Comms Dealer

Vodafone UK celebrated its 2015 Partner of the Year award winners at its annual partner conference (St John's Hotel, Solihull, 9th July), and outlined upcoming changes to the Vodafone Partner Programme, now in its fifth year.

Partners heard first-hand about Vodafone's continued focus on total communications and renewed emphasis on customer experience excellence both within its own business and in the partner channel.

To align with this, Vodafone Partner Services will continue to work closely with its partners as the programme enters a new phase with the launch of Capability tiering next summer.

The new Capability tiers will recognise and reward partners on their success and expertise in selling and delivering total communications solutions and their ability to provide customer experience excellence. Details around the new phase of the programme will be released in due course.

Rob Mukherjee, Head of Vodafone Partner Services, said: "Both we and our partners are focused on supporting UK businesses to make best use of technology - technology which enables UK plc to work more efficiently, deliver great customer service to their own customers and compete in today's fast-paced market.

"We want our partners to focus on the things that matter - driving converged technologies and providing a fantastic customer experience.

"We also want to support our partners to be the best channel to market for our total communications portfolio, as we know this is what customers want. We believe that the upcoming changes to the programme will be key to enabling the future for both our partners and our customers."

The Vodafone Partner of the Year awards recognise partners who exhibit the highest level of performance, capability and skills across fixed, mobile and total communications between 1st April 2014 and 31st March 2015. The winners were..

• Total Communications Partner of the Year - Onecom
• Platinum Partner of the Year - Olive Communications
• Gold Partner of the Year - Qualitel Voice and Data (part of Elitetele.com plc)
• Silver Partner of the Year - NIBC Corcra
• One Net Partner of the Year - Connect Telecom
• Fixed Partner of the Year - italk
• Award for Innovation in Fixed Solutions - Eison

Mukherjee added: "Five years on from the launch of the Vodafone Partner Programme and our partners remain a vital part of our business.

"The awards are our way of celebrating our partners' commitment to and belief in Vodafone and it's fantastic to be able to recognise their well-deserved success.

"The award-winning partners span across all of our current tiers and across the mobile, fixed and total communications space, which is further demonstration of our own efforts to become a leading total communications provider."

To underline its evolution towards a full comms solutions specialist distributor Nimans has launched a new corporate video that it hopes will open the eyes of viewers.

"Nimans has always been known for traditional telecoms products and solutions but there's more to Nimans than you think," said Group Sales and Business Development Director, Richard Carter.

"For example Wireless LAN is one of the fastest-growing areas in the UK comms industry, set to expand 20% year-on-year and we are at the forefront of this fast growing market.

"The new video provides a snapshot of where we stand as a company and how we continue to offer resellers everything they need to compete in an ever-changing business world where technology sits at its heart.

"The video showcases how we can help resellers tap into new areas of activity particularly around recurring revenues that build greater long term value into their businesses."

WLAN, Hosted Services, Data Connectivity, Wholesale Mobile and Unified Comms are sectors spotlight as growing market opportunities.

Cisco is to invest $1bn (£650m) into the UK economy -  funding multiple projects over three to five years including investments in education and skills initiatives, a major extension of Cisco's British Innovation Gateway programme, and $150m of venture capital investments in Internet of Everything UK start-ups.

The investment was secured during a meeting at No.10 Downing Street between UK Prime Minister David Cameron, Business Secretary Sajid Javid, Cisco Chairman and CEO John Chambers, incoming Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins and Cisco UK and Ireland Chief Executive Phil Smith.

This second significant round of activity in the UK follows the $500m commitment made by Cisco in 2011, which has contributed in excess of $5bn in technology and manpower to the UK economy.

The commitment of $150m for Internet of Everything UK start-ups and venture capital equity investments will focus on key priorities for Cisco and the UK.

These include applications of Internet of Everything (IoE) technologies across the financial technologies, retail, and healthcare industries, and smart city development. In addition, corporate investments will also accelerate innovation in cybersecurity solutions.

Capital will also be made available for further strategic acquisitions by Cisco in the UK, which over the past five years has included acquisitions in wireless software, next-generation video delivery, and cloud-based security technologies.

Cisco will also further its UK-based Cisco Networking Academy education programme to promote innovation and entrepreneurship.

