Comms Dealer

Capita has partnered with Ark Data Centres to supply data centre space for the new Capita Private Cloud platform.

The move allows Capita IT Enterprise Services to develop standard infrastructures, processes and services that it can offer customers rather than creating bespoke solutions in every case.

By using Ark's data centres, Capita IT Enterprise Services will outlay one tenth of the capital cost compared to that of maintaining its existing facilities, and will at the same time reduce its environmental footprint.

The Kirby Group, an Irish multi-disciplinary engineering services contractor, is saving upwards of 15,000 euro a year thanks to a ShoreTel UC solution delivered by Phone Pulse, a telephony solutions specialist.

The installation was completed in just one and half weeks with zero downtime or disruption to operations and no interruption to call flow.

The ShoreTel solution has equipped The Kirby Group with its own telephony system which has enhanced productivity and reduced costs on outsourcing and line rental for the company.

It has provided organisation with its own scalable call conferencing facility, which was previously outsourced, meaning third party costs for call conferencing have been eradicated. The unified messaging feature means important calls are not missed as all voice mails automatically get routed to the user's email account.

Adrian Harte, IT manager, The Kirby Group, said, "We've rolled out a full ShoreTel VoIP solution to enhance our inter-branch communications and increase staff productivity. It was absolutely critical for us to reduce our legacy line rental expenditure and above all, to future-proof our business.

"Coupled with productivity savings which are harder to quantify, this has been a great investment for the company. The ShoreTel solution is a new way of communicating and has enabled us to extend the range in which we carry out business."

The Kirby Group employs 650 people in Ireland, the UK and in Brussels and works with high profile, well known, multi-national clients including Siemens, Google, Pfizer and Intel.

The Cloud Industry Forum's (CIF) Code of Practice for Cloud Service Providers has been formally recognised by ENISA (the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security), having been added to its Cloud Certification Schemes List (CCSL).

The CCSL, which has been compiled and assessed by ENISA in collaboration with the European Commission and the Cloud Select Industry Group (C-SIG) on Certification, has been designed to help end users and CSPs determine which Cloud certification schemes fulfil their requirements and can offer the correct level of reassurance.

Alex Hilton, CEO of the Cloud Industry Forum, said: "This is a major milestone for the Cloud Industry Forum and the broader cloud community. There are no dedicated cloud standards in the market, making it difficult for small business customers to identify trusted advisors.

"We hope this recognition will encourage more users of cloud services to actively seek providers that are CIF-certified, and likewise more CSPs to seek certification. We have taken important steps in providing a foundation in what is a fast changing and, to many, a new technology sector."

Distributor Exclusive Group could hit its billion euro target a year early as it looks to make further acquisitions, particularly in the leasing area.

A record quarter for the privately funded business saw sales reach 173m euro - an increase of 56% on Q1 2014 (40% like-for-like).

"A big change across our business is more services - global services capabilities that enable our vendor and reseller partners to close larger deals, assure more recurring revenue streams and gain stronger strategic ties with customers," CEO Olivier Breittmayer told IT Europa.

He thinks the company could hit its 1bn euro target by the planned year of 2017 without making any more acquisitions.

The growth is not so much taking share from other distributors, as signing vendors who are themselves growing, he says.

Security is the main pull, with firewalls and VPN as big areas.

Its key strategic vendors FireEye and Palo Alto seem to have had particularly good sales recently. The only limiting factor on growth is the speed - it takes two/three years to introduce a new vendor and build it.

New market segments are emerging such as cloud app analytics and policy management, where it has fast-growing Netskope, and its data centre focused business Big Tec, which it will roll out further in Europe this year.

It is trading in six European territories and continues to expand rapidly, reporting growth of more than 100%

The leasing business Exclusive Capital is now fully operational in France following the acquisition of Fibail System in January, and is already delivering substantial opportunities, he says, being both very profitable and opening up new business.

Geographic expansion is planned for the second half of 2015; and it looks like the UK could be one area where he is looking for a leasing business acquisition.

This is part of the Group's evolution toward a services-led business. Margins were in line with expectations, demonstrating growth and sustainability, while market and currency volatility was further mitigated by a balancing of Exclusive Group's global revenue share, supported by strong growth outside the Eurozone area where Exclusive Networks businesses in APAC (+35% growth), Middle East (+45%) and the UK (+60%) were top performers.

ITEC, the global logistics and services business acquired in December, has had an impact, building pipeline and confirmed orders from cross selling within the Group.

Capita has snapped up UK-based Pervasive, an IT solutions provider specialising in enterprise wireless networks, mobility managed services and bring-your-own-device solutions.

Pervasive, which comprises Pervasive Networks and Beovax Computer Services, has a large client base across a range of sectors including further and higher education, local government and the health service.

It's an EMEA partner for wireless networking provider Aruba Networks, which has recently been acquired by HP.

The business will sit within Capita IT Enterprise Services as part of the Technology Solutions division.

Pervasive will give Technology Solutions its fifth specialist business unit focused on mobility while further boosting capability within storage, compute and security obtained through two recent acquisitions - data storage specialist Solid State Solutions (S3) and IT security reseller Network Technology Solutions (NTS)

Peter Hands, executive director, Capita IT Enterprise Services, said: "We are continuing to see a shift in working habits with the increased use of mobile devices, requiring flexible technology that enables employees to enhance productivity.

"Pervasive has a strong record of providing wireless networks to clients across multiple sectors, offering the agility to respond to changing customer requirements.

"The addition of Pervasive further enhances the range of services offered by our Technology Solutions division, which already offers clients expertise in information security, networking, unified communications, cabling and data management."

