Comms Dealer

Darren Boyce has left Maintel having completed a one year term following Maintel's acquisition of Proximity Communications in October 2014.

Boyce, who was previously CEO of Proximity, had been appointed to the Board of Maintel Holdings as a non-executive director with effect from 24 November 2014.

He has now resigned from this position but will continue to advise the company as a consultant.

Webroot reported growth across all business segments driven by strong customer demand for Webroot SecureAnywhere solutions and a substantial increase in channel and MSP partnerships.

The addition of new customers fuelled double-digit, year-over-year growth across the company's target markets. Bookings from new business grew 29% in the OEM segment, 46% in the business segment and 16% in the consumer segment compared to the first fiscal quarter of 2015.

This new business resulted in the addition of over 1.3 million new home users, over 453,000 new business endpoints, and over 700 new MSP partners during the quarter.

"Our first quarter double-digit revenue growth demonstrates a significant shift in the industry to adopt our Smarter Cybersecurity approach," said Dick Williams, Webroot CEO.

"Building on the record growth we posted in FY15, we have started FY16 with strong results in all segments and in all regions. We enter this quarter with solid pipelines in all segments and with new product offerings that will enable us to ramp up throughout the remainder of the year."

Webroot also introduced the IOT Security Toolkit which enables Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solution designers and system integrators to integrate cloud-based threat intelligence services to protect critical systems against modern malware, zero-day exploits and other external threats and internal vulnerabilities.

Tech Data has reported Q3 net sales of $6.4bn, a decrease of 5% from $6.8bn in the prior-year quarter.

In Europe, net sales were $3.9 billion (60% of worldwide net sales), a decrease of 6% from the prior-year quarter. On a constant currency basis, net sales grew approximately 6%. Gross profit was $314.8m, or 4.90% of net sales, compared to $335.0m, or 4.95% of net sales in the prior-year quarter.

Gross profit improved approximately $9 million, or 3% year-over-year.

"Continuing our positive first half momentum, I am pleased to report that Tech Data delivered another solid quarter in Q3 of fiscal 2016, said Robert M. Dutkowsky, chief executive officer.

"On a constant currency basis, we posted good top line growth, improved non-GAAP operating income by nearly twice the rate of sales growth, and grew non-GAAP earnings per share by 19% to a record Q3 level.

"Additionally, for the first nine months of the fiscal year, we grew non-GAAP earnings per share by 31% on a constant currency basis, generated $221 million of cash from operations, and completed $147 million of share repurchases.

"Tech Data's performance through the first nine months of the fiscal year is a testament to our company's strengths, namely, our diversified customer and product portfolios, strong vendor relationships, state-of-the-art global IT platform, and our teams' ability to effectively respond to the demands of the ever-changing IT market."

Mobile security specialist Lookout has embarked on a cross-European reseller hunt.

David Helfer, VP of Worldwide Channel Development, says there is a deep consultancy business in enterprise mobility for VARs and integrators.

With some 20 partners in Europe and working through distributor Exclusive Networks, he says the mobility area requires a different set of skills from general enterprise security.

"Enterprise mobility is all about risk assessment," he tells IT Europa. "And security channels have to have the right skills sets and be more forensic in approach".

Legacy security methods by themselves are not sufficient to protect against advanced mobile threats, he argues. Signatures can't scale with the pace of malicious software development and behavioural analysis lacks the context to consistently identify true risk, often creating noise amid which real security signals can be lost.

Lookout bases its predictive technology on its Global Sensor Network which monitors the worldwide population of millions of mobile devices, including 70 million users with 11 million applications, a list which is growing by 20,000 new apps every day.

Having recently named Jamie Andrews as Lookout's EMEA Partner Director, the company is looking to add partners, particularly those selling to 2,000-3,000 seats in the enterprise, though obviously the solutions scale up and down.

It raised $200m last year specifically to build the business globally and now claims to have over 350 staff.

While mobility channels have experience in that market, they are not necessarily right for this area, which require the ability to talk to CIOs and CSOs.

Not that the channel for Lookout will be vast in number, because of the skills and relationships with users that are required - probably no more than 50 in total across the region.

