Comms Dealer

By Anton Le Saux, Head of Connectivity and Partner Sales at O2 Telefónica UK: As M2M solutions develop and improve and customers become clearer about exactly what they want, the M2M evolution is gaining momentum.

The market isn't seeing product growth alone, but more of an organic development that is touching more parts of every business and putting pressure on providers to widen their solutions.

This is great news for M2M providers, but also introduces short-term challenges. To achieve maximum impact from an M2M installation the best route is an end-to-end solution. Being a provider of smart connectivity is great, but customers are now looking for end-to-end capability, including connectivity, devices, solution and managed services in a single package. As customers become better educated, their requirements become more specific and all-encompassing, so end-to-end services are in demand.

Most analysts predicted this evolution with providers moving from pure managed connectivity to aggregated solutions, and potentially even further into fully integrated M2M services providers. It is an organic progression, but development rates will vary and some providers will struggle to keep up.

Few providers are in a position to offer a genuinely end-to-end, fully integrated system. So it makes sense for businesses to come together in a partner ecosystem to broaden their offering and extend their reach. This is why the M2M evolution is taking the shape of partnerships rather than product development alone. It gives providers an opportunity to quickly reach new customers rather than remaining dependent on the more time consuming process of product expansion.

For more information emailanton.lesaux@telefonica.com or visit partnersdigital.telefonica.com

By Elvire Gosnold, Director, Blabbermouth Marketing: What exactly is marketing? Some might say marketing is 'making things look pretty'. I disagree. Marketing is about making things desirable.

Most of us eat potatoes, but why don't we all buy the 'value' ones? I was a victim of the marketing game last week. I bought National Trust potatoes at a far higher price than the value ones. Why did I do that? Do I really think eating an expensive potato will get me closer to living in a stately home with perfectly manicured gardens? Aspirational potatoes, that is fantastic, and I of all people fell for it. Although I must add they tasted good.

My superior potato experience got me thinking that it was the great content marketing that the National Trust do that made me so engaged with their brand. Traditional marketing is about how to sell a product or service. The message to buy product X is blunt. Think of a TV advert or a press release.

The difference with content marketing is that it's not about direct selling, it's about informing people about how they can use the product, or benefit from a service in a way that the user will perceive the product as desirable. This makes brand value far greater as consumers are engaged with the brand rather than the product, which makes up-sell and cross-sell opportunities more realistic. A few examples of content channels are: Social networking, blogs, webinars and infographics.

Content should avoid self-promotion. It should solve a problem, address a challenge your audience faces, educate them or engage them emotionally. The idea being that your prospects are encouraged to use your content when doing their research, so when they later engage with your sales people your business has the necessary credibility for them to buy with confidence.

You don't need to be Einstein to figure out the future of numbers, according to ICUK's founding Director Paul Barnett, who proposes a radical rethink of the number porting process based on common sense principles.

Barnett has hurled his thoughts 'out there' and is seeking a mandate to overturn the immovable object of the number porting process. His long-term campaign for fundamental change starts here, revealed as a thought-provoking exercise that, he says, simply cannot be rejected - such is the strength of his belief in the need for a full blown revolution.

"I propose some out-of-the box thinking on how we see and interact with phone numbers in the future," stated Barnett. "We all know how frustrating and antiquated the number porting process can be. It's time for a radical change. Although there will inevitably be technical limitations or complexities, my aim is to encourage thought leadership that delivers a solution and rids this industry of the current porting systems and their limitations."

For Barnett, maintaining the status quo is inconceivable, but to win such a vote for change would need a Herculean exercise in cross-industry persuasion. "What I propose is a model similar to that of transferring a .uk domain name with Nominet," he explained. "The Nominet model is unique in the world of domains, in as much as a tag is assigned to a domain and this determines who controls the domain on behalf of the customer. The tag can change from provider to provider with ease, securely and with minimal barriers. Even if the losing provider puts up their own barriers to migration, the tag can still be changed by the owner via Nominet.

"When put into perspective, a number could have a tag which determines who looks after it from a billing and 999 perspective, and instead of name servers for domain DNS handling, you have an equivalent detailing routing for calls. Thus, a number could be held by one provider, a number facilitator, and calls handled by another."

Barnett's plan is to develop a consensus of thought leaders who together could forge a feasible case for change. "We have operated with the current porting model for many years now," added Barnett. "We have all grumbled about it, but see very little in the way of change or improvement from Ofcom.
Alternatives to the existing model have been proposed in the past, but nothing has been followed through. Why not take the chance to remove Ofcom from the equation and design a better solution whereby we can rid ourselves of old world thinking?"

