Comms Dealer

A boardroom reshuffle including significant new appointments has positioned managed service provider GCI for an ambitious period of market expansion based on a three-year growth agenda. Former Easynet Global Services MD Adrian Thirkill joins GCI as CEO - the post previously held by company founder Wayne Martin who becomes Chairman. Thirkill was instrumental in Easynet's £402m sale to Interoute.

Martin commented: "There comes a point in every business where we need to make a leap to the next level.

"Since GCI was established in 2000 we have grown rapidly through a mix of organic growth and strategic acquisitions. The injection of fresh blood and raw energy is exactly what's needed. I am placing the business in the best possible hands for the next stage of GCI's journey upwards."

Thirkill added: "I see a huge untapped opportunity in GCI and its sales channels. It has a proven, well-invested and scalable platform."

In another telling move, Phil Hambly, previously with InTechnology and SAS Global Communications, joins GCI as Marketing Director.

According to Hambly the 'transformational impact of the millennial generation's appetite for new ways of communicating' will catalyse the cloud and the managed services market.

"Our objective is to grasp the moment by focusing our organisation without losing the agility for which GCI has become known," stated Hambly.

GCI's growth strategy is supported by the Business Growth Fund (BGF), GCI's equity partner. BGF investor Gurinder Sunner added: "Our engagement with GCI has been about providing the financial muscle and broader support necessary to ready GCI for its next growth phase.

"Industry analysts cite huge potential in the cloud and managed services sector. We believe that GCI is in the right place at the right time to benefit from the growing demand as organisations transition from legacy infrastructure to cloud-based technology stacks."

IT Europa and Angel Business Communications will jointly be staging the sixth annual UK Managed Services & Hosting Summit on 21st September 2016.

The event will bring leading hardware and software vendors, hosting providers, telecommunications companies, mobile operators and web services providers involved in managed services and hosting together with Managed Service Providers (MSPs) and resellers, integrators and service providers migrating to, or developing their own managed services portfolio and sales of hosted solutions.

All indicators are pointing to the continued rapid growth of managed services, with the world market predicted to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12.5% to 2019, but the impact of new technologies and changing buyer behaviour in the face of evolving requirements is creating challenges for both vendors and MSPs alike.

Under the theme of the Digital Dividend - The Role of Managed Services in a Digital World, the Managed Services and Hosting Summit 2016 will provide insights into how the market is changing and what it will take for MSPs to succeed as it evolves.

Specific areas addressed will include the emergence and impact of the Internet of Things (IoT) and M2M, the growing importance of security, trends in service delivery and how to create value both within an MSP and for its customers.

The UK Managed Services & Hosting Summit 2016 is a management-level event designed to help channel organisations identify opportunities arising from the increasing demand for managed and hosted services and to develop and strengthen partnerships aimed at supporting sales.

Building on the success of previous managed services and hosting events, the summit will feature a high-level conference programme exploring the impact of new business models and the changing role of information technology within modern businesses.

These conference sessions will be augmented by breakout sessions within which leading vendors and service providers which will provide further insight into the opportunities for channel organisations looking to expand their managed services portfolios.

Throughout the day there will also be many opportunities for both sponsors and delegates to meet fellow participants within the Summit exhibition and networking area.

"Advances in technology, economic pressures and evolving business models are combining to fundamentally change the role of IT within businesses and the role of MSPs and other channels in delivering it," said Alan Norman, Managing Director of IT Europa.

Jason Holloway, Director of IT Publishing at Angel Business Communications, added: "The Managed Services & Hosting Summit provides an opportunity for vendors, VARs, integrators and service providers to come together to address the issues and opportunities arising from the surge in customer demand for managed services and hosted delivery models."

The Managed Services and Hosting Summit 2016 will take place at 155 Bishopsgate, London, on 21st September 2016. For more information visit: www.mshsummit.com

The skills and capabilities acquired by Maintel via its acquisitions of Proximity and Datapoint have enabled the systems integrator and MSP to launch a new nationwide Partner Services division.

Maintel CEO Eddie Buxton commented: "The acquisitions brought together a strong portfolio of skillsets, meaning we can now offer a one-stop-shop of support to partners."