This builds on its already successful UK-wide network of innovation centres, established in the BIG initiative, which includes IDEALondon, the National Virtual Incubator network and CREATE.

Cisco will also support the UK government's desire to redress the country's North-South economic imbalance, with the addition of new centres of expertise, funded university collaborations, skills investments and expansion of Cisco's apprenticeship programmes.

The UK is Cisco's second largest country market, with up to 7,000 employees.

The company intends to expand further, doubling its Central London footprint with the addition of a new state-of-the-art office before the end of 2015, and the creation of over 200 new jobs.

The new activities form part of Cisco's global 'country digitisation acceleration' programme, whereby select countries across the world receive major strategic investment to accelerate existing government goals for driving economic growth through high-tech innovation.

Prime Minister David Cameron said: "This massive investment from Cisco is great news for the UK's growing digital economy and is a clear vote of confidence in our long term economic plan. It will create jobs and growth across the country, providing security for hard working people."

John Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco, added: "We believe the UK is well on its way to becoming one of the top digitised countries in the world, and we're proud to once again activate new programmes and continue our deep commitment to partnering with the UK government.

"Since 2011 we have delivered over and above on every objective we set with government in our prior commitments - encouraging technology, innovation and entrepreneurship.

"Through the British Innovation Gateway initiative, we have supported the government's ambition to create world class technology hubs across the country, generate jobs, diversify the economy and support sustainable growth."

Nine pupils from Springwood Primary School in Swinton gained insights into working environments during a guided tour of Nimans' Manchester HQ.

A presentation on working at Nimans and the types of careers on offer was also given, along with a demo on how a phone system and two-way radios work.

The pupils then demonstrated their skills as phone operators as they rang each other up playing out a customer and sales scenario. Two separate groups then embarked on a guided tour of the premises, keeping in touch via two-way radio.

Event organiser Sue Goldfine from Nimans said: "We thought it would be an interesting and informative experience for the children to visit a large company and give them an insight into the world of work. It also gave our staff the chance to meet the young people who were very enthusiastic and keen to discover more."

School teacher Collette Gibbons added: "The pupils absolutely loved it. They don't normally get the chance to go behind the scenes of a business and learn about what goes on. It was a very worthwhile and rewarding experience."

Logicalis UK has achieved the Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Authorised Technology Provider (ATP) designation from Cisco.

The designation recognises Logicalis as having fulfilled the training requirements and programme prerequisites to sell, deploy and support Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure products and solutions.
 
Participation in the Cisco ACI ATP Program allows Logicalis to offer customers a new data centre architecture designed to simplify operations and greatly reduce provision time through automation for their applications.
 
Chris Gabriel, CTO at Logicalis UK, said: "Together with our strategic vendor partners we've long been committed to helping realise the positive impact of emerging technologies for enterprise IT, with Software Defined Networking and Application Centric Infrastructures at the top of that agenda for some time.
 
"We're focused on helping our customers build a new relationship between IT and the business, where the CIO is able to offer the choice of services their organisation needs at the speed the business needs it - we call this the Service Defined Enterprise.

"The Cisco ACI authorisation is further testament to our investment in the skills, infrastructure, people and training that position us as a trusted partner in transforming the way organisations define and provision agile IT and data center services.

Fortinet has closed the acquisition of Meru Networks, expanding on its secure wireless vision to address the $5bn global enterprise Wi-Fi market with integrated and intelligent secure wireless solutions.

Fortinet's solutions in secure Wi-Fi markets, with its FortiAP secure wireless access points and FortiWiFi integrated security appliances for enterprise branch offices and small businesses, have been among the fastest growing products in the company's 'advanced technologies' portfolio.

The addition of Meru's intelligent Wi-Fi solutions to the Fortinet portfolio extends the delivery of a secure, uninterrupted user experience - anytime anywhere - providing peak performance in environments requiring high capacity load and a high-density of wireless users, such as enterprise, education, healthcare, and hospitality.

"To truly protect against all possible attack vectors, we are continuing to expand our end-to-end security platform to provide customers with the visibility and continuous threat protection they need - from the data centre to the cloud to the end-point," said Ken Xie, founder, Chairman and CEO of Fortinet.