This is a phenomenal approach that makes perfect sense, according to Barnett, who is seeking allies to join his rolling campaign convoy. "We all see a world that is steadily moving towards VoIP, and the traditional physical barriers to exchange boundaries are no longer prevalent," he added. "Yet, in some places number ranges are so scarce that clients aren't able to get numbers that belong to a particular area, with 0207 being the most notable example.

"Is it time that we design a new numbering solution with long-term ambitions to replace the system we know, and from an industry perspective, get frustrated with? Could a new system ensure that we deliver a long-term number solution without the need to change it again in a decade? Is it deemed necessary for geographic boundaries to still play a part? Could a replacement be operated outside of Ofcom, UK Government control, or even country boundaries? Could a replacement be simple enough to remember, having seen the slow adoption of IPv6 where the complexities and misunderstandings are stifling any enthusiasm for change?"

This probing set of questions exposes the limitations of the current numbering system, claims Barnett. On the other hand, he noted that the Internet has no boundaries. "The future of telephony is inextricably linked to data, so why introduce barrier limitations over how we identify and make calls to one another?," he asked. "Sure, it's helpful sometimes to know what country you are calling, but that's mainly from a billing perspective. In a world of data, why should the distance data has travelled dictate cost? The handling of numbers in a virtual space has blended perceptions about who you are calling. No longer is the local number you are dialling guaranteed to be a neighbour."

Having felled all arguments in favour of keeping the current system, Barnett turned his attention to other areas of concern: "Could operating this on an international level help tackle areas such as security, provide a fairer solution for poorer countries, ensure international standardisation for emergency contact information, not to mention the ability to freely trade and transfer numbers between providers?," he said.

"With the move towards VoIP assured, real change is needed. If we can't easily improve on porting as we know it, a coalition of radical thinking must be deployed. It's time to debate how a national, or even international numbering solution, could be designed with the next generation telephony at its core."

Slick and fast growth can only be achieved by moving to the cloud, according to Planet Hippo's Managing Director Darren Lavender, who built the company from scratch and is now busy turning even bigger plans for expansion into action.

Planet Hippo was formed in 2005 by Lavender and Jeremy Rose, founder and Managing Director of Ocean Telecom, a provider of mobile telephony solutions to corporate users in the UK. "We started out by testing the concept of Planet Hippo with Ocean Telecom's customers, then developed the core elements of the business including the billing platform and website," explained Lavender. "Over the next three to four years we concentrated on enhancing our proposition with the addition of services such as Microsoft Exchange mail, Website Designer packages and Virtual Private Servers on both Linux and Windows."

Planet Hippo is part of The Network Selector Group and has consistently been voted by users (individual and corporate) as one of the top UK web hosting companies on Web Hosting Directory, an online service that rates companies across the UK, USA, Canada and Australia. The firm is growing by around 80-90 per cent every year, driven not only by growing its user base organically, but also by an increasing number of digital agencies that are outsourcing their web hosting operations to the company. "We are also pursuing a programme of strategic acquisitions that will enable us to expand our reach across the UK," noted Lavender.

Another important extension of the company's capabilities was developing its own email platform, pointed out Lavender. "It eliminated overnight the spam and virus problems that customers were having using the shared resources that we used when we started out," he added. "This gave us a reliable and resilient platform that was totally under our control, and enabled us to offer a higher level of service to customers."

Making the move from a single server presence to cloud-based networks gave the company a more flexible platform. With web hosting packages starting from just £1 per month, the company has an agile approach to providing tailored solutions. "We also offer reseller hosting solutions that enable web developers, web designers, freelancers, web hosting agencies and IT professionals to outsource the hosting of their websites," added Lavender. "This eliminates the need for resellers to invest in their own infrastructure, security and support teams to meet the prevailing customer demand for 24/7 uptime."

Planet Hippo also takes care of server maintenance, including back-ups, security, software installations and more, allowing resellers to concentrate on growing their businesses instead of supporting their own hosting service. "The investment we made in building new data centres can be leveraged by resellers to provide clients with a value added service," added Lavender.

