Comms Dealer

Ingram Micro's Q2 revenues came in at $10.5bn, within the guidance range and representing an increase of 2% on a currency-neutral basis.

The strengthening of the dollar had an 8% negative impact on revenues in dollar terms. Recent acquisitions contributed 2 percentage points of growth.

Gross margin was 6.31%, a 56 basis point improvement over last year.

Europe revenue of $2.9bn was up 8% year-over-year on a currency neutral basis, but down 8% in dollars.

Local currency revenue strength was driven by strong iPhone demand and solid sales of advanced and specialty solutions.

Additionally, the acquisition of ANOVO added 2 percentage points of growth. Demand in Germany, the largest regional contributor, improved in Q3 with strength from corporate resellers in categories including networking, data capture point-of-sale and mobility.

France and the UK also contributed strong growth and Italy and Spain delivered double-digit growth supported by an uptick in advanced solution sales in both countries and strong mobility sales in Italy.

Non-GAAP operating margin was 62 basis points. The European technology solutions business continues to deliver year-over-year improvement with expanding gross and operating margins, Ingram Micro says. However, this progress was diluted by efforts to build out the higher margin strategic businesses, including in mobility and to expand the cloud marketplace throughout the region.

CEO Alain Monie said: "For Q4, we continue to see stable markets globally, and we expect demand for higher value solutions to continue to outpace average IT growth rates. In our core business, we expect SMB to remain healthy broadly."

Sennheiser has unveiled its new wired headset series Culture Plus, designed to maximise the adoption of Unified Communications solutions, and certified for Skype for Business while compatible with all major UC and softphone brands.

Sennheiser Voice Clarity, which is based on wideband sound, provides a natural listening experience while the noise-cancelling microphone ensures optimum speech intelligibility by filtering out ambient noise. Sound enhancement profiles automatically adjust to optimise for either voice or multimedia, and with advanced ActiveGard technology, users are protected against acoustic shock and sudden sound bursts.

Calls can be managed intuitively and seamlessly via the functional in-line control unit, which also operates the switchable Noise at Work limiter compliant with EU's Noise at Work Directive. When not in use, the headset can be stored and transported in a practical carry pouch.

"Headsets are an important consideration in any UC deployment," says Lars Riis Rasmussen, Vice President of Sales and Marketing, EMEA, at Sennheiser CC&O.

"Culture Plus is for organisations that want their office workers to rapidly adopt headsets in a UC environment. It combines Sennheiser sound quality and instant wearing comfort for a communications experience that will make it easier to enjoy the benefits and achieve the full potential of UC solutions."

The addition of the Culture Plus wired series complements Sennheiser CC&O's product portfolio of headset and speakerphone solutions for contact centres, office and UC environments.

Ghosts, ghouls and scary characters roamed the offices of comms specialist Nimans as a Halloween inspired theme day proved a 'spooktacular' success.

Ghoulish games, themed cakes and a pumpkin making competition proved popular as staff from across the business entered into the 'spirit' of the day, arriving for work as witches, monsters, scary film characters, zombies, Kiss rock stars and even a set of Mrs Brown's Boys lookalikes. Company Chairman Julian Niman also joined in the fun.

"We have many great characters, although they don't normally look this scary," joked Investors In People Manager Sue Goldfine.

A network security solution launched by Daisy Wholesale is certified against the regulations of PCI compliance, a compulsory requirement for all businesses that take card payments.

Called DaisySentry, the solution comes at a time when data breaches are again making the headlines.

"For resellers that are already selling broadband connections, DaisySentry provides a great value-add opportunity, with no internal upskill requirement," said Nick Harvey, Business Development Manager at Daisy Wholesale.

"Cybercrime is on the rise and it is not just large corporate businesses that fall victim to data breaches. The 2015 UK Government Data Breach Report claimed that 74% of small businesses had reported that they had suffered a security breach and these can be devastating for a business. Not only can they ruin the trust between a business and its customers, but the cost to the business can range upwards of £75k on average in the SMB space1."

Cybercrime has become a regular tenant in the headlines of late and for the very first time, the Office for National Statistics has included an estimate of fraud offences in its annual report. It published an estimate of five million instances of fraud last year in England and Wales - half of which are reported to be cybercrime offences.

"In our experience, there are a lot of businesses that aren't even doing the basics when it comes to securing their data networks," added Harvey. "Particularly in the SMB space, they struggle to find adequate security solutions without the in-house IT expertise."

DaisySentry simplifies the process of securing and managing a business' local area network (LAN) through an automated and fully-managed service, essentially taking the burden off the end customer.

