Comms Dealer

Europe is preparing for another legal showdown with Google, this time over its Android mobile operating system.

"Our concern is that, by requiring phone makers and operators to preload a set of Google apps, rather than letting them decide for themselves which apps to load, Google might have cut off one of the main ways that new apps can reach customers," EU antitrust chief Margrethe Vestager has said.

The comments come a year after she accused the company of favouring its shopping service in delivering search results at the expense of rivals.

Privately-held Veeam Software, which has been building its European channels and pushing its cloud backup and disaster recovery, has reported a 24% rise in bookings in Q1 over the same period last year, doing well particularly in the bigger deals.

Ratmir Timashev, CEO at Veeam, said: "Our Q1 results show that demand for Veeam Availability solutions continues to accelerate rapidly and we fully expect this growth to continue at a similar pace for the rest of 2016."

In in its sixth year, the Veeam Cloud & Service Provider (VCSP) programme, which offers opportunities for service providers, reported an increase of 82% in the number of transactions year-over-year. It says it added close to 11,000 total paid customers in Q1 2016, consistent with a historical average of approximately 3,500 new customers each month, and channels are expanding, with 39,000 ProPartners worldwide.

In the UK & Ireland, Veeam says it now has 13,752 customers, a rise of 28% customers since Q1 2015, and 2,527 ProPartners, up 14% yr/yr.

A consortium led by Seneca Partners, including Barclays and Finance Yorkshire, has given Vapour a £1m-plus funding boost, making the cloud provider the first north of England business to receive Barclays' Innovation Finance Product.

The move sees Vapour Media rebrand as Vapour Cloud and the funding will support the growth of Vapour's technical and business development teams as well as enhance its cloud portal capabilities.

Vapour has witnessed rapid growth since it was established in 2012 and has previously attracted a multi-million pound venture capital investment.

Vapour works with organisations across the UK, providing business solutions encompassing Internet access, a cloud voice platform and UK-based storage, back-up and replication - all private and fully functional in the UK.

Last year the business merged with Manchester-based Everycloud in a transaction backed by Finance Yorkshire and private investors.

Vapour plans to double its headcount to 42 in the next 12 months, expand its private MPLS network, move to larger premises with a demonstration suite, and launch a new portal.

Tim Mercer, co-founder and CEO at Vapour, commented: "In the two years since conception, Vapour has developed over 50 partnerships, securing a number of rounds of equity funding and now has the support of a major high street bank.

"The investment from Seneca Partners, Barclays and Finance Yorkshire is testament to our vision and ambition. As a relatively newly formed company, it is a major boost for us to secure this support.

"All of the teams involved demonstrated from the start that they fully understood our market proposition and recognised the potential of the business to achieve rapid growth."

Richard Manley, Director at Seneca Partners, added: "Through our group company Acceleris, Seneca Partners has been involved with Vapour since the EveryCloud merger last year.

"As with the merger and previous funding rounds, Acceleris successfully project managed this £1m+ fund raise, which was led with a significant equity investment from Seneca's EIS fund.

"With the new funding and an experienced senior management team, the combined business now has the fire power to drive significant growth through its 'one-stop-shop' sales offering."

David Parr, Relationship Director at Barclays in Manchester commented: "As part of our plans at Barclays to enhance our high growth offering to the market, we are extending our lending capabilities and credit appetite in the technology sector for ambitious, entrepreneurial businesses like Vapour."

David Best, Investment Manager at Finance Yorkshire commented: "We first backed the management team at Vapour Cloud in June 2013 with an investment from our Seedcorn fund, and have now committed £1.3m to support its ambitious growth plans."

Enghouse Interactive is enabling enterprise customers of its Quality Management Suite (QMS) to bring more emotional intelligence to bear in their interactions with customers.

This is achieved through a new real-time soft evaluator capability in the latest version of the software, QMS 2016.

The new soft evaluator tool offers fully automated quality assurance and call optimisation for every call.

The technology helps encourage agent empathy and gauges the emotional state of both customers and agents by evaluating their voices and improving conversations in real time.

The soft evaluator capability can assess live calls to identify incidences of cross-talking, changes in conversational tone, speech ratio balance, speech volume and the stress levels of both parties.

Users can employ the tool to produce scores against each of these criteria either automatically in real-time to be attached to recordings in the QMS or to make them available in a batch format to be assessed and reported on at a later time.

Steve Ellis, Managing Director of Enghouse Interactive distributor, 5i, said: "This new real-time soft evaluator capability is helping to move enterprises to a new level in terms of the way they interact with their customers through the contact centre."

Cloud provider Calligo has opened a new office in London and appointed Mark Thomas as Director of On-Boarding Services to support and grow its client base across the country.

Julian Box, Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer commented: "Our push into the UK is in recognition of the size and opportunity of the cloud market and is a natural next step given the strong client base we already enjoy in there."

Before joining Calligo Thomas was the Solutions Architect at Databarracks, responsible for the design and implementation of its Infrastructure-as-a-Service and Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service offerings. He has also held leadership roles at VirtualizeIT and Virtustream.

