Comms Dealer

Six Degrees Group (6DG) has announced its Giving Back Scheme whereby employees have the opportunity to get involved with local community projects and gain volunteer experience during their working hours.

The company has pledged to 'give back' the equivalent of a 6DG employee's full working year to local communities, equating to 260 days. Every member of staff will have the opportunity to apply for a full or half days 'community leave' each year.

6DG is openly encouraging all staff to get involved in the local community and volunteering opportunities with their own choice of preferred charities.

Susanna Brown, Director of HR, said: "In addition to giving valuable time and support to those in our communities who need it most, we recognise that participating in such activities can also help play an important role in employees' individual personal development. At 6DG, we are eager that our employees get the most out of working life."

The Giving Back initiative will run alongside 6DG's CSR programme, Six Degrees of Hope, through which employees raise money for WeSeeHope.

6DG has supported the charity since the company was founded, fundraising through a number of annual events and individual challenges.

Hot demand for cloud services drove a 27% increase in Exponential-e's total revenue for the year ending 31st January 2016. Revenues reached £77.3m and EBITDA rose by over 35% to £13.8m with pre-tax profits up 47% to £6.7m.

Underpinning this growth was strong customer acquisition with a 35% increase in new business sales for cloud services.
 
"Over the last year we have enjoyed particular success in targeting the C-level community," stated CEO Lee Wade. "The security offered with our private cloud network has been adopted by many clients in sectors such as legal, finance and media, that have some of the most stringent privacy, compliance and security requirements."
 
Exponential-e is transitioning its business into a global IT brand and will focus on its core network and platform stack, investing in automation - SDN (Software Defined Network) and NFV (Network Function Virtualisation) - to drive a better customer experience and enable organisations to scale and deliver services more quickly.

"Moving forward, we will be looking for opportunities to build our capabilities in data centric services, machine learning and proof-of-concepts for artificial intelligence," added Wade.
 
Exponential-e aims to achieve 23% growth in its next financial year and will recruit an additional 60 staff. Last year staff numbers increased by 20%. 

UC provider Zest4 has launched an M2M Partner Programme following its link-up with Arkessa late last year.

The programme was unveiled at a Chester Races launch event and is designed to help partners fully address the growth opportunity in M2M and IoT services.

The package delivers education and technical support, training via the Zest4 partner academy, marketing support, optimised tariffs and competitive commercials.

"The launch day was a success and many partners are now seriously considering taking their first step into the M2M arena," stated Mandy Fazelynia, Zest4's Operations and Business Development Director.

"The M2M package that ourselves and Arkessa have made available to partners will help them unlock new revenue opportunities now and for the future."

Abzorb has bundled a PBX maintenance service with its UC and mobility portfolio following a link-up with maintenance partner CSR.

Called PBX Cover, the white label service will be officially launched at Comms Dealer's MiVAD event on June 9th.

The end-to-end service combines PBX system maintenance cover (99% of systems are supported), smartphone systems (Mitel Office 400) and the Money Box SIP gateway which enables SIP to be deployed on legacy PBXs.

According to Abzorb the proposition unlocks the potential for resellers to upgrade legacy kit with next generation products and services and further lock-in customers with a maintenance offering.

The 24/7 system maintenance and support service includes all fixed handsets as standard, response within one hour to all faults, quotes raised within eight hours, nationwide coverage for support, and resellers could earn up to 40% margin on Abzorb's annual pricing, said the firm.

PBX Cover also includes pre-sales and training via the Abzorbplus partner programme.

"With our smartphone systems, services such as SIP and hosted telephony can be accessed without the traditional stumbling blocks often encountered," said Mark Riddell, Head of Indirect Channel.

"Maintaining customers' PBX adds value and helps to strengthen loyalty on PSTN, CPS and SIP connectivity, while generating ongoing annuity revenue from maintenance and updates."