Harvey concluded: "Built with the SMB market in mind, it provides enterprise-class network security at a low monthly cost - there are no large upfront sums involved. Customers can be safe in the knowledge that DaisySentry is providing network security and addressing the technical requirements of PCI and can concentrate on running their business."

The DaisySentry device provides firewalls, WiFi and LAN segments, 4G failover, VPN and content filtering - all managed via a cloud management portal that enforces pre-configured security templates.

With built-in Daisy WiFi, the customer is also able to provide compliant public hot spots and in turn enhance their customers' shopping experience, said the firm.

Easynet, an Interoute company, has integrated netEvidence's Highlight cloud-based monitoring and reporting service within its Matrix Management Portal (which provides 1,000-plus partners across the UK with a transparent view of network and application performance).

Mike Ayres, Managing Director of Channel Partners at Easynet, said: "Management tools like Highlight are vital in helping our partners to grow their businesses. With Highlight, partners can differentiate their offer in the market by delivering a unique level of visibility and transparency for their customers.

"The key benefit of Highlight is that we are using the same tool as our partners and their end customers - it's a single consistent view across everything.

"With this common view we can proactively identify and fix any problems. And when critical applications are reliant on any number of parties - including ourselves, partners, carriers and end customers - a single indisputable view of what is happening removes any unnecessary finger pointing."

Highlight's browser-based window offers full visibility into how, where and by whom critical business services and applications are being consumed. Highlight leverages the intelligence already available in networks, moulding enormous volumes of information into a clear, intuitive dashboard that can be understood by executives, managers and engineers alike.

Ayres added: "We needed Highlight to equip partners with full visibility of the applications that are driving the workspace including both internal and cloud-based services. The challenge is to deliver not just reliable services but to ensure critical applications are given the correct priority.

"We receive calls from partners relating to what they believe are network faults but are in fact poorly performing applications. We find that when partners and their customers start to look at Highlight's application views, they are often surprised at the applications being used such as Skype for non-work purposes."

Riverbed Technology, specialist in application performance infrastructure, has named Chris Elsmore as Vice President Channel Sales for EMEA.

He will be responsible for leading the Riverbed channel sales team and driving partner strategy, execution, and strategic sales programs in the region.

He will report to Kristian Thyregod, Senior Vice President, EMEA.

Elsmore joins Riverbed from Guidewire Software where he was Vice President Global Alliances & Business Development, responsible for partners worldwide and business development.

Prior to this, Elsmore held global and regional senior channel leadership roles with Panopticon Software, SAP Business Objects, and i2 technologies.

Kristian Thyregod, Senior Vice President, EMEA, at Riverbed said: "As the market evolves we have a huge opportunity to meet the challenges of the hybrid enterprise and deliver solutions for software-defined networks.

"With the vast majority of our revenue generated through our channel sales model, Chris' proven experience will be instrumental in driving our partners to embrace and sell our portfolio of solutions as part of the Riverbed Application Performance Platform."

Elsmore added: "Our partner ecosystem is key to our success so I look forward to strengthening and deepening the relationships we have with our channel community across the region, to drive maximum impact and significant growth."

Arrow Electronics has announced plans for a set of seminars on the Internet of Things (IoT) across Europe.

The IoT in Focus tour will encompass locations in Germany, France, UK, Sweden, Denmark, and Poland and cover connectivity and embedded applications, system integration, big data and the cloud.

Arrow has a broad range of expertise and a network of suppliers with IoT capabilities, enabling it to advise and assist organisations that want to capture value from the explosion of the IoT.

The IoT in Focus seminars will cover where the IoT is now and where it is going. With a predicted future of billions of connected things, the correct selection of platform, technology, communication and data management architectures are essential for a scalable and secure IoT implementation.

As with any new innovative emerging market, new standards, evolving designs and applications present challenges of implementation, but also offer significant opportunities for growth, increased operating efficiencies and the delivery of more value to end users, said the firm.

BroadSoft has unveiled Project Tempo, a new initiative based on BroadSoft's UC-One offering, and envisions new UC-One cloud services that will allow individuals and teams to reach new levels of productivity by integrating real-time communications and collaboration, cloud applications, and contextual intelligence, into a unified end-user experience, claims the firm.

The first step in the rollout of Project Tempo will be the release of a beta version UC-One Hub, in the first quarter of 2016. UC-One Hub is a cloud service that integrates real-time communications with cloud applications and offers contextual intelligence - allowing users to be more efficient and productive.