His entrance into comms territory was selling mobile phones in the retail sector during 1999. Having achieved success, he moved to selling mobile telephony to corporate clients and won many important deals. A stint in IT marketing followed, working for a company that provided mobile telephony and web-based services including hosting, website development and support. But Lavender's greatest achievement to date is building Planet Hippo from scratch into one of the UK's fastest growing ISPs and partnering with key technology vendors. One of the latest innovations is a partnership with Cisco making Planet Hippo the first ISP to offer the new Cisco Energy Management-as-a-Service offering on an e-commerce basis. This cloud-based solution helps corporate and public sector users to cut IT energy costs by up to 35 per cent and provides 100 per cent visibility into the energy use of every network connected device, according to Lavender.

The Energy Management-as-a-Service solution measures and manages the energy use of all connected devices from any vendor, including switches and routers, desktops and laptops, monitors, wireless access points, IP phones, printers and copiers across distributed office and data centre environments. "We provide a web-based portal where users can access a single dashboard showing wasted and saved energy for every IP-connected device, along with detailed energy data collection information and specific recommendations for optimising energy usage," noted Lavender.

Planet Hippo has also launched a new IaaS solution. It provides corporate users with a scalable, secure and cost-effective way to deploy cloud hosting, offering 99.99 per cent availability and zero packet loss to meet SLA requirements. "It offers greater flexibility and scalability than traditional web hosting by enabling corporate users to accelerate their delivery of cloud services and achieve significant cost reductions," explained Lavender. "This is done by reducing their reliance on premise-based IT infrastructure and eliminating the need for costly and obsolete centralised storage."

Lavender's current focus and priority is moving to the cloud, a migration that will enable the company to grow without the high level of investment associated with running its own in-house infrastructure. "The move to cloud will enable us to deliver a higher quality of service as well as offer faster speeds, increased reliability and redundancy including failovers and back-ups," said Lavender. "Before the end of 2015 we expect Planet Hippo to be a 100 per cent cloud-based operation."

Overturning traditional perceptions can be a long-term challenge, but according to Nimans' Group Sales and Business Development Manager, Richard Carter, the distributor is fast becoming known as a full-blown solution provider rather than 'just a voice distie' with 30 years of impeccable operation under its belt.

Nimans' well earned status as a bastion of traditional distribution spearheaded by Julian Niman cannot be contradicted. Just as certain, however, is its evolving role as a distribution hub for a spectrum of new and emerging technologies - all relevant to today's forward-looking ICT resellers. And a flick through Nimans' latest trade catalogue reveals a story of change and innovation, claims Carter. "Not that long ago technologies such as hosted telephony, WLAN, data connectivity and wholesale mobile would have been a foreign language, but today they represent a sizeable and growing chunk of Nimans' operations," he said.

"Our evolution is based on helping customers grow. That's never changed. We've always been a trusted supply source and now recognise how recurring revenues and leasing offer new ways for resellers to build greater value into their businesses, in addition to upfront sales. Choice is key."

Traditional technology such as systems, headsets and telephony remain popular, but it's not just about shipping boxes from Nimans' state-of-the-art warehouse. "We offer much more and are no longer a long standing voice distie," commented Carter. "The message is getting out there, but there are still some resellers who think they know us but in truth they don't. It's up to us to show them why Nimans is now a complete solutions-led specialist."

To help convey this message Nimans is changing the strapline on its logo, negotiating updated supplier contracts, launching a new company overview brochure and renaming its Systems Sales team to Solutions Sales. These, says Carter, are fundamental changes to the business made from the ground up.

In terms of growth areas, Carter points to WLAN and hosted as particularly stong. "Hosted is growing dramatically and the huge number of end points we are shipping reflects this as well as general levels of demand," commented Carter. "WLAN is one of the fastest growing areas in the UK comms industry, set to expand 20 per cent year-on-year. The £250 million UK sector is growing much quicker than the PBX market, and Nimans is at the forefront of the latest trends offering wireless connectivity solutions from Samsung and Engenius."

According to Carter, high quality WLAN is an essential business component that represents a 'massive opportunity' for telecoms and ICT resellers. "Today's technology combines simple installation with long range wireless performance across a host of environments," he added.

In the hosted telephony space, GS-hosted is Nimans' own hosted voice platform that offers resellers three ways to make money - upfront, recurring or a combination of both. The fast growing service includes a three year licence with every handset purchased and offers a choice of both capex and opex revenue models. Resellers can source the service for as little as £2 per seat, noted Carter.

Another important growth area for Nimans is data connectivity, which, says Carter, is flourishing. "Our Network Services division helps resellers maximise revenue opportunities in today's data hungry world," said Carter. "Ninety per cent of all data was generated in the last three years and we offer a wide choice of high capacity and flexible connectivity solutions such as broadband and FTTC, DIA, EtherStream, EFM, LAN Extension and MPLS/VPLS-based Wide Area Networks."