Abzorb's long-term partner BT Wholesale has welcomed the launch and predicts greater uptake of its hosted Centrex and Wholesale SIPT propositions as a result of resellers adopting PBX Cover.

Dave Axam, Director of Hosted Communications at BT Wholesale, stated: "By adding its PBX Cover service, Abzorb is able to deliver a complete end-to-end solution including configuration, installation and support."

Marketing firm Blabbermouth has rolled out a 'Transformation Initiative' designed to optimise the sales and marketing performance of businesses in the channel.

Blabbermouth's MD Elizabeth Sparrow (pictured) said the initiative responds to a general lack of integration between the sales and marketing functions of many businesses, stunting their ability to realise their full selling potential.

To put things right, Sparrow said Blabbermouth's business transformation process begins with a company health check, strategic planning, discussions about the true nature of a company, its identity, growth ambitions and long-term goals.

"We then put in place a joined up marketing campaign to deliver new opportunities," she explained.

"But this is only part of the solution. No department should operate in isolation, especially sales and marketing which go hand in hand."

Blabbermouth plans to position businesses for growth by preparing them for seamless customer acquisition, and the man at the centre of the company's new campaign is incoming consultant David Sparrow (pictured) who joins Blabbermouth from TalkTalk Business where he was Head of Corporate and Enterprise Sales and played a leading part in the creation of this high performing division.

Previous roles include notable stints at Freedom Communications, Virgin Media and T-Mobile.

His main purpose is to help sales and marketing leaders escape from the straitjacket of siloed working by creating more scope for professional chemistry between departments.

"Business assessments can often be complex and sensitive," he said. "But we provide a tactful and uncomplicated review of capabilities, processes, structures and strategies within the sales department before establishing best practices and integrating these with the marketing effort.

"Our aim is to assist a variety of businesses with their growth plans and help them unlock new market potential and large flagship opportunities.

"The best businesses are those rooted not in a fractured departmental mode of operation but in a unified framework based on joint targets, measurements and processes that maximise on the benefits of sales and marketing integration."

Blabbermouth's auditing and assessment know-how also enables it to report back on the complete customer journey.

In other company news, Blabbermouth has appointed Cath MacLeod and Leticia Fonseca as Marketing Account Managers and Rico Green as Marketing Administrator.

"These high calibre appointments demonstrate ongoing investment in our strengthening team," said Elizabeth Sparrow.

MacLeod brings significant B2B and B2C marketing experience while Fonseca joins from BT Wholesale where she was Marketing Manager.

In a response to the Queen's Speech ISPA Chair James Blessing said: "ISPA is pleased that broadband and technology had a prominent place in the 2016 Queen's Speech. The Digital Economy Bill contains a number of measures that will impact on ISPA members.

"ISPA is pleased that the Government has put the digital economy front and centre of its upcoming legislative programme.

"The Internet industry has invested significantly in making the UK 'a world leader in digital provision and will continue to do so and so we support government action to remove barriers to rollout.

"We further support the principle of universal broadband, but there remain a number questions surrounding the USO that still need to be addressed, including funding and the impact on the market, so that the benefits of broadband can be felt as widely and effectively as possible.

"We await further information on consumer measures, including automatic compensation, including how this will fit with the existing consumer redress framework.

"Finally, ISPA notes the Government's plan to legislate on its manifesto commitment on age verification for sites offering adult content. ISPA responded to the consultation and will now work with Government and members on this challenging and technically complex area."

Microsoft is partnering with European software giant SAP on the use of SAP's popular Hana in-memory database.

It's often used for performance intensive analytics and transaction processing work, and competes with the in-memory features of Microsoft's SQL Server database on Azure's cloud infrastructure.

A single Hana instance on Azure will support up to 3TB of RAM, with 32TB supported over 16 instances.

SAP already supports Hana on Amazon Web Services, as well as through its own cloud platform.