The beta will initially run on BroadSoft's UC-One Communicator using Google Chrome, and feature off-the-shelf cloud application integrations with Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Drive, in addition to Concur, Redbooth, and Twitter.

Today, BroadSoft believes that workforce productivity in the enterprise is suffering because various tools and off-the-shelf applications used by teams and workers to communicate only address niche solutions, and are disjointed from workflow processes. This often creates scattered communications, ineffective meetings, and fragmented workflows decreasing productivity and decision-making.

"The fact that BroadSoft supports 26 of the top 30 global service providers demonstrates our success," said Michael Tessler, chief executive officer, BroadSoft. "We believe that Project Tempo is an innovative initiative that extends BroadSoft's position, creates new revenue sources for service providers and meets the communications and collaboration needs of the emerging millennial workforce majority."

Service providers will have the flexibility to deliver BroadSoft UC-One and Project Tempo services via the BroadWorks platform, or as a fully managed hosted service from BroadSoft's cloud infrastructure, BroadCloud.

Pelican Rouge Group has selected Unify and its accredited partner Viegli to transform its communications infrastructure in the UK with the OpenScape Business platform.

The OpenScape Business platform will bring a new level of mission-critical availability and reliability to the communication capability in Pelican Rouge Groups' UK distribution network - boosting the company's ability to deliver seamless customer service.

Pelican Rouge Group, a long established coffee company with its own brand active in 12 European countries, was having difficulties with an existing aging telephony only system.

In the UK, the existing system was nearing its end of life and could no longer be supported. With a large scale distribution network, that relies on effective external and internal communications, it is critical that Pelican Rouge has a truly resilient communications in place. In addition, the Pelican Rouge UK team wanted more control and visibility on analytics, particularly around team performance.

After consulting with implementation partner Viegli, Pelican Rouge Group opted to implement the Unify OpenScape Business platform. OpenScape Business, which was specifically developed for the fast-growing SMB market, will increase the stability of the company's communications network while leaving room for future innovation.

OpenScape Business is a pure software solution, providing a complete all-in-one UC offering for Pelican Rouge, including voice, conferencing services, web-collaboration including video, presence, mobility, social networking and multi-channel contact centre capabilities.

At the core of Pelican Rouge Group's new system is a 58 seat inbound contact centre that has already taken more than 100,000 inbound calls, reducing abandoned calls by over 64% and improving the customer service that Pelican Rouge provides. Other benefits such as mobile integration and the myPortal for Outlook have allowed staff to interact with each other in a new, and much more productive, manner.

Robert Nunn, Technical Director, Viegli said: "Pelican Rouge Group was faced with a common problem - telephony systems were no longer fit for purpose. We were happy to work with Pelican Rouge to find the right solution.

"The teams at Pelican Rouge and Viegli are working closely together to continually improve the service that Pelican Rouge provide to their clients and by providing a live helpdesk for them their staff can contact us at any time for advice and or assistance with the system."

Tony Smith, By Tony Smith, UK&I Channel Sales Director at Unify: "Whether we're helping provide a solid backbone or innovative, cutting edge communications solutions, it's always pleasing to see the great value our channel partner network brings in meeting the needs of customers with our industry leading technology."

With the initial implementation complete and a success, Pelican Rouge Group is looking to consolidate more of their depots onto OpenScape Business. This will provide the business with the ability to focus on maintaining high uptime and availability across its communications network.

BroadSoft has unveiled a new BroadCloud software release, available in November 2015, that will bring the full capabilities of UC-One and SIP Trunking services to BroadCloud, and also includes service assurance enhancements, new terminal device options from AudioCodes, Polycom, and Yealink, and a UC-One Hospitality solution.

This release will extend the market coverage of BroadCloud from a SMB hosted PBX solution to hosted UC solution capable of serving large enterprises, said the firm.

The new BroadCloud release is one of several announcements unveiled and demonstrated at BroadSoft Connections 2015. This event is BroadSoft's annual global users' conference, which took place on October 25th-28th in Phoenix, Arizona.

BroadSoft also announced Project Tempo - a new initiative based on BroadSoft's UC-One offering - that will 'power the future of work for the small to large enterprise', and reported that it surpassed 12 million cloud unified communications lines deployed globally.

Michael Tessler, chief executive officer, BroadSoft, said: "BroadCloud's new unified communications services represent the continued evolution of BroadCloud from a small business hosted PBX to hosted UC solution capable of serving the needs of small, medium and large enterprises."

BroadCloud provides service providers with a managed, end-to-end operating platform, which supports the full life-cycle of the business customer - from initial quote to service activation to support processes.