Just as important in Nimans' connectivity portfolio is mobile data. "We work with leading network carriers to offer resellers lots of mobile tariffs and associated services such as bureau billing," explained Carter. "Resellers maintain full customer ownership and benefit from a choice of single or multiple user inclusive tariffs and bundles, or bespoke pay-as-you-use options. We are also enabling resellers to exploit new areas such as the IoT and M2M, where vital data can be automatically transmitted direct, such as from vending machines and water meters."

A prominent feature in the recent changes at Nimans is the appointment of Marcus Yates who now spearheads Unify systems sales. His appointment follows a four year stint at the distributor, previously heading-up the NEC division which is now being run by Yvonne Tierney-Neave who also boasts an extensive comms career. "This reshuffle is in addition to our Systems Sales team being renamed Solutions Sales," explained Carter.

"We are much more than a traditional distributor. A new corporate video is being developed to emphasise the changes within our business and how resellers can capture new revenue streams and continue to grow and develop. Across the Group the number of engineers has doubled. And we have all the components in place to maintain our levels of service and support."

Carter believes that for the most part resellers do not still see Nimans as a traditional voice distributor. "They are getting the message," he commented. "Nimans is very much a voice and data service and solutions specialist as well as a channel comms distributor. For example, we are revisiting all of our supplier agreements because what we currently have is essentially equipment distribution contracts, but the industry is moving more towards software and services. We are combining the old with the new, and it's an exciting journey."

Philip Carse, Analyst at Megabuyte.com, reports on the recent performance of leading companies in the comms space during the last quarter.

As with the previous quarter, the Telecoms & Networks peer group outperformed the FTSE All Share this last quarter with an average 9% share price rise versus 2.5% for FTSE, but slightly under-performed the broader Megabuyte universe of UK tech stocks, which was up 12%. The main share price gainers were TalkTalk and Adept Telecom off the back of results and an acquisition respectively, while the biggest story of the quarter was Daisy's deal to buy Phoenix IT in an unusually busy M&A-busy period.

TalkTalk led the share price gainers, up 23%, after the company published strong fourth quarter revenue growth of 6% to £475m, driven by 14% growth in Corporate (B2B). The company has increased medium term revenue growth guidance 1pp to 5% while reiterating 25% EBITDA margin targets, and has laid out ambitious plans for the business, including Corporate (double market share) and FTTH (up to a 10m homes rollout). TalkTalk also acquired hosted voice provider tIPicall for £5m. Adept Telecom's 16% share price rise reflected its £7m/4x EBITDA acquisition of unified comms and managed service player Centrix, boosting revenues by a third, expanding its product capabilities and its public sector exposure.

Other strong moves included Kcom (+11% for no obvious reason), Redcentric (+10% after buying Calyx's managed services business for £12m), and Vodafone (+9% on speculation concerning a corporate deal with Virgin Media owner Liberty Global). The main share price faller was Coms plc (-73%) after a Board upheaval and dire trading updates, culminating in the sale of its telecoms business to Timico for £2.5m. Multi-utility reseller Telecom Plus fell 28% after a profit warning. Adept (+52%) and Coms plc (-89%) also lead/prop up the 12 month share price performance charts.

Overall, M&A has been a key feature of the last quarter, led by Daisy's 160p/£179m agreed acquisition of Phoenix IT, which we speculated on when Daisy announced its take private last August. The agreement will boost Daisy's EBITDA by 42% before synergies and create a £200m mid-market telecoms and IT powerhouse and boost Daisy's Partner division, alongside its existing SME business, in an organisation with total combined revenue of about £620m.
Daisy also partook in the Calyx break-up, buying Break Fix for £3.75m, while Chess acquired the Carrier Services division for £1.8m, alongside Redcentric's managed services deal mentioned above. Timico was also a multiple acquirer, buying IT specialist Wirebird for an undisclosed amount alongside the aforementioned Coms plc deal. We estimate that the two deals add about £23m, or 50%, to Timico revenues, though with little to show in the way of profit in the short-term.

Other recent noteworthy deals include UK Broadband's proposed and rather expensive £14m acquisition of mass accommodation ISP Keycomm, and Specialist Computer Centres (SCC) investment in connectivity specialist Fluidata, building on its recent acquisition of SSE Telecoms' data centre business. In other corporate activity, rural fibre to the home network operator Gigaclear raised £30m to take total funding to date to £50m or so.