Further hires in the UK will follow in the coming months as Calligo continues to grow its presence in the UK.

Imago ScanSource is launching a new video conferencing system, i-Kandy, bringing together two products from Polycom and Array Telepresence.

i-Kandy combines the Array Equal-i image processor and DX dual-headed camera with the Polycom Group 500 video, voice and collaboration system.

Imago ScanSource is offering its reseller channel the opportunity to become authorised partners for i-Kandy, which will enable them to take advantage of the available training programmes, secure improved margins and deliver installation services to customers. Imago ScanSource is also currently providing a 2-for-1 offer on i-Kandy for a limited period.

"We introduced Array to the UK market last year, and its ability to upgrade video conferencing endpoints to immersive telepresence at a fraction of the costs usually associated with high-end systems, has proven popular," said James Vickerage, Vice President for the UK and Ireland at Imago ScanSource.

"With the launch of i-Kandy, we are taking this a stage further and providing resellers with a ready-made solution that they can offer to their customers to transform their collaboration experiences."

Norbain is offering customers a new range of networking and communications solutions from supplier ZyXEL Communications.

Simon Moore, Buyer at Norbain, said: "This partnership with ZyXEL allows Norbain to offer a switch offering that can be tailored to meet the complex networking requirements often seen within the surveillance market."

Lee Marsden, President of Europe at ZyXEL, added: "With our technology and Norbain's knowledge and reach into the Surveillance space, we believe we can help support it with the ever growing migration to IP."

ICT resellers are uniquely placed to add energy provision to their service portfolio and take advantage of upfront revenue share deals advises Sean Dixon, who has joined Fidelity Energy as Partner Account Manager.

GB rower Dixon built the award winning sales team at Fidelity Group's ICT channel from 2014 after his Olympic ambition was side-tracked.

He oversaw a growth in revenue to £8 million and helped secure the Account Team of the Year Award for Fidelity at the Comms Dealer Sales Awards.

"Fidelity Energy is growing fast and has big plans, I wanted to be part of that," he said.

"I build strong relationships and enjoy the task of finding new partners. For me, the simplicity of Fidelity Energy's proposition makes the opportunity exciting. The company has invested heavily in creating a pricing and marketing support portal and the structuring of supplier revenue share means partners can be on boarded and earning money instantly."

By adding energy to their portfolios Dixon believes reseller partners should be able to leverage their established trusted relationships within their base with ease.

"It's an established business principle that the more products you sell to a customer the less likely they are to churn, this and the fact that the margin in a customer is the same for energy as it is telecoms, means the opportunity is huge," he added.

"The margins in energy deals can be unlocked upfront even on three and five year terms, this makes it compelling for resellers and of course the current energy prices make switching compelling for business customers who are currently poorly served," added Dixon.

Manchester-based Invosys is in expansion mode following a number of key account wins and product launches, creating new finance, development and customer service roles.

Simon Baybutt joins as Head of Finance and Billing, bringing 25 years accounting experience. His remit is to strengthen the company's internal auditing function and develop its analytics process.

Siraz Giga has been appointed Account Director to develop and grow Invosys' largest customer account. He boasts over 15 years experience in the telecoms industry, starting his career as an engineer at TalkTalk Business (formally Opal Telecom) before progressing to Inbound Sales Specialist with the firm.

Carl Bartlett also joins as Business Development Manager. Previous roles include stints at Orange and Vodafone.

He has sold mobile, IT services, fixed and hosted solutions and inbound solutions in both direct and indirect partner channels.

Meanwhile, Jason Bedward has joined as a Network Engineer and Sean Ives is on boarded as a Software Developer.

Ellie Hazelwood and Laura Berne join the sales support team, along with Luke Jennings as administrator.

Peter Crooks, founder of Invosys, said: "Our new additions to the team bring a wealth of expertise which will help us achieve our vision to become the global innovators in the communication software industry."

Simwood has accelerated its growth momentum with a series of staff promotions and high profile hires.

Information security specialist Cal Leeming (pictured) joins next month as Associate Director in charge of ongoing internal developments. Leeming was formerly one of the UK's most prolific hackers but over a decade later is now an expert adviser to business, Government and frequently the media.

He has trained the MoD and the NCA on security and regularly appears on TV as a reformed character.

Leeming also worked for a number of Silicon Valley companies in senior positions before joining Simwood.

Reaffirming its commitment to people development Simwood has promoted Ross McKillop to the role of Associate Director; Porting Manager Rachel Dowling becomes Senior Manager; Project Manager Adele Dowling is posted to the Operations Manager role; and Operations Desk Agent Chris Keller has been promoted to Level 2 Support Engineer based in Southampton.

Thomas Lauro joins Simwood as a Node.js developer. He moves from a Tokyo-based B2B e-commerce company to bolster the company's Mauritius operation.

"The vast majority of our team are technical, genuinely top of their game and largely invisible to customers," said Managing Director Simon Woodhead.

"We have 100 per cent retention of staff and a happy productive team. We're in an exciting place right now."

Simwood has also kicked off a recruitment campaign for additional staff in operations and marketing capacities.