Comms Dealer

Network testing and security vendor Ixia has extended its distribution agreement with Arrow to the EMEA region. Arrow already handled the portfolio in North America and Latin America.

Arrow resellers in EMEA can now join Ixia's Channel Xcelerate Partner Program, which aims to help resellers' deliver end-to-end solutions for making their customers' applications and network security stronger.

"Collaborating with Arrow in North America has added a new dimension to our mission of making it easy for resellers to do business with Ixia," said Lori Cornmesser, vice president of global channel sales at Ixia.

"Arrow's strong ties with Ixia technology partners in North America and EMEA will help fast-track end-to-end solutions to value-added resellers and their customers."

Nick Bannister, Arrow senior director and head of networking and security EMEA, said: "Ixia's offering is instrumental to a number of Arrow solution areas including cloud, mobility, SDN and the Internet of Things."

Speaking at the NetEvents IT and security symposium in London this week, Gabe Luis, Ixia senior director of sales EMEA, told IT Europa: "We currently have around 200 partners across EMEA and they will benefit from our new product CloudLens, which enables their customers to measure performance, security and compliance needs across any private or public cloud service.

"Customers have a list of service requirements for every cloud service they use but their cloud service providers do not always deliver on what they promise, CloudLens allows them to check."

Ixia was recently acquired by Keysight Technologies, which is a $2.9bn network optimisation and product design firm.

HPE has boosted its Partner Ready programme with enhancements and a new suite of digital tools and content on hybrid IT, data analytics and edge computing.

New channel competencies and partner resources also aim to make it easier for partners to position and sell the HPE portfolio spanning hybrid and edge solutions.

At the Discover event this week, HPE also unveiled new HPE Pointnext services that partners can leverage to grow incremental revenue streams, plus a suite of digital marketing resources to help partners drive demand and build pipeline in the digital world.

According to Gartner, half of all enterprise content will be machine authored as well as managed on hybrid cloud systems by 2018.

File synchronisation and sharing are expected be a standard embedded Enterprise Content Management business function, while over 20% of all businesses will be managing content from multiple organisations.

These realities emphasise the urgent need for businesses to update and future-proof processes by investing in systems that allow content to be smoothly integrated and easily accessed online, says Gartner.

Across financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, legal and retail industries, the demand for ECM and Business Process Management systems to be personalised and hyper-connected is rapidly increasing - magnified by the continuous rise in e-commerce and an increasingly agile workplace and consumer.

Legacy ECM systems, on which many businesses still operate, are unable to integrate structured content and unstructured data, creating significant issues for companies across sectors, including loss of data and inefficient processes. In addition, businesses are facing the pressing challenges of rising data centre costs and increased security demand, as regulated companies want to maintain steadfast control of critical files while also avoiding the stress of massive data centres.

The cloud's ability to bring external stakeholders into internal business processes much more easily tackles a major pain-point for businesses today. Despite popular belief, sharing data and content with business partners is both secure and compliant, which is imperative for heavily regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare.

TeleWare has opted for Next Generation Data (NGD) to host its cloud-based call recording service.

The move follows TeleWare's decision to migrate all fixed line call recording solutions onto the new platform which is based on Microsoft Azure.
 
TeleWare has installed a number of racks at NGD in support of its new Cloud Call platform and is leveraging NGD's high speed low latency hybrid cloud infrastructure.

This is already enabling the new service to securely store over 35,000 minutes of voice call recordings per day in the public cloud and which can be accessed by authorised users without any discernible delay.
  
Rob Corrigill, CTO, TeleWare Group, stated: "We have total peace of mind that the data centre is the right fit for our current requirements and has the scale to support our future needs."      
  
TeleWare's Cloud Call Recording service enables businesses to record both inbound and outbound conversations wherever workers are.

Union Street Technologies has completed the northern leg of its Streets Ahead roadshow, kicking off at Glasgow's Grand Central Hotel before calling at Newcastle's Crowne Plaza. The firm used both venues to demonstrate aBILLity's latest developments including the billing platform's new web browser interface.

Head of Sales and Marketing Vincent Disneur stated: "It was great to share information on what we've been working on, what's coming soon and how our software can be used to boost profitability and productivity.

"The enthusiasm and positive feedback we received from guests was encouraging and an endorsement of our roadmap. We're looking forward to visiting Bristol and London next month for the southern stage of the roadshow."

The launch of three new Ivy Collection Restaurants has been aided by QDOS Communications which served up a menu of IT and Internet solutions for The Ivy City Garden in London's Square Mile, The Ivy Marlow Garden and The Ivy Cobham Brasserie.