Converged systems are now established as go-to platforms for customers' mission-critical workloads.

According to the Technology Business Research (TBR) Converged Systems Market Landscape, converged systems continue to displace traditional, stand-alone infrastructure, establishing the market as critical to the future longevity of data centre hardware OEMs.

Market maturity and saturation will result in a more well-informed customer base, with decisions extending outside the IT department to include line-of-business executives. For vendors, working alongside partners to deliver messaging balancing technology-driven workload expertise and improved business outcomes is critical to maximising adoption, it says

"The evolution of converged systems represents a landmark in the history of data centre infrastructure," said Christian Perry, a TBR principal analyst and practice manager. "Customers are overcoming internal resistance to IT change and deploying these systems rapidly at the expense of traditional servers and storage arrays."

Converged systems are in a period of mainstream adoption, rendering the market crowded and competitive. Differentiation is becoming challenging as capabilities across competing systems increasingly overlap. In this climate, vendors are beginning to balance their portfolios between comprehensively serving general-purpose workload needs and accommodating specific workloads such as analytics requiring high performance and reliability with purpose-built systems.

"Converged systems vendors continue to drill down into customers' most resource-intensive and mission-critical workloads," said Krista Macomber, a TBR data centre analyst. "This creates opportunity not only for increased converged systems sales, but also for consulting, add-on software and add-on hardware sales."

Rackspace' Q3 saw net revenue for the third quarter of 2015 of $509m, up 10.7% from the third quarter of 2014, adversely affected by shifts in currency exchange rates.

On a constant currency basis, net revenue grew 12.9% from the third quarter of 2014.

Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter of 2015 was $177m, for a margin of 34.9%, up 11.9% from the third quarter of 2014. For the full year, Rackspace continues to expect revenue to grow between 12% and 14% year-over-year, on a constant-currency basis, and expects adjusted EBITDA margins to be between 33% and 34%.

Taylor Rhodes, president and CEO of Rackspace, said: "We're excited about the new products and partnerships that we've launched in recent months with Amazon Web Services, Intel and Microsoft. These initiatives will make us more competitive and will drive our growth for the future."

The business is consolidating, he says, as telcos and other smaller dedicated or managed hosting providers are exiting because of the pressure from AWS primarily and Azure etc.

Cloud hosting provider Cobweb Solutions (a Microsoft 'cloud distributor') has introduced a new way for partners to sell services from a range of cloud vendors.

Cobweb's new concept of the 'cloud reseller in a box', now available to partners, packages services from a range of vendors including Microsoft, while enablement provides a solution for end-to-end customer lifecycle management.

These programmes work with the Cobweb, an ecosystem of integrated services resellers can integrate into their portfolio, including billing-as-a-service and bundled services.

Cobweb is building upon its participation in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program as a 2-Tier provider. This extension allows Cobweb to sell services to resellers and expands cloud sales opportunities for partners by enabling them to provide direct billing, sell combined offers and services, as well as directly provision, manage and support Microsoft cloud services.

The set-up in terms of choices and costs have been simplified and defined, it says and the cloud reseller in a box ability combined with Cobweb's billing service has simplified the process of administrating delivery and customer services so that customers and resellers have a straightforward billing relationship built around Direct Debit.

At the core of the deal is Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Azure and the rest of the Microsoft cloud solution provider services, plus a portfolio of additional vendor cloud services and the Cobweb London cloud for business applications requiring UK data residency.

It is getting harder to read the values of tech companies. It will mean that European tech start-ups and any technology firm not making a profit are going to have to prove their worth to their investors much sooner than some of them hoped, says Brett Cole, M&A analyst at ansarada.

ansarada is a global provider of data rooms for merger and acquisition (M&A) due diligence. Its data rooms enable the hosting, exchange and management of confidential information between bidders and sellers during the M&A process through its Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions.

Founded in Sydney, ansarada has offices in Australia, Europe, USA, Hong Kong and South Africa.

Looking at recent events: Square, trading on the NYSE, and Match Group on NASDAQ started trading this week. After slashing its offering price to $9 a share, Square soared 45% to $13.07, showing that investors still crave new tech investments - at the right price. Match Group, the owner of dating services such as Tinder, OkCupid and Match.com, climbed 23% to $14.74, after being valued at the bottom of its expected range.

