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Ultracomms has been certified as compliant with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) v3.1, achieving PCI DSS Level 1 accredited service provider status for its platform.

Ultracomms uses DTMF (dual-tone multi-frequency) clamping technology to mask payment card data from entering the contact centre, so the person handling the call is unable to see or hear the card details, making screen and continuous call recording safe for organisations and customers.

Ultracomms completed its certification following an audit by independent QSA Coalfire, confirming its solutions are compliant with the PCI DSS for Level 1 merchants who handle over 6 million card transactions a year. As a result, Ultracomms will shortly be included in the MasterCard and Visa Europe lists of approved service providers.

Robert Bates, Chairman of Ultracomms, said: "Clients are more sensitive than ever to the potential for financial and reputational damage caused by security breaches and fraud involving payment card information. Achieving PCI DSS Level 1 certification is a significant milestone for Ultracomms."

Ericsson is to further invest in NodePrime to acquire 100% of its operations based in San Francisco.

NodePrime's platform is designed to support the command and control of the complete ecosystem of data centre components.

Integrated into the Ericsson Hyperscale Data centre System 8000, this software platform enables discovery, analysis and automated configuration of existing and new data centre hardware platforms.

This allows data centres to become hyperscale and adopt distributed infrastructure.

James Malachowski, co-founder and CEO of NodePrime, said: "Our vision from the start was to transform the infrastructure into a single entity where it's entirely possible to grasp the management of hyperscale data centre infrastructure through the collection of trillions of associated metrics inside one view.

"Now being part of Ericsson, together we are creating a power shift for enterprises to make decisions on their own terms and scale with precision at the speed at which businesses need to respond today."

Anders Lindblad, Vice President, Head of Business Unit Cloud & IP at Ericsson said: "We believe in innovation coming from the Silicon Valley area and will continue to increase our presence and distribution of such innovation."

The pace of digital uptake isn't reaching its potential, resulting in widening gaps between service delivery and customer expectations, according to new research by Dimension Data.

In the 19th edition of its annual Global Contact Centre Benchmarking Report, organisations are unclear about who owns, oversees, and manages the digital channels in their contact centres.

That's because there's a lack of management focus which impacts the effectiveness of the design of their digital solutions, and by consequence, how customers engage with their businesses.

This year, 1,320 organisations across 14 industry verticals in 81 countries in Asia Pacific, Australia, the Americas, Middle East & Africa, and Europe contributed to the research.

"While telephone interactions in the contact centre are managed, tracked and quality controlled, the same performance rigour isn't always applied to digital channels," said Rob Allman, Dimension Data's Group Principal Director, Customer Experience and Collaboration. "This can lead to an inconsistent and degraded customer experience across a brand or services company."

Half (50%) of the benchmarking report respondents said they track quality on digital channels compared to 89% on phone.

Some 82% reported that they have processes to identify sales opportunities on phone compared with 60% on digital.

Measurement of cost and time per interaction is also missing on the majority of digitally assisted-service channels, which suggests an absence of consistency in management approach.

Allman says new contact channels are being designed in isolation and often without any involvement from the contact centre.

"Our research reveals that almost half (47%) are excluded from, or are partially involved in the design phase of new technology solutions in contact centres, while 55% have little, or no involvement in solution approvals.

"In fact, 2 in 5 (40%) organisations said that their digital channel systems don't meet existing business needs, and 19% are confident that their future requirements will be met."

Joe Manuele, Group Executive of Dimension Data's Customer Experience and Collaboration Business Unit, added: "New digital technologies must be designed with how they'll be consumed in mind. Organisations also need to understand the user experience and customers' expectations if they want successful adoption of the technology and achieve the desired business outcomes.

"The complexity of providing customers with a connected experience frequently spans multiple channels including Internet, web chat, social media, and phone. This requires greater capability and understanding of the customer journey when engaging with an organisation's contact centre. To be effective, the technology solutions need design, ownership, and especially a human touch."

Nimans has hosted a half-day Panasonic NS700 partner event staged at the Aztec Hotel and Spa in Bristol and designed to introduce resellers who are new to the Panasonic brand to the system.

"Since its launch in September 2014 the NS700 has become one of our fastest selling systems ever and the event was designed to explain the reasons why," said John McKindland, Head of Solutions, System Sales at Nimans. "It was a resounding success with virtually everyone that attended signing up on the day."

Virtual1 has cut the price of Ethernet by up to 25% following the 6-8% reduction of Openreach's Ethernet Access Direct annual rental prices.

New CFO Magnus Batsvik-Miller commented: "My first priority as CFO at Virtual1 has been to look at how we can help our partners win more business in reaction to the Openreach changes.

"While it reduced its pricing to the entire market on the 1st of April by up to 8%, Virtual1 reacted by furthering those reductions with up to 25% over its entire Access portfolio."
 