"We expect the acquisition of Meru to help us deliver new solutions and services to help enterprises of all sizes deploy, manage, and secure wired and wireless networks in a mobile era."

John Petter, CEO of BT's Consumer Division, has called on Ofcom to formally amend the scope of its Digital Communications Review to include pay TV, citing high prices and poor outcomes for consumers arising from a lack of competition in pay TV.

In a speech to the Broadcasting Press Guild, Petter compared the falling prices, rising speeds and strong international performance of the UK broadband market with the high prices and bad outcomes suffered by UK consumers in pay TV.  

Petter hit back at Sky's calls for the break-up of BT, describing them as a 'smokescreen' designed to obscure the real market failings in pay TV, where Sky is the dominant player.

Petter said: "Whereas in the energy market regulators have criticised the Big Six operators, in pay TV Sky has a 64 per cent share, so there is really only the Big One.

"Switching in pay TV is 50 per cent lower than the levels seen in broadband, so it is clear we just aren't seeing the right levels of competition for Sky."

X-IO Technologies has appointed five new members to its Executive Team - Mark Zeller as Vice President, North American Sales; Bill Alexander joins as Chief Financial Officer; Steve Ashurst joins as GM EMEA; John Grover becomes Vice President Human Resources; and Ellen Rome joins as Vice President of Field Enablement and Demand Generation.
 
X-IO also announced that it has recruited Diamond Lauffin as Chief of Channel Strategy and Execution.    
 
Bill Miller, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, said: "X-IO is in a strong position from which to pursue leadership in the rapidly evolving storage industry where flash, cloud, and the software defined data centre are rapidly changing the landscape.

"With an increased demand for our price/performance leading all-flash arrays and the emerging trend for ultra-reliable hardware to underpin Software Defined Storage, X-IO is now executing at a new invigorated pace."
 

Bolton-based IT provider Imerja has been selected to improve the firewall infrastructure at The Royal Mint's secure headquarters in South Wales.
 
Following a competitive tender, Imerja was chosen to devise and implement a robust security solution which delivers both costs saving and reduced overheads, proposing a solution based on firewall technology from Check Point.
 
This is the latest project in a long-term relationship between Imerja and The Royal Mint. The IT firm has been a trusted security partner for the worldwide coin-maker's since 2009, helping to protecting its information and infrastructure from security breaches and minimising the risks that could impact on brand reputation and revenue.
  
Ian Jackson, MD at Imerja, said: "The Royal Mint is now using the same firewall solution as all Fortune 500 companies and is strategically placed for growth in the deployment of IT infrastructure in an increasingly IT pervasive world.  
 
"We relish every opportunity to work along The Royal Mint's internal team - whether to discuss ideas, develop projects or implement solutions - and are looking forward to building on this partnership in years to come."
 
Jeremy Davies, Network Manager at The Royal Mint, added: "Imerja fully understood the challenge and went the extra mile during the firewall replacement project."

Unitrends global channels boss Mike Dalton , talking to Comms Dealer sister publication IT Europa, says that its full partner programme, set to be revealed in a couple of months, will avoid revenue targets and the traditional silver, gold, platinum structure in order to concentrate on lifting channel engagement frequency.

The company has committed to becoming 100% channel and he aims to develop a plan to drive business through channels and get them educated on what Unitrends offers.

Still a relative unknown in the business, the back-up specialist will also be expanding its sales teams and building out from its UK and DACH base. It has partners in every European country, he says, but as not needed to localise the product yet. With a strong offering in the mid-market, it has built up a good following in the education and government sector, but has no real vertical market dominance.

The point of the channel move is to enable it to concentrate on pushing through resellers, avoiding competition an the costs of setting up offices.

"It is all about getting mind-share," he suggests.

"If we teach the partners to fish, we don't have to fish ourselves, but we also need to convince the customers that the reseller is a fisherman."

The programme will aim to build brand awareness against multiple competitors, and grow the reseller base, using e-marketing, co-marketing and social media to convince customers and channels of the value.

If he can get the 1,000-plus resellers who have made sales, albeit most of them a single instance, to up their transaction rate an give him 20% more business, he says he will be delighted.

With a cloud product just out in the US, Europe can expect a similar announcement some time soon.