So what to make of the latest news out of Silicon Valley for European tech firms? Bay Area valuations are souring, according to some. Snapchat has been discounted by one of its investors, mutual fund giant Fidelity. Dropbox's valuation too has been sheared by the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock.

Is this the pricking of the Silicon Valley bubble? Undoubtedly yes, especially when it done by some of the world's best known asset managers, says Brett Cole.

In June there were an estimated 40,000 digital businesses in London, up from 28,000 in 2010, according to a report in the Financial Times. A new start-up up is launched every 20 minutes in Berlin, says an advisory agency for new companies Gruenden. There are 22,000 tech companies in Stockholm and the most common job in Swedish capital is that of programmer, according to the Stockholm IT Region website

These thousands of businesses are surely in the midst of revisiting their business plans, assumptions and burn rate just as Europe literally heads into winter, he says.

If the tech bubble is slowly or rapidly deflating then expect a more than a wave of mergers and acquisitions among tech companies. A virtual M&A tech tsunami will occur, Brett Cole predicts. Start-ups working on similar or the same field may look for partners prompted by much harder to access finance to fund their nascent businesses. More established companies that have won loyal customers and reported rising EBITDA (earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation) may have to give up more of their equity to large tech rivals from the US or China, an Alibaba or a Yahoo perhaps.

Large tech companies like Yahoo, Alibaba, Google and Microsoft don't care where the technology that can bolster their businesses originates, they just want to get it before a rival sees it and snaps it up.

The question is whether European companies will play a role in any such tech consolidation or will they be trumped by non-European acquirers willing to pay more than they for some of Europe's most exciting technology. Andrus Ansip, the European Commission's vice president in charge of creating a single digital market, says European's venture capital firms want large markets and legal certainty across the EU.

But different rules in different countries within the EU is limiting cross-border financing, venture capital deals and M&A in the tech sector; rather a contradiction to the notion the EU is a single market. European venture-backed tech companies raised $7.43bn in the first three quarters of 2015, just 19% of the $39.54bn US tech firms got in such financing in the same period this year.

If the EU can't agree on uniform standards then its budding tech sector faces artificial ceilings on its growth, funding and deal activity in the former of mergers or acquisitions, Brett Cole concludes.

ALSO and Westcoast have joined forces to create what they claim is the largest Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) in Europe, offering numerous open services such as Microsoft Office 365, Azure and Dynamics CRM.

Joe Hemani, CEO of Westcoast, said: "Westcoast has enjoyed a good start to the cloud journey and we are seeing an increasing demand for our offers.

"The cloud market is growing fast and requires the highest level of automation and ease of use for the customer. Together we will continue to grow and and bring added value for our customers."

Gustavo Möller-Hergt, CEO of ALSO Holding AG, added: "This cooperation is a great milestone for the ALSO Group, allowing our customers who are multinational companies in Europe to operate and expand the cloud business."

Ingram Micro Europe has gained certification as a Cisco Advanced Technology Distributor for Cisco Unified Computing System (ATD-UCS) in the EMEAR region, aiming to build its data centre business with Cisco.

With this new certification, Ingram Micro is now authorised to submit UCS B exception deal requests on behalf of non-certified two-tier partners as well as deploy and implement on-site installation services for these deals. It also means exception requests coming from Cisco Advanced Technology Partners can now be processed faster.

"We are now able to offer broader support and greater opportunities to the channel," said Mark Chlebek, Senior Director, Advanced Solutions EMEA, Ingram Micro.

Since earning the Build-To-Order certification, Ingram Micro says it has been able to help channels to cost-effectively increase the speed of delivery to end users and the ATD-UCS certification takes this one step further.

Philip Wright, Senior Director, EMEAR Distribution, Cisco, added: "ATD enables our distributors to differentiate, add competitive advantage and provide a more bespoke service to our Partners and their customers."

Ingram Micro's flyHigher program complements the ATD award by giving partners a structured path to acquiring the necessary skills for data centre opportunities.