It is a national embarrassment that residents and businesses in rural areas, and indeed many of those in towns and cities, have been left in the digital dark ages. Pure fibre infrastructure is the 21st century utility and is an essential component to everyday life."
 
Matthew Hare, Chief Executive at Gigaclear, added: "Bringing fast broadband to rural Britain has its challenges. This partnership with CityFibre gives Gigaclear access to more capacity, faster delivery and more flexible bandwidth across the country. It helps us build Gigabit networks where other operators do not reach, to meet the demand for better broadband from homes and businesses."

Back-up specialist Druva has formed a German subsidiary to drive partner recruitment and expansion in the DACH area.

Druva has appointed Andreas Sturm as Regional Sales Director, DACH, to lead the company's business development efforts.

His experience includes more than 16 years in similar roles at Verne Global, Commvault and EMC.

At the same time, Susan Hoch has been appointed as Channel Manager, DACH, joining the Druva team from VMware where she spent the last eight years running partner enablement and support initiatives.

Rick Powles, Druva's VP for EMEA, told IT Europa that the business is set for a period of rapid growth driven by the need for compliance among customers looking at the adoption of the GDPR data privacy rules by Europe.

Druva has been building its cloud business through working with both AWS and Azure, and with, it says, some 40% of corporate data now at end-points, it is finding customers responsive to the idea of protection at this level as well as the traditional server backup.

Druva, which first localised its top-rated data protection solutions into German last year, has seen the rapid adoption by German, Austrian and Swiss organisations, including Andritz, Continental, DHL, Leica, Siemens and dozens of others, it says.

Claranet has been positioned as a Leader in Gartner's 2016 Magic Quadrant for Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting, Europe, for the fourth year running.

Gartner has revised the criteria for its IaaS and hosting Magic Quadrants this year to take into account the evolving market. While there is still a focus on locally-hosted services in Europe, public cloud services are gaining in popularity throughout Europe - a change that has been reflected in the name and evaluation criteria for Gartner's Magic Quadrant for Managed Hybrid Cloud Hosting.

Charles Nasser, CEO of Claranet, commented: "We see hybrid IT as a key differentiator for us and have, over the past two years, invested heavily in our public cloud capabilities to ensure that we can offer a complete range of hosted services."

netEvidence has rebranded as Highlight following the appointment of Antony Bream as MD who aims to expand the company's global reach and growth on the back of recently announced revenues which were up 27% on last year to £3.6m (the latest in a four year run of 25 per cent average increases).

Richard Thomas, CEO, stated: "The new branding is a key element in our expansion - it's modern, in tune with the industry and gives us a fresh platform to build on the successes we have already achieved with global partners such as Verizon and Telstra. We will now embark on a whole new level of expansion outside our traditional UK market and into Europe, Asia and North America."

Bream was previously at Nimbus Partners (a Tibco company) where he built the sales and delivery team from scratch to expand the business globally.

He achieved a similar European expansion for Dion, a global financial solutions company, working specifically to build out its European sales and commercial teams. And for the Swiss-based financial software company Crealogix, Bream helped expand its brand and profile in the UK using a mix of social, content marketing and partner relations.

Bream said: "My experience over the past 12 years has been in helping companies, of a similar size to Highlight, to expand their sales and marketing and work with the other company departments to align internal and external processes to achieve success on a global basis. And Highlight is ripe for expansion.

"The new brand offers a more global positioning and will be supported by a significant investment in marketing and a continued focus on R&D to closely match customer requirements for the future."

Avnet has appointed Danny Yeowell as Director for its Technology Solutions UK Security and Networking business unit.

Yeowell has over 30 years experience within the IT industry working for manufacturers and systems integrators across a broad range of sectors and joins from Dimension Data where he was UK solutions director.

Prior to this he headed up pre-sales and architecture at Logicalis for six years.

Yeowell will be responsible for accelerating growth and profitability for Avnet, its partners and suppliers in the area of security and networking - a business in which Avnet UK has seen double-digit growth in the last year.

Christian Curtis, Sales Director, Avnet Technology Solutions, UK, said: "Danny has considerable experience in an area of the market that presents significant opportunity and where we have high ambitions to accelerate growth for our partners and suppliers.

"Security and networking is pervasive to all areas of technology and none more so than next-generation, where huge growth is predicted.

"Over the last few years we've invested heavily in building out a security centre of excellence, which has enabled us to deliver significant value to our partners and reaped rewards for all concerned. We will continue to invest in this important area."

Huawei has named Shi Weiliang as Vice President of Huawei's Enterprise Business Group in the UK.

Prior to this role, Weiliang was the President of Enterprise Business in West Africa.

During his year and a half tenure in this role, Weiliang led a sales team that significantly grew the enterprise business in the region and his team was also awarded the Outstanding Regional Award Business Group in 2015 by the business.