The companies have partnered to integrate several SAP product lines - its Ariba procurement/B2B software, Concur travel/expense management software, SuccessFactors HR software, and Fieldglass people-management software - with Office 365.

And Microsoft's Intune mobile device management (MDM) software will be able to manage apps from third-party developers that rely on SAP's Hana Cloud Platform (this lets developers build cloud apps running on top of Hana).

Separately, SAP has updated Hana to include graph data processing and capture & replay support. The former helps companies better understand and visualise patterns involving people, places, and things, and the latter helps IT workers evaluate and assess the impact of changes made to Hana workloads.

Distributor Avnet has announced a new UK partner enablement programme as part of its converged infrastructure practice.

The practice supports channel partners delivering pre-architected IT infrastructure solutions and includes regular Avnet-hosted channel briefings and a centre of excellence, The Resource, located in Avnet's newly upgraded UK demonstration venue.

Miriam Murphy, Senior VP, Avnet Technology Solutions, North region, EMEA, said: "The IT landscape is changing rapidly with the continuous innovation of new technologies.

"We have designed our next channel briefing to bring clarity to converged infrastructure and to address how it is evolving and the value it can bring to our business partners and their customers.

"The event underlines Avnet's investment in this priority area and its support for partners. Our aim is to simplify the delivery of converged infrastructure solutions and to enable partners to take advantage of this growing market."

The next channel briefing is being held at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), London, on Thursday 26th May 2016 and involves the following vendors: Cisco, Commvault, F5, HDS, HPE, IBM, NetApp, Nimble, Veeam and VMware.

The CBI has responded to new legislation announced in The Queen's Speech during the State Opening of Parliament.

Josh Hardie, CBI Deputy Director-General, said: "Given the focus on the European Union referendum in this political cycle, it's particularly encouraging to see the Government's clear commitment to locking in growth, creating jobs and boosting investment to create a more prosperous society.

"Prioritising the digital revolution, which is transforming the face of modern business, is a key step to propelling the UK's productivity. Ensuring that broadband reaches all corners of the country will breed a new generation of companies in an increasingly competitive environment.

"We are already working closely with the Government on ensuring higher education gives students the best opportunities and skills, and on the devolution of business rates to drive regional growth. Further action to improve offender rehabilitation is an area where business will look forward to working with the Government.

"Whatever the outcome of the EU referendum, it's vital the Government ploughs ahead with the rest of its programme. In the near future, business is looking forward to hearing more on several key projects, from a new runway in the South East to the National Innovation Plan."

F-Secure has launched a new intrusion detection and incident response managed service that combines human and machine intelligence with a promise to notify companies within just 30 minutes of a breach detection.

According to Gartner, the greatest area of unmet need is effective targeted attack and breach detection.

"Companies are finding that on their own they struggle with intrusion detection and incident response," said Pekka Usva, VP of Advanced Threat Protection at F-Secure.

"They need to find a staff of cyber security experts, build monitoring infrastructure and source good threat intelligence data.

'setting up a proper in-house system is difficult and expensive and takes years to do. That's why a managed service makes sense. It provides an immediate, tangible return on investment."

F-Secure's Rapid Detection Service leverages the strengths of both human and machine intelligence to provide an all-in-one intrusion detection and response service that's ready to go immediately.

The service consists of three main components: Endpoint and Network Decoy sensors that collect data about events and activities; F-Secure's threat intelligence and behavioural analytics, which analyses the data to identify anomalies; and the Rapid Detection Center, which is staffed 24/7 by a team of cyber security experts who identify and handle incidents.

When a breach is detected, an expert will contact the customer within just 30 minutes with incident response and to offer optional onsite investigative services if needed.

"The human component is an important factor," stated Erka Koivunen, Cyber Security Advisor at F-Secure. "Attackers are human, so to detect them you can't rely on machines alone. Our experts know how attackers think, the very tactics they use to hide their presence from standard means of detection. The human factor also eliminates false positives, which are an extreme waste of resources."