QDOS WAS approached by Caprice Holdings having previously provided Telecoms, IT and Internet for the Ivy Collection - the first contract being the Ivy Market Grill in Covent Garden in 2014, followed by a further eight venues over the last three years.

Simon Catterick, Chief Executive, QDOS Communications, stated: "The Ivy venues are always very popular, therefore the reservations offices are inevitably busy, and the technology in the restaurants needs to work at an optimum level to meet the requirements of diners and staff.

"Caprice are working with us on a busy development schedule with a further ten restaurants this year located in Dublin, Edinburgh, Tower Bridge, Bath, Guildford, York, Cheltenham, Harrogate, Manchester and Leeds, with more set to follow in 2018."

MyPhones.com is to showcase Cisco's 7800 and 8800 handsets alongside its Altos platform at a roadshow on July 4th in Manchester.

The hosted comms provider has also added the Cisco 7832 conference endpoint to the list of phones that are compatible with the Altos platform.

These additions build on MyPhones.com's partnership with Cisco. The 7811, 7821, 7841, 7861 and 8811, 8841, 8851 and 8861 models have been operational with MyPhones.com's Altos hosted platform since early 2017.

MyPhones.com has worked with Cisco to deliver secure extension mobility hot-desking capabilities on the Altos platform using these phones.

The development is proving popular with MyPhones.com's reseller partners, who, in the first three months, have already ordered more than 6,000 handsets.

Chief Executive of MyPhones.com, Dr Stuart Marsden said: "Our hosted platforms, including our current platform Altos, were originally designed to operate specifically with Cisco handsets.

"We have extended compatibility with other manufacturers over the years to increase choice for our resellers. Now, almost 15 years on, it feels particularly fitting to be working again with Cisco."

Northern Ireland comms provider Rainbow has added £1m to its annual £5m investment pot dedicated to customer support, adding 10 more staff to its customer service and engineering teams.

The company will also invest in cloud-based products during the next two years.

Stuart Carson, Sales Director, said: "This is a mobile world. Companies need to adapt to stay ahead. Unified communications are of paramount importance and relevance and this investment will allow us to develop our offering over the coming years for all our clients."

Rainbow boasts more than 10,000 customers across Northern Ireland, and has offices in Belfast, Dublin and Glasgow.

Although a start-up business, comms consultancy Springtel's founder and MD Peter Cresswell (pictured) underpins the company with almost ten years industry experience, especially in the billing sector.

His father, Steve, was a founding director of Union Street Technologies and instrumental in writing the company’s aBILLity billing platform.

"I joined Union Street in 2008 and worked in a variety of roles, from first line support, second line support, team leader and Technical Support Manager," said Cresswell jnr.

Fours years later he joined Channel Telecom as Operations and Billing Manager and in 2013 decided to go it alone. He contracted for a number of comms companies including G3, Edge Solutions, Digiquip and Direct Response Group which he joined as Billing Manager.

"Within the first three months my team got the billing cycles for telecoms, call centre and Cirrus (a cloud contact centre provider) down to the first three working days of the month, instead of the two weeks it had always taken," added Cresswell.

"I was asked to work more closely with the Cirrus side of the business, helping to design its commercial pricing model and strategy ahead of a channel roll-out. I then worked more closely with the CEO on various projects."

Having left Direct Response Group in February this year, Cresswell launched Springtel in May to make available his experience and services to comms companies, offering an outsourced service for billing runs, reporting, analysis of billing system configurations, advice on commercials, bespoke software development and help with migrations or company acquisitions.

"We also offer cover for bill runs either as a one-off for holiday or sickness or on a longer-term basis," he added. "These services are more cost-effective than employing a full-time billing or commercial manager. 

"Outsourcing the billing functions can also have a big impact on efficiency. Our team of experts are available at a fraction of the cost of billing managers."

Node4 has added database managed services to its portfolio following an investment in Nottingham-based Onomi.

Andrew Gilbert, CEO at Node4, said: "Leveraging Onomi's capability and expertise in database management gives us a great opportunity to add further value to our customers by introducing cloud database skills and management services to them."

Database managed services cover implementation, database administration, optimisation, support, maintenance and disaster recovery of business-critical databases.

Database managed services allow businesses to keep their databases optimised and secure while making the most of the insights databases provide without putting a big strain on their internal IT resources.   

Julian Boneham, Director and co-founder at Onomi, added: "We've grown very quickly and needed to develop our back-office operations but doing it on our own would have required us to slow down."

Andrew Slater, Director and co-founder at Onomi, added: "This investment by Node4 enables us to scale the business without any disruption to our customers. We now have the ability to scale and invest in staff and tech to continue to innovate."