He said: "Our enterprise business has seen strong growth in the last few years and leading the UK enterprise business is an exciting opportunity. As the digital landscape continues to adapt, the challenges facing enterprises also changes. I look forward to working with our partners to help Huawei meet the growing demands that face many UK businesses today."

In 2015, Huawei Enterprise Business Group globally generated $4.25 billion annual revenue, an increase of 43.8 percent year-over-year fuelled by customer demand for new ICT solutions.

ScanSource POS and Barcode hosted its 2016 ScanSource Partner Conference in Malta this month, bringing together almost 200 attendees, including ScanSource executives, vendor and reseller partners.

The conference gathered channel experts for three days of networking; and the agenda featured a series of sessions discussing new trends and key developments in industry software, with a particular focus on the challenges and opportunities around the Internet of Things.

Attendees also engaged in a vendor panel discussion led by the conference sponsors.

ScanSource POS and Barcode Europe's President, Maurice Van Rijn, provided an update on the company's latest services and tools, and enhancements to existing tools, such as Showpad and PartnerPAD.

Alongside the conference, ScanSource POS and Barcode announced the opening of two new offices in Warsaw, Poland, and Madrid, Spain.

ScanSource also provided an overview of its enhanced sales structure with the appointment of five regional sales directors for its Europe business.

Ultracomms has appointed Derwyn Jones as Chief Executive Officer.

He brings over 25 years experience in the contact centre and business process outsourcing (BPO) industries, and has a proven track record in delivering improvements in operations, sales, cost control, quality and productivity.

Prior to joining Ultracomms he held a variety of non-executive, board advisory and C-level roles with major blue chip brands including Parseq, Golly Slater, The Panther Group, Dell Corporation, and the SITEL Corporation, both in EMEA and in the US.

Robert Bates, Chairman of Ultracomms, said: "Derwyn brings a wealth of experience in the contact centre industry and a proven strategic background that will help us continue to grow the business and deliver an innovative roadmap of features and services for existing and new clients."

Derwyn's appointment follows a period of investment in technology, including the patented advanced answer machine detection solution, AMD+, PCI DSS level 1 certification, and most recently the announcement that speech analytics technology will be made available to clients this summer.

Jones said: "Ultracomms has an impressive technology portfolio backed by a talented and committed team. Looking ahead, we want more organisations to be aware of how Ultracomms can help them achieve improvements in productivity and learn how the right choice of technology can have a positive impact on both customer and employee experience, while optimising costs and remaining compliant with all the key industry regulators."

Data centre firm MIGSOLV has rolled out its first channel programme and is on the hunt for resellers of its colocation services.

The support package includes discounted rack price, dedicated account manager and support line, 24x7 onsite support and the company is backing its programme with the promise that if, within 60 days, a reseller's customer is unhappy with any aspect of its service, it will refund all related fees.

MIGSOLV CEO, Alex Rabbetts, stated: "We're excited to launch our reseller programme as the next phase of our company's growth. There's a great opportunity for forward-thinking resellers to enhance their offerings."

MIGSOLV's Gatehouse data centre is located on a nine acre site in Norwich.

5G commercial services will launch in 2020 and there will be 24 million 5G subscriptions worldwide at the end of 2021 for mobile and fixed broadband services, according to Ovum's inaugural 5G Subscription Forecasts released this week.

North America and Asia will each account for more than 40% of global 5G subscriptions at the end of 2021, followed by Europe with more than 10% of subscriptions, with the Middle East and Africa accounting for the remainder.

Ovum estimates that 5G services will be available in more than 20 markets worldwide by the end of 2021, with services in all four major world regions. However, the vast majority of 5G subscriptions will be concentrated in the US, Japan, China, and South Korea, where major operators have revealed aggressive timelines for launching 5G services.

"The main use case for 5G through 2021 will be enhanced mobile broadband services, although fixed broadband services will also be supported, especially in the US," said Mike Roberts, Ovum Practice Leader covering carrier strategy and technology.

"Over time 5G will support a host of use cases including Internet of Things and mission-critical communications, but Ovum does not believe those use cases will be supported by standardised 5G services through 2021."

A number of operators have announced plans to launch what they describe as 5G services before 2020, but these will not typically be based on networks and devices complying with 5G standards, and so are excluded from Ovum's forecasts.

Ovum defines a 5G subscription as an active connection to a 5G network via a 5G device. 5G is further defined as a system based on and complying with 3GPP 5G standards, beginning with parts of 3GPP Release 15, which is scheduled to be finalised in 2018.

"5G is at an early stage and there is a high degree of uncertainty around 5G deployment and adoption, including significant upside and downside risks," Roberts added.