Comms Dealer

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.

Provider of voice cloud services Natterbox has notched up 122% year-on-year growth in its latest quarter, a result that confirms the company's expansion in the cloud PBX and Salesforce voice integration markets.

Natterbox also secured a £3m funding facility from BOOST&CO and gained 40 new customers in the period, making the past quarter the most successful in its history.

To keep pace with growth Natterbox plans to increase its headcount by 15%, and has appointed Charles Heunemann as Global Head of Sales and Marketing, and Tim Beeson as UK Sales Director.

Heunemann was formerly MD APAC for cloud security firm Webroot and brings 30-plus years experience in the IT and telecoms sectors.

"Our new customer wins are a clear sign that the market trusts the cloud to deliver business telephony solutions," he said. "Natterbox's vision is to ensure phone systems and the customer's voice are incorporated in the digital age."

A new data centre in America brings Natterbox's global facilities to six, providing coverage for Europe, North America and Asia-Pacific.

Neil Hammerton, Natterbox CEO, added: "As organisations refresh their telecoms and voice management services they have the opportunity to improve their customer experience as well as drive efficiency and save money. Telecoms is now rapidly moving to a cloud delivery model in the same way as IT."

Simwood's focus on VoIP uptime, fraud prevention and real-time APIs helped the wholesale network operator to secure a deal with the London Internet Exchange (LINX) for the provision of reliable voice services.

As one of the world’s largest Internet Exchange Points LINX provides a meeting point for 600-plus ISPs including Simwood. The London network currently handles approximately 5Tbps of peak traffic and is within reach of around 85% of the global Internet. 

"Having previously deployed VoIP internally in and between its two offices, LINX wanted to embrace the wider benefits of VoIP while enhancing availability," said Simwood CEO Simon Woodhead.

Simwood operates an IP network spanning Edinburgh, Manchester, Slough and London and is built for high availability.

It also operates its own SS7 interconnects to BT and Virgin, each in multiple sites.

The VoIP stack is distributed throughout the network and at each level is able to fail over between sites. It has no dependence on and competes directly with services from other operators such as BT's IPExchange, noted Woodhead.

"It was a joy to receive an RFQ stipulating requirements that matched our USPs from such a technically competent organisation," added Woodhead.

"The process was exhaustive right down to an examination of fibre maps and failure scenarios, because if LINX sneezes the Internet catches a cold."

LINX CTO Richard Petrie added: "We want the flexibility VoIP offers, but not at the expense of availability. And Simwood's achievements on VoIP fraud mitigation and excellent real-time API were a welcome bonus."

The solution is currently in the deployment phase and will be brought into service over the coming months.

Lancs-based Abbey Telecom has recruited Andy Wilson (pictured) as Director with a remit to leverage sales opportunities in the north west region.

"We've hundreds of clients nationally but it makes sense to win business locally and do more on our home patch," stated Wilson.

He joins from cost management consultancy firm PCMG where he was Managing Director. Wilson's previous experience also includes a stint as Head of Sales and Service for BT Conferencing in the 1990s before becoming Sales and Marketing Director at Ryder Systems. He assisted in the sale of Ryder Systems to The CTI Group where he became the Worldwide VP for Sales and Marketing.

Abbey Telecom MD Tony Raynor added: "Our goal is to help new and existing customers understand the options they have with us in terms of lines and minutes packages, mobile solutions, as well as the high tech range of Samsung traditional and VoIP telephone systems. Andy will play an integral role in making that happen and he will be a fine addition to our team."

A WebRTC partnership between Telefónica' and Mozilla has come to fruition with the beta launch of Firefox Hello, the latest version of Firefox's browser which incorporates a screen sharing feature.

The update offers a new way for people to communicate and collaborate in real-time on the web, according to Ian Small, Telefónica's CEO of Communication Services & Product Innovation.

"Back in January we announced that Firefox Hello had been released into the Firefox browser allowing everyone to experience seamless real-time video communication," he said.

"We also mentioned that we were testing new exciting features that will help to make the Web a more open and collaborative place. I'm very excited to announce that the latest version of the Firefox browser now includes screen sharing capabilities within Hello.

"This new feature allows the host to share a browser tab or application window while in the video conversation, opening up new possibilities for collaborative web browsing with friends, family and co-workers. It's a great way to shop online together, collaborate on a document, or just watch a video with a friend."

Hello requires no plugins, accounts or sign-ups. A video conversation is started between two people by using a link to connect the two parties. The guest can join a video call simply by clicking the link that is provided by the host and screen sharing options are then made available in the chat window.

At this stage Hello is still in Beta, so please try out this latest version and let us know what you think - but keep your eyes peeled for more features that enable even closer collaboration and show that the Web is much better when experienced together."

Watford-based Freedom Communications has augmented its UC portfolio with the addition of DXI's cloud-based EasyContactNow solution.

The agreement signals DXI's push to recruit more UK partners to its channel programme, a campaign led by Glenn Warrington who aims to extend DXI's reach into new markets.
The move comes hot on the heels of DXI's acquisition by 8x8 for £16.5m late last month, extending US-based 8x8's European expansion strategy.

Freedom MD Pat Botting said: "DXI's products are quick to install and deliver a fast impact with minimal disruption to our business.

"The scalable solution is well suited for a small internal department supporting colleagues as well as a large customer-facing contact centre managing thousands of calls a day."

Warrington stated; "I have worked with many organisations, helping them to build their go-to-market strategies, and DXI stood out with its innovative approach and determination to deliver for the customer."

Sharon Maslyn, DXI Sales Director, added: "As more and more organisations are looking to harness the power of the cloud to drive superior customer communications, DXI is positioned to deliver both cloud and hybrid solutions that slot into existing infrastructures."

8x8 has acquired privately-held DXI for £16.5m and plans to bring DXI's EasyContactNow contact centre product to the US market by the end of 2015.

"The acquisition of DXI enables 8x8 to continue to boost its European expansion efforts," said Vik Verma, Chief Executive Officer of 8x8.

"With DXI's strong UK contact center market presence and technical team, 8x8 can broaden its European footprint, offer a frictionless, online sales approach for agile contact centres and line-of-business buyers, and add a stellar team passionate about bringing next-generation contact centre innovations to market."

Luca Pepere, DXI CEO, added: "Over the last couple years, we have seen an inflection point for cloud communications, and the contact centre continues to evolve from a stand-alone cost centre to a critical organisation-wide business asset.

"This market shift will propel the next phase of our business, and together we will drive a new level of disruption in business communications."