Comms Dealer

New Star Networks (NSN) has been ranked 328th on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500 EMEA 2015, a ranking of the 500 fastest growing technology companies in EMEA.

Rankings are based on percentage revenue growth over four years.

NSN CEO Mark Shraga said: "we are delighted to win this award, what an incredible thing to be acknowledged as one of the fastest growing technology companies in such an enormous market as EMEA!"

David Cobb, Deloitte UK an Partner in charge of the Deloitte Fast 500 EMEA programme, added: "As a recipient of the 2015 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 Ranking, NSN has demonstrated that it is indeed one of the fastest growing technology companies in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and we are proud to honour them for this."

A growth rate of 315% over the past four years secured NSN 49th position in the 2015 Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50 last month, a listing of the 50 fastest growing technology companies in the UK.

In its half yearly results for the period ended 30th September 2015 cloud company iomart reported revenue growth of 16% to £36.4m (H1 2015: £31.5m) including 10% organic growth in the hosting operation (H1 2015: 8%).

The firm also reported adjusted EBITDA growth of 11% to £15.5m (H1 2015: £14.0m) and adjusted profit before tax growth of 8% to £8.7m (H1 2015: £8.0m).

The period included acquisition of public cloud consultancy SystemsUp in June and the addition of United Hosting after the period end.

Angus MacSween, CEO, said: "This has been another good trading period for the Group, driven by both organic and acquisitive growth.

"The cloud market landscape that we occupy continues to evolve and with that, the long-term recurring revenue opportunities.

"We are well established as a major player in providing the flexible cloud solutions that businesses require, whether that be the private cloud, public or hybrid cloud spheres, and we are investing in expanding our teams to help our customers navigate and deploy a wider choice of solutions."

A fund raising event held by New Star Networks (NSN) and charity customer Avante Care & Support marked a milestone double for both organisations - NSN's fifth anniversary and the charity's 25th year in operation.

Avante Care & Support enhances care in older age by providing personalised home support and residential services.

NSN CEO Mark Shraga said: "We are always happy to support charities where we have shared concerns, and Avante care & Support focuses on an area of human concern that is personal to my own family.

"We were delighted to be asked to support its coming Christmas raffle fundraiser and look forward to seeing some healthy donations at the event."

NSN also marked its fifth anniversary by celebrating 49th place in the 2015 Deloitte UK Technology Fast 50, a ranking of the 50 fastest-growing technology companies in the UK.

Gary Bunney has been appointed CEO of MDS, a provider of real-time charging, billing and customer management solutions.

He brings almost 20 years experience in sales, operations and development, and is credited with turning small real-time revenue management businesses into £100m turnover organisations.

Bunney has also worked with large operators including BT, Vodafone Group and Telefónica O2.

"With its fully-managed cloud-based real-time charging, billing and customer management solution, MDS is helping its customers meet the changing requirements of today's digital enterprise," he said.

"I'm excited by the great opportunity we have to expand on the excellent work MDS has already done in helping its customers win in an increasingly competitive market."

MDS' customers include BT, TalkTalk Business, eir, ACN and Telefónica O2.

KYOCERA Document Solutions UK has been awarded a place on the Government's Digital Marketplace G-Cloud 7 framework.

KYOCERA secured presence on two lots within G-Cloud 7 - Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Specialist Cloud Services - for its Cloud Print Service (CPS). After launching earlier this year, CPS will now be included on G-Cloud 7 from December 2015.
 
Eddie Ginja, Cloud Evangelist, KYOCERA Document Solutions UK, said: "Our successful application to join the G-Cloud framework is an endorsement of our secure approach to cloud printing.

"This is another route for our customers to procure managed print services in a cost effective way. We're pleased to be playing a major role in supporting the UK Government's drive to transform public sector IT and delivery of modern, efficient and effective services."

Gigaset pro and ProVu have completed an integration project that adds the complete Gigaset pro range of desktop and DECT phones to ProVu's Zero Touch Provisioning system.

This will enable the SIP hosted telephony provider to reduce the cost and complexity of rapidly deploying Gigaset devices while ensuring devices are feature compatible with improving levels of end-customer service.

ProVu, a value added distributor of Gigaset pro products for several years, has developed its own independent hosted provisioning platform that works across all the main SIP hosted telephony platforms.

The platform allows SIP telephony service provider partners to select and ship phones directly from ProVu to end customer premises that have already been programmed with configuration settings and user credentials to allow rapid service activation.

The platform is already used by 50 VoIP services and has already supplied over 400,000 devices from multiple vendors to tens of thousands of end customers and offers next day delivery with all phones direct to customers as new and un-opened boxes with white label options.

"The service has proved very popular and our work with Gigaset pro to include its portfolio within provision systems is a great addition and reflects strong demand from our SIP telephony partners and their end customers," said Darren Garland, manging director for ProVu.

ProVu has certified the Gigaset pro portfolio for SIP operation with its partners and also offer optional remote device management services including device firmware updates and configuration changes through either a self-service portal or via a highly automated bulk process for larger installation.