He pointed out that Maintel's channel business was the strongest performing sales division in 2015, representing circa half of the firm's overall revenue.

"In launching Partner Services we are building on this success through an experienced team focusing on our channel partners," added Buxton.

"Partner Services brings together skills and resources to help the channel win service, support and managed business across UC, contact centre, workforce optimisation and networking technologies.

"We've already seen a great response to the creation of the division, including a 10% partner increase."

Maintel Partner Services offers two main types of service across the UK and Ireland- professional services (including engineering, installation and consultancy) and managed services (including maintenance and support).

Interoute has expanded its Nottingham presence with a new 16,000sq foot office in the city centre.

The new office will bring together employees from Interoute's existing offices on the outskirts of Nottingham, as well as staff from the Derby office of the recently acquired Easynet. 

The new office will also help Interoute attract new talent due to the improved transport links and city centre location.

Interoute’s new Nottingham office will house group finance and UK sales employees and will be home to the Interoute Academy Programme, which sources graduates.

Glowing Q4 2015 sales of £350,000 were eclipsed by positive customer feedback, according to Comms Supply which notched up record sales in the period, along with sparkling endorsements from customers.

"Our fourth quarter results for 2015 were 27% higher than any other period since we launched almost four years ago, and more than double the sales of the same period in 2014," stated Karl Alderton, Comms Supply's founder and MD.

"But it's only when there's a problem that we show our true colours. We send out a service questionnaire whenever anything goes wrong, whether there's a fault, billing issue or any other glitch.

"That enables us to find out what customers really think, and we achieved top marks across all of the service categories surveyed, and a Net Promoter Score of 58."

SpliceCom's just launched solution builder web portal will slash the time it takes partners to put solutions together from hours to minutes, claims the firm.

SpliceCom offers soft and hard voice platforms for deployment in the cloud, on-premise and hybrid applications, and the broad range of configuration and deployment options meant that resellers were spending more time analysing and then designing the best solution based on the most-competitive price, often amounting to several hours.

"SpliceCom Design Services was developed to simplify these tasks by streamlining and unifying system configuration, pricing and comparison," said Stuart Bell, Business Development Manager.

"The portal allows channel sales personnel to configure SpliceCom solutions from five users to thousands in under two minutes, providing comparisons between more traditional hardware-based systems and native or virtual soft voice solutions through a simple one touch slider key."

Alternative Networks has retained its Platinum Partner status with UC&C provider Mitel. The Mitel standard comes soon after Alternative was awarded Platinum Partner status by Avaya.

The standard is in recognition of Alternative's high levels of capability across Mitel's product set, including contact centre and cloud and demonstrates Alternative's success as a Mitel solutions expert across six verticals including education, professional services, retail and healthcare. Award of the standard was based on direct customer feedback on Alternative's ability and service, as well as Alternative's knowledge, training and certification.

Alternative has also recently launched its own in-house-developed Platform as a Service, APaaS (Alternative Platform as a Service for UC & Voice) solution, which uses Mitel's MiVoice Business.

APaaS is hosted and managed across two of Alternative's Tier 3 datacentres and is directly integrated with Alternative's existing connectivity and SIP partners.

Neil Rampe Commercial & Marketing Director at Alternative, said: "Platinum status offers a number of benefits including securing stronger commercials, meaning we can be more competitive in the market, as well as provide enhanced technical pre and post sales support from Mitel."

Exponential-e has achieved approved supplier status on the G-Cloud 7 framework. Through its WAN offering delivered over its wholly-owned, 100 gig-Ethernet network, it can now readily deliver Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Specialist Cloud Services (SCS) solutions to organisations in the public sector.

"The G-Cloud 7 award is another important area of Exponential-e's public sector package," explained David Lozdan, head of public sector at Exponential-e.

"Paired with our recent network services award, we can make it even simpler for customers to select connectivity services that complement the cloud services offered via G-Cloud."

Through the latest framework services, Exponential-e aims to deliver a simplified route for public sector bodies to adopt private cloud services.

"Since its inception, G-Cloud has aimed to offer a broader range of cloud computing services to the public sector and greater flexibility in procurement contracts," added Lee Wade, CEO, Exponential-e.