Aside from TalkTalk, other recent notable public company results include American-listed UCaaS player 8x8. Alongside fourth quarter 22% organic revenue growth to $43.5m at a 11% (non-GAAP) net income margin, the company guided for at least 25% growth this year from its UK subsidiary, the ex-Voicenet. BT reported a robust fourth quarter, with EBITDA up 7% to £1.8bn on revenues down 2% at £4.6bn. Again, BT Consumer was the standout division, with revenues up 3% in the quarter, taking the full year growth rate to 7%, at £4.3bn, while Openreach added a record 455k fibre broadband net connections this quarter.

In a positive trading update, Alternative Networks has described first half trading to the end of March 2015 as 'robust' and on track to meet full year expectations (consensus shows revenues up 12% to £154.8m and EBITDA up 20% to £23.5m, growth largely inorganic). Performance was driven by Advanced Solutions, helped by the Control Circle and Intercept IT acquisitions (albeit with some challenges at Control Circle) and cross-selling, as well as mobile market share growth, while fixed line is 'in line'. The company is also targeting 15% annual dividend growth.

The pick of the bunch of private company results were those from connectivity and cloud specialist Exponential-e, with revenues and EBITDA for the year to January 2015 up 22% to £60.6m and 40% to £10.2m respectively, with similar growth expected for the current year. In this last quarter, Megabuyte also started tracking fast growing business comms providers Focus Group and Wavenet.

The rise of shadow IT could suggest that many CIOs are not able to deliver the innovation required by their organisations, presenting significant challenges in the development of coordinated IT strategies in the enterprise. How can resellers help them, and what challenges will resellers face in building customer relationships and achieving a successful outcome?

The mission critical nature of IT has come to the fore at a time when IT budgets are showing signs of an uptick and the role of CIOs is changing due to digitalisation and shadow IT. The critical nature of business IT is nothing new, but the level of criticality is increasing by the day. "For VARs to remain competitive in this world of fully converged IT, becoming experts in various integrated technologies is absolutely key," said Keith Bartlett (pictured), EMEA Director for Business Development, Distribution & Inside Sales at ShoreTel. "The days of the basic reseller are numbered. VARs need to invest in highly experienced people who are not only sales savvy but also experts in specific verticals. These are the individuals that will attract and retain CIO and business relationships."

CIOs are the face of an organisation's requirements around IT and infrastructure. They are also tasked with improving various lines of businesses (LoB). However, as speed to market and technological change occurs at a quicker pace, it is becoming commonplace for the LoB leaders to seek their own quicker implementations of historic IT solutions. "For example, many Salesforce implementations are driven and managed by sales departments as a forecasting tool with CRM solutions driven by marketing," added Bartlett. "While VARs need to retain and support their relationship with the CIO, developing and nurturing relationships with other LoB departmental heads is also important. This ensures that solutions are considered for their integration capabilities, not just their specific pain point solution. This will enable the VAR to become a trusted advisor and capture more wallet share within their respective customer bases."

VARs need to ensure that any LoB solution is fully integrated into the organisation's IT stack creating a truly end-to-end automated business engine that drives efficiencies, reduces costs and improves customer retention. The context for this transformation is the relentless march of digitalisation which is impacting all organisations. But those seeking to be digital businesses do not suddenly become experts in IT overnight. They specialise in their own field and need to find a way to innovate and build their business services online.

"Customers need help to build a resilient infrastructure with high speed access to digital services," noted Nathan Marke, Chief Technology Officer, Daisy Group. "But surveys suggest that CIOs suffer from a lack of confidence in their ability to cope with the rate of change. Our job is to help the CIO extend their armoury so that the IT department can remain relevant as the business moves into digital services."

Due to the rise of cloud-based applications and changing work habits such as BYOD, the role of the IT department is changing. Shadow IT (IT that is implemented within a business context but without the involvement of the actual IT department) is fine to a point, but it does raise some issues around compliance, support and security etc. "Failure to involve the IT department in these processes comes at a cost," added Marke. "The successful production of digital systems requires the robust management of the CIO in order to deliver an enterprise-standard service."

According to Marke, resellers need to consider the changing role of the CIO, from running a technical department to increasingly becoming a broker of cloud and traditional services. "We should reflect on how we change to continue to add value," he added. "This brokerage role requires the CIO to be highly competent commercially, to be able to communicate and operate at an executive business level, and to build strong, trusting relationships where partners are truly committed to the delivery for mutual benefit."