"Gigaset pro has been supportive in this process and recognise that provisioning services like ours are helping service providers to meet the demands of the rapidly growing cloud-based telephony market - especially for smaller customers that don't necessarily have onsite technical capabilities and just want to plug in a device and get up and running straight away," added Garland.

He estimates that some of its SIP telephony service provider customers have reduced the cost of device provisioning by 80% and the time between end-customers placing an order and receiving a phone has dropped from as much as 5 days to next-day delivery by using ProVu's services.

Garland also points to the benefits of its application programming interface (API) which allows its SIP telephony service provider customers to directly connect their own web based ordering system into the ProVu provisioning platform to further streamline customer activation.

"We are pleased to have the Gigaset pro portfolio within the ProVu Zero Touch Provisioning service and look forward to working closely with them to ensure that future models are included and additional features offered by Gigaset pro devices are compatible with its extended management services," says Matthew Marchant, Head of Sales, UK and Ireland for Gigaset pro.

Entanet's deployment of NewVoiceMedia's cloud customer contact solution ContactWorld for Service has quickly paid off with 80% of incoming calls being answered within 20 seconds.

Integration with Salesforce gives Entanet's team of 30 technical advisors more control and improves the customer experience, according to Matt Mills, Head of IT at Entanet.

He said: "We opted for ContactWorld because of its ease of implementation and integration with Salesforce. We wanted all the metrics and statistics that the system offered in order to drive our business performance".

Neil Watson, Head of Service at Entanet, added: "As the reports are in real-time we now know what's happened to every single call. This means our directors can speak confidently to partners when striking new deals or continuing relationships."

'As the business continues to grow, we'll be in a position to offer a consistent, high quality customer experience for resellers and end users."

C4L has added VIRTUS' LONDON2 data centre in Hayes as a Point of Presence (PoP) on coreTX, the service provider's high performance data centre network.

The agreement to connect LONDON2 to the coreTX network follows many years in partnership at the successful Enfield location, and an exclusive arrangement allowing full suite connectivity, 10Gb circuits and a large footprint of colocation racks within the facility.

The 65,000 sq.ft. newly opened LONDON2 facility deploys fresh-air evaporative cooling technology which decreases energy consumption, bringing site power usage effectiveness (PUE) to below 1.2, delivering substantial savings to clients in the premises.

Pete Hill, Partner Account Director, said: "VIRTUS and C4L have worked collaboratively on business for many years and we are both constantly improving each other's potential by bringing new and innovative additions to the table.

"VIRTUS LONDON2 Data Centre is a new breed of DC which opens up a whole world of opportunities through high density racks, allowing huge capacities which wouldn't have been possible even a year ago, fully serviced out of the site."

Datto, a vendor of data backup, recovery and business continuity, is preparing to spend the $75m raised from backers recently on channel expansion in EMEA.

Andrew Stuart, EMEA MD, tells IT Europa: "We have been focused mainly on the UK and Ireland. We wanted to bring the products to the wider EMEA market, and we decided six months ago to do this through distribution."

Datto has already signed up seven distributors covering 24 countries.

The funding will be used to increase the marketing efforts in support of the channels, looking at a 250% jump in marketing funds, to help existing partners to grow and allow distributors to build channels.

"With their growth comes our success. We have just hired a new partner marketing manager to work exclusively with them on remarketing."

"We feel that it is important that Europe is an autonomous business, with its own marketing departments, development and software engineering etc," added Stuart.

"We will double headcount next year and triple the office space. We are building a new partner briefing centre here as we believe it is not enough to just have sales people in-country."

Datto has historically concentrated on the MSP market, but expertise acquired in the last year will allow it to move into new markets.

BroadSoft BroadWorks, BroadCloud and UC-One unified communication and collaboration solutions are now compatible with Microsoft Office 365.

This integration blends BroadSoft's cloud PBX with cloud office productivity software, giving joint customers an integration capability.

BroadSoft used Microsoft's software developer kits to integrate its solutions with Microsoft Office 365, reflecting BroadSoft's commitment to open platforms and the interoperability of its communication and collaboration services with other devices, systems and applications.

"BroadSoft's integration is a great example of how partners can build on the new Office 365 platform to better serve the needs of our mutual customers," said Steve Guggenheimer, corporate vice president of Microsoft's Developer eXperience & Evangelism (DX) group.

With the BroadSoft Office 365 integration, customers are now able to leverage BroadSoft's cloud PBX and UC-One capabilities from their Microsoft Office 365 desktop applications, including cloud-based calling, to any telephone in the world.

Users can also click-to-call any phone number in emails, documents, databases, address books and on web pages from within Office 365 applications with carrier-class quality and reliability, claims the firms.

"With Microsoft Office 365's significant and growing commercial installed base, these users represent an attractive market opportunity for BroadSoft and service providers," said Michael Tessler, president and chief executive officer, BroadSoft.

"We believe that the BroadSoft Microsoft Office 365 hosted-PBX integration offers service providers a proven carrier-class and differentiated solution that enhances customers' desktop productivity and leverages existing software investments."