Tom O'Hagan welcomed Openreach's changes following the conclusion of Ofcom's Business Connectivity Market Review, saying: "The reduction in the cost base to all suppliers helps us reduce the cost of ownership of access circuits in the UK and will drive the uptake of Ethernet even further in the SME space.

"Watch this space for further price reductions and promotions throughout the coming year."

Sennheiser has received the Red Dot Award: Product Design 2016 for its D 10 Series.

The Red Dot seal is awarded annually to products that stand out from the competition due to their design and innovation.

In total, the international jury of 41 designers, design professors and specialised journalists assessed over 5,200 products, submitted by candidates from 57 nations.

Andreas Bach, President at Sennheiser Communications, said: "We created the headset range to bring the freedom of wireless communication and voice clarity within reach of more everyday users."

Webroot has added Cloud Harmonics to its global network of value-added distributors.

Cloud Harmonics is expanding its product portfolio with Webroot BrightCloud Threat Intelligence for Palo Alto Networks to help its network of VARs and MSPs improve their customers' ability to detect and block malicious IP threats at the network perimeter.

"Adding threat intelligence from Webroot, a Palo Alto Networks ecosystem partner, to our portfolio gives more than 400 channel partners in our network access to its cybersecurity solutions," said Anand Desai, vice president of marketing and emerging technologies at Cloud Harmonics.

"Enterprises and mid-market users can now use global threat intelligence, with behavioral analysis, to protect themselves the moment a new threat is detected anywhere in the world."

According to the Webroot 2016 Threat Brief, more than 100,000 net new malicious IPs are launched every day.

Since cybercriminals change hosts and IP addresses frequently, new threats emerge constantly and firewalls need accurate and timely updates.

BrightCloud Threat Intelligence for Palo Alto Networks integrates with Palo Alto Networks Next-Generation Firewalls to detect and block malicious incoming IPs.

Global network access company The Kenton Group has set up a new business unit, Kenton Optical and Fibre Technologies, building on its network access, demarcation and connectivity solutions.

The new business division, headed up by Andy Howard, will provide optical networking and fibre solutions and services to carriers, operators, service providers, enterprises and governmental organisations throughout the UK and EMEA.

"Kenton Optical and Fibre Technologies was created in response to customer demand for optical, OTN, WDM and 100G service delivery platforms and networking equipment," explained MD John Larkin.

"These capabilities expand our connectivity solutions and allow us to address new customer segments."

Howard has worked in the optical networking industry since 1997 within engineering, product management and sales at companies including Nortel Networks, Transmode, BTI Systems and Cyan.

Larkin added: "Howard's experience and our creative engineering team will make a winning combination."

BigTec UK, the data centre arm of distributor Exclusive, is to supply Nuage Networks from Nokia as part of its SDN solutions proposition.

The Nuage Networks SDN overlay helps large enterprises simplify network operations, deploy applications with more agility and adapt network services in a secure multi-vendor cloud environment, says the firm.

Big Tec UK will distribute the full Nuage Networks portfolio, which includes the Virtualised Services Platform (VSP), Virtualised Network Services (VNS) and Virtualised Services Assurance Platform (VSAP).

"The inconvenient truth about data centre virtualisation is just how tough it becomes to manage multiple hypervisors, multiple clouds and an explosion in the number of virtual endpoints," stated Jason Dance, MD for BigTec UK.

"With Nuage Networks SDN technology organisations no longer will find it prohibitively complicated to scale up and harness the true power of their underlying networks.

"Nuage Networks works in tandem with our other vendor technologies, particularly security and software defined WANs."

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) has chosen NetApp to revamp its data infrastructure in collaboration with S3 Consulting.

ZSL owns London Zoo and Whipsnade Zoo and runs conservation projects in more than 50 countries.

It runs a large number of applications that are central to its research and academic output as well as its daily operations, including ticketing and membership systems, all of which produce a significant mass of data.

Five years ago, ZSL adopted a network-attached storage model with NetApp. As the business evolved, ZSL was ready for a refresh to bring more storage capacity and faster speeds to support its growing organisational needs.

Through its partner S3 Consulting, ZSL upgraded to NetApp FAS2500 series hybrid storage arrays to provide an infrastructure that could cope with its growing data needs.

Nick Napier, Head of ICT at the Zoological Society of London, said: "We now have an intuitive platform that is easy to manage. The benefits of how and what we can now back up are a huge step up from our old solution, and we now have a fully future-proofed investment."

Elliot Howard, UK & Ireland Country Manager for NetApp, added: "The availability of data is vital to any business or research body, and for ZSL access to this data at any time means it is able to continue with vital research, while also maintaining a high quality of customer service in its zoos."

Robert Galt, CTO for S3 Consulting, stated: "ZSL recognised that as the demands of the business were growing it needed to make a change to how it delivered on storage and backup as part of their virtualised infrastructure."