The CIO's traditional technical skill set is still relevant but must be moved into a third platform context, believes Marke. "Two types of CIO will emerge," he added. "There will be those who rise to the challenge, embrace and allow shadow IT to flourish where it creates innovation and delivers the best collaborative result. These CIOs will become CEOs in time. But those who fail to grasp this opportunity will remain under the CFO as a cost centre, not irrelevant, but not critical to changing the business landscape."

Gartner predicts that Chief Marketing Officers will spend more on IT than CIOs by 2017. The smart reseller must develop their marketing and sales techniques and advise the CIO to have those conversations with the CMO in order to bring value to the relationship. "It is vital that these discussions focus not on the technology but on the services and what can be done to make a business work better," added Marke.

ICT resellers and MSPs occupy a unique position to drive innovation within businesses, drawing together and managing the delivery of a complex set of technologies in ways that are beyond the capabilities of in-house IT departments. "Perhaps more importantly, this technology has become a distraction from what internal IT departments should be focusing on - their core business and how IT can support the objectives of the organisation," said Neil Thomas, Product Director at Claranet.

"MSPs are in a prime position to help businesses take a step back, look at what they need from their IT and where they want to be in five years time. This is a luxury that too many internal IT departments don't have, their time being largely consumed by keeping the lights on and maintaining the status quo. MSPs are able to provide a high level of application expertise that will enable businesses to succeed in developing innovative growth strategies."

But there are significant challenges in the development of co-ordinated IT strategies in the enterprise. "The risk is not that people outside the IT department are having a role in procuring IT," explained Thomas. "Individual units within an organisation do have a role to play because they bring specific knowledge of their requirements. The risk is that the result will be an uncoordinated and siloed IT set-up with duplicated services and uncontrolled costs across the organisation, with data being stored in a way that is not compliant with the security policy of an organisation."

Shadow IT is sometimes a sign that IT departments cannot understand the needs of the business at large, pointed out Thomas. The knock-on effect is that more business leaders are taking it upon themselves to source their own IT. "What is key is that the IT department becomes the enabler of innovation and assists with these purchases," added Thomas. "The effective use of resellers and MSPs can enable an IT organisation to perform this leadership role."

The important role played by ICT resellers in helping end users with their digital strategies is clear in almost all partner-customer engagements witnessed by Entanet. "It's more important now than ever for resellers to develop a real relationship with their customers," said Stephen Barclay, Entanet's Head of Sales. "The abundance of knowledge and experience in the channel makes customer retention a key point of focus. Resellers who operate as trusted advisors earn the loyalty of their customers, especially where it's balanced by strong commercial acumen and a close eye on the market."

Entanet encourages its reseller partners to develop a consultative sales approach, but they will come across challenges such as customer inertia and price sensitivity. "This often comes down to a lack of understanding on the user's part, which justifies the need for resellers to guide the customer," said Barclay. "When they see value in the advice they're given and understand the benefits of a particular solution, price becomes less of a determining factor. Resellers who remain engaged with customers build strong relationships."

Although resellers are experts on the solutions they sell, first and foremost they need to gain a strong understanding of the end user business and the challenges they face. "Strategic solution selling is a requirement," agreed Kim Jennings, Director of Sales at ScanSource Communications Europe. "This approach helps end users to be more efficient and enables resellers to improve how the customer does business. This also helps resellers to get closer to their customers and be trusted advisors. The most successful resellers provide sophisticated sales and pre-sales support, along with a team that understands business issues and processes and can demonstrate a return on the investment. This is the opposite of resellers who just provide an insight into the 'speeds and feeds' of a product with no solution or added value."

US-based RingCentral has a strong and growing influence in the UK and in March this year partnered with BT to launch BT Cloud Phone. Here, Curtis Peterson, SVP Operations, discusses the company's fast evolving expansion strategy.

Despite the march of technology and the attendant challenges of keeping pace, the biggest hurdle facing RingCentral is realising the market opportunities at hand and raising the company's profile. "With SaaS adoption maturing all the way through to enterprise accounts, building a case for SaaS-based business communications is no longer difficult," said Peterson. "And we are approaching the natural end-of-life for on-premise PBXs. This, combined with mobile workforces and the need for more than just voice, is wind at our back. The challenges are reaching all of the opportunities and telling our story."