"As the framework continues to open up new opportunities for public sector contracts, we look forward to standing up against the competition to grow our presence in this sector.

"Over the next few months, we will be investing in sales and marketing initiatives to raise awareness of our ability to offer access to resilient cloud services that remain on the inside of the corporate firewall and are delivered over a reliable and secure network."

Exponential-e aims to feature the public sector heavily in its growth plans for 2016 as it aims for double digit growth.

The company's appointment to the G-Cloud 7 framework will cement its presence within government computing and allow it to concentrate on achieving scale and supporting the public sector in delivering digital services.

Enterprises in the UK have been increasing their investment in IaaS, compared to SaaS, in 2015, says research.

Likewise, the UK market opportunity forecast report shows that IaaS market size is expected to grow at the highest CAGR of 46.3% from 2015 to 2019, and is expected to supersede the SaaS market, with a figure of $5.6bn by 2019, thus emerging as the largest cloud computing segment in the UK enterprise market.

A new survey from Kable shows that 48% of UK enterprises have been planning to increase their ICT budget in 2015, an increase of 18% from 2014.

Considered as one of the largest ICT markets, enterprises in the UK realise the value of investing in newer ICT segments to accelerate the productivity and growth of their enterprises.

Kable's survey of 178 UK enterprises shows that a significant proportion (48%) of UK enterprises have been planning to increase their overall ICT budgets in 2015, witnessing an increase of 18% compared to 2014.

Resonating positive sentiments, the survey further shows that the proportion of respondents looking at reducing their ICT budgets as well as the proportion of enterprises keen to retain their investments at the same level will be declining.

The growing incidence of cyber and malware attacks has driven investments in security products and services. As illustrated in the figure below, identity and access management (IAM) and backup & archive are the leading security segments among UK enterprises, as 63% of enterprises in the UK are planning to invest in each of these security segments over the next two years.

This trend is further validated by Kable's market forecasts for the UK that estimate the security products market to reach a figure of $1.7bn in 2019; growing at a CAGR of 5.5% from 2015 to 2019.

"Ever evolving threats of cyber attacks, in addition to increased Governmental pressures and security compliances are some of the factors that are fuelling the adoption of security solutions among UK enterprises," said Renjitha Balkrishan, an Analyst at Kable.

"The pervasive adoption of security solutions and its services is expected to grow in the coming years, as the implementation of various disruptive technologies such as cloud, mobility, and social media, is creating newer security challenges and threats for mission-critical enterprise data."

With cloud computing redefining the traditional ways in which enterprises conducted their business, UK enterprises have been transforming their enterprise operating models with various cloud computing technologies such as SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.

The customer insight survey from UK shows that enterprises in the region allocated the highest proportion (37%) of their average cloud computing budget to SaaS, followed by IaaS with a budget allocation of 35% in 2014.

This trend is validated by Kable's market forecasts for the UK, which shows that SaaS is attracting the highest market size, with revenues of $1.5 billion in 2014, followed by IaaS with a market size of $840 million in 2014.

Barry Tuffs is the new man at the centre of Unify's channel growth campaign.

The newly appointed Vice President for UK and Ireland Channels is tasked with delivering channel growth via a partner recruitment programme while maintaining existing relationships with partners and distributors, such as Nimans and ScanSource.

He will also be focused on the roll out of new cloud-based partner programmes designed to target the small and mid-market customer segment.

Tuffs brings 25-plus years telecoms experience in direct and indirect sales and management, and joins Unify from Avaya where he held a variety of roles including Director of the UK & Ireland Channel Team.

He helped to introduce the iConnect Program and take the vendor into the mid-market sector.

Prior roles include stints at Cable&Wireless, Telewest and Nortel.

He also spent three and a half years running his own business, called Wire Solutions which traded as a BT Local Business.

Tuffs will report to Thomas Veit, the Senior Vice President of Channel for EMEAR at Unify.

Veit stated: "Barry will be an instrumental part of our channel acceleration strategy in the UK & Ireland as we aim to expand our presence dramatically in the coming years."

Tuffs added: "This is a tremendous opportunity to help drive the growth of the company."