RingCentral was founded in 1999 by Vlad Shmunis and Vlad Vendrow in Silicon Valley. Both have a pedigree in engineering and they shared a vision to build a software-based business comms solution. After delivering fax-over-Internet and basic forwarding services, their goal was to create a touch-enabled and touch configurable platform, a quest that came to fruition six years ago when they launched their flagship product, RC Office, which has since been adopted by more than 300,000 businesses in the US, Canada and UK.

The main driver for the company has been an up-market push. "We put a plan together for small businesses based on an e-commerce strategy with simple set-up and configuration," said Peterson. "This has traditionally been a difficult segment to serve as many customers are first time buyers of these types of systems. Our current focus is to continue to serve and grow the smaller business while moving up-market. This is a distribution and branding positioning exercise, and the early results are positive."

RingCentral employs and contracts approximately 1,500 employees in the US, UK, Russia, Ukraine, China and the Philippines. Its latest earnings report showed quarterly revenues of circa $65 million and year-over-year growth of 35 per cent, while improving operating margins. It's target customers trend towards 50-plus seats where the company witnessed Q1 growth of over 100 per cent. Just under 500 of RingCentral's employees are in engineering, QA and DevOPs roles. The company develops, certifies and deploys its own software-based systems that run on commodity hardware, and has over 100 patents issued or pending for its Intellectual Property.

Its target markets remain the UK, US, and CA with a focus on growing its up-market presence in all regions. "We are also targeting the international branch offices of companies that are headquartered in our key territories, serving over 29 additional countries with local telephone number presence," added Peterson. "Our partnerships with carriers have also been delivering growth."

VARs represent a significant portion of RingCentral's business. While they have traditionally profited from CPE, the new VAR model is solution-based. "By distributing RingCentral in their product portfolios they are able to meet the needs of a business that is mobile and works from multiple places," added Peterson. "We update our software every eight to ten weeks without service interruption. This allows VARs to profit from areas such as WAN, ISP, LAN, and specifically Wi-Fi. With IoT and multimedia communications coming to the Wi-Fi office, talented VARs who know how to engineer, build, configure and maintain these systems will be critical."

Peterson's interest in technology reaches back in time further than his memory. He does recall having a PC when they were rare, coding at the age of 12 and taking computers apart and reassembling them to see how they work on the inside. His relationship with communications was borne more out of necessity than curiosity. "I always liked the personal side of communications," he said. "We lived a long way from my grandparents and the ability to ring them seemed the kind of technology that could change lives."

Peterson was at that time ten years old and living in France, making regular trips to the post office where he could make satellite calls to his family. So it's not surprising that communications became an integral part of his life from an early age. Fast forward a few years and Peterson set about sharpening his technical skills in Computer Engineering at Auburn University and embarked on careers in research, development and code writing. "I moved to building out networks when the age of the Internet arrived," he explained. "But it was never about the bits and bytes to me, it was about technology and communications fundamentally improving lives and personal interaction."

Today, Peterson sees multi-modal communications and complete mobility driving the future of business communication platforms. "Our platform now includes business messaging and HD video meeting and collaboration capabilities," he said. "Our mobile-first approach means these technologies can be used on regular mobile devices. As the younger generation enters the workforce, they typically text three times more than talking, so a business comms platform must accommodate these new workforce behaviours."

Peterson has an uncanny knack for understanding what makes people tick, an attribute that underpins his biggest career achievement - successful people development. "Many of my former employees are either VPs at large companies, own and operate their own business, or at the forefront of their expertise and career," he commented. "Obviously, their hard work and ambitions are not my doing, but I do believe that my influence, vision, and attention to customers and people before technology had a small part to play in their growth."

Agilitas CEO Shaun Lynn aims to bring inventory to the masses having completed an MBO and appointed industry veteran Tom Kelly as Chairman.

In June 2014 Lynn led an MBO along with NVM Private Equity from the previous backers Acal Enterprise Solutions. Completing the MBO and then assembling a 'great team' ranks as Lynn's biggest career achievement to date. Most notably, two high profile hires are certain to boost Lynn's growth ambitions, having on-boarded former Logicalis chief Tom Kelly as the new Chairman (who described Agilitas as the 'IT industry's best kept secret'), and Richard Eglon as Marketing Director who joined from channel services firm Comms-care. The appointments are astute, with Kelly adding more clout to how the business is perceived and Eglon chomping at the bit to further raise the company's profile and 'get its message out there'.

Agilitas is a European provider of supply chain solutions focused on delivering services to the server, storage and networking marketplace. Its portfolio of support services include risk mitigation, service inventory management, training, repair, technical support, IMACs and hardware sales. The company traditionally focused on pan-European OEMs, large service providers, resellers and system integrators, and is now developing its services proposition in line with the evolving OEM roadmaps, market trends and the changing demands of customers for enhanced services and offerings.

The Nottingham-based inventory management specialist was set up in 1991 and known as Computer Parts International, operating as a parts sales business focusing on IBM mid-range and high-end products. Steady growth and various reincarnations through the 1990s and early 2000s saw the addition of HP and IBM Wintel product ranges to the services portfolio.

"From 2003 onwards the focus was on the development and implementation of a customer driven annuity business model, then rolling it out through customers such as StorageTek, Bull and Phoenix IT," explained Lynn. "This led to a fully outsourced inventory model launched to the market in 2012. Today, Agilitas supports some of the UK's leading OEMs, resellers and managed services providers as IT firms look to benefit from the Inventory-as-a-Service proposition."

In its 2014 financial year Agilitas increased revenues from £6.2 million to £7 million and upped the headcount to 71 from 54. The company expects to reach £9.1 million revenues this year and add more staff, with £11.8 million budgeted for financial year 2016 along with a projected increase in headcount from 78 to 87.

The market influences most strongly felt by Agilitas include the need to simplify complex products and product life cycle management, core to context evolution, the rising adoption of cloud and the requirements of large service companies moving away from the traditional reseller-distributor model to develop their own services proposition. "We aim to change the mindset that having access to high quality service and expertise isn't as costly as IT firms perceive it to be," said Lynn.

His time in IT began as a graduate hire at IBM UK in the global services strategic outsourcing division where he spent six years in a variety of commercially focused roles supporting some of Europe's largest outsources such as C&W, NTL, JPMC, Defra, ABN Amro and Astra Zenecca. Lynn was then recruited by Sun Microsystems soon after the StorageTek acquisition as Head of Delivery Partner Management and Multi-Vendor Services. This involved a strategic focus on the insourcing of multi-vendor activity with an emphasis on moving up the value stack offering around OEM services.

"The highlight during my time at Sun was creating the largest and most profitable Sun/Oracle multi-vendor business unit worldwide," said Lynn. "In my current role I spend much of my time focusing on working with clients to identify what is core to them and their customers, and what is on the periphery. From my perspective, having the technical skills to fix a customer's issue and to take ownership is core to a business, while owning the spares inventory and managing the logistics function is periphery. This is where Agilitas can add value and support their requirements."

Lynn hopes to transform the perception of IT spares management by making the IT market more agile. He believes that reactive parts buying is mostly inefficient and clunky, rarely delivering the value that the end users crave. So Lynn is working hard to create deeper customer relationships, understanding their needs and challenges, while selling based on creating value with greater emphasis on the indirect benefits that truly make a difference, such as service.

Agilitas' credentials are impressive, offering multi-vendor hardware support, third line engineering fly and fix services, a technical help desk, engineer training, test and repair services. It boasts 85 forward stocking locations throughout Europe, supporting 'always-on' two to four hour parts-to-site SLAs, achieving a 99 per cent hit rate. The company is one of the largest stockists of data centre hardware in Europe with over £6 million of multi-vendor service inventory covering in excess of 75,000 parts.

Commenting on the next phase of growth for the company, Lynn noted: "For many years we have delivered inventory management services for some of Europe's leading OEMs and service providers. We have expanded our services portfolio in line with customer demand and will continue to do so. However, with the addition of Tom Kelly we have someone who is already driving us forward in getting ahead of the curve."•

BroadSoft has acquired US-based mPortal, enabling BroadSoft's global telecommunications service provider customers to deliver customisable UC experiences to a wide range of business end users across different market segments.

mPortal designs and develops customer experiences across mobile, web and other connected devices. mPortal's mobile-centric design and development capabilities will provide the foundation for BroadSoft Design - which allows service providers and enterprises to customise and differentiate UC solutions built around BroadSoft's UC-One solution.

"It is increasingly clear that a 'one size fits all' strategy for delivering unified communications is insufficient for meeting the superior and differentiated end user experiences that businesses demand," said Scott Hoffpauir, CTO, BroadSoft.

BroadSoft UC-One makes UC services and other business applications available on a single user interface.

"With BroadSoft Design, service providers can now deliver personalised services to a wide range of market segments and devices," added Hoffpauir.

BroadSoft Design is available to service providers delivering UC services with the BroadWorks platform or via BroadCloud, the fully-managed end-to-end service.