The company has 76 employees with key sites in Newbury and Newmarket.

QLogic has expanded its distribution agreement with Arrow's OEM division that provides integration, manufacturing, and supply chain management services to industrial OEMs and intellectual property-based companies.

Under the terms of the agreement, Arrow will offer QLogic's complete portfolio of 10Gb Ethernet (10GbE), Fibre Channel, and converged networking solutions throughout Europe.

"Arrow OEM Computing Solutions provides businesses with instant infrastructure and access to a dedicated team of experts who fully understand their needs and goals," said Franco Mezzullo, vice president, EMEA, QLogic.

"This agreement expands our customer base and helps us accelerate market acceptance of our 10GbE adapters, which have recently achieved the second largest market share in the world, according to a Dell'Oro report."

As Dell took the opportunity to highlight its channel strategy to partners in Berlin last week, Aongus Hegarty, VP EMEA, told Comms Dealer's sister publication IT Europa that the company is looking to utilise its pan-regional distribution relationships to expand its reach in the SMB and consumer markets.

Dell currently ships around 40% of its overall EMEA sales through the channel, and expects distribution to increase 50% year-on-year in 2015. While the main goal is to increase Dell's customer base through the channel, Hegarty claimed distribution is also beneficial to its reseller partners. "A lot of that growth will come from building out a more significant distribution footprint, particularly in Western Europe. It will also give flexibility to partners that we're dealing with in [Dell] PartnerDirect to now have their business flow and be fulfilled through distribution."

But to reach its target of 30% year-on-year growth in channel sales this this year, Dell needs to grab more share in the SMB and consumer markets. "You'll see us build up more capability to reach into small and medium businesses with a lot of our products and solutions that we haven't been reaching today. So a lot of that growth and expansion will come from those areas and into the segments of customers we've been less represented in the last few years."

Referring to recent industry consolidation and restructuring news in the supplier space, Hegarty also said the UK market especially is representing more opportunities to gain stronger footing in those key growth markets. "If you look at the UK, we have a very strong presence in many business lines within that market. But also significant opportunity to grow and develop with this consolidation taking place in the PC business. There's companies exiting and selling off other elements of their business. The opportunity there for us is to grow and expand through distribution, I'd say broadly across the market but particularly into the small and medium business and to consumer segments."

While Hegarty was keen to emphasise Dell's localised approach, pointing out the firm hasn't got central headquarters and operates an 'in-country' model, the vendor has recently adopted a different strategy with distribution. "Over the last few years we've started to look at how we could have more multi-country, pan-regional distribution relationships. So we signed an agreement with Ingram Micro first and then Tech Data in the middle of last year where we would look at rolling out pan-European distribution relationships and that's been rolling across Europe."

The roll-out is expected to complete by the end of the year. Although the programme is in many countries adding to an already existing distribution network, Hegarty said the vendor doesn't see a conflict. "It's not that these are replacing relationships, it's complementing them, it's adding to the breath of our coverage and the breath of our reach in the marketplace."

Looking forward, Hegarty says Dell expects to add to the over 4,000 global partners it now has this year. In EMEA the vendor is also acquiring new staff as part of its investment plans. "This year we're investing with probably up to 400 to 500 people added into our organisation just from a sales, channel and from specialist perspective net incrementally. So quite a significant, 15% incremental investment in our headcount and specialist resource."

With security as Dell's current key theme, it is understandable the vendor has been making a lot of noise about the increasing number of its partners gaining security certifications (up 41% last year). However, it will be interesting to see if the vendor will look to partner with ISVs and other channels as well in the near future.

Microsoft has invited Newcastle IT specialists Technology Services Group (TSG) onto its elite global advisory council for key partners.

The council, made up of 27 official reseller partners from around the world, meets bi-annually at Microsoft's Seattle headquarters and TSG is one of only two UK businesses to have a seat.

Paul Burns, National Technical Director at TSG, said: "The Global Partner Advisory Council gives us a great chance to talk to other large partners from around the world as well as to represent our customers directly in front of Microsoft.

"The council is the perfect platform to feedback to Microsoft what we see among products as working well or not for our customers. So we have an opportunity to influence the development and delivery of their products which will ultimately improve the experience for our customers."

Earlier this year TSG achieved Microsoft's Gold Level Competency Award for Small and Midmarket Cloud Solutions.

UC vendor Swyx Solutions has unveiled a new version of its cloud solution SwyxWare Compact for Datacenter.

With SwyxWare Compact, resellers and MSPs can offer cloud-based unified communications services to their customers without a large initial investment. Based on a VMware platform, the Compact version has been adapted to the needs of the channel and is aimed at partners with existing VMware knowledge.

"Since 2007, we have offered our SwyxWare Datacenter Edition that has been primarily offered by carriers and service providers with their own data centre.

"With the Compact version we now cover the needs of the entire channel, so any reseller can give the customer a choice for SwyxWare - on-premise or out of the cloud," said Swyx CEO, Dr. Ralf Ebbinghaus.

Avaya has completed the acquisition of Esna Technologies, a provider of real-time collaboration and communications software, to accelerate the adoption of communications-enabled applications for both enterprises and mid-market companies.

Through the acquisition, Avaya will enable end users to more easily access multi-vendor communications capabilities - voice, video, IM/presence, conferencing and messaging - from within cloud-based business applications using their device of choice, claimed the vendor. 
 
An integrated Esna-enabled Avaya Communicator web client will be available for both the Avaya IP Office and Aura platforms with out-of-the-box video and voice capabilities that can be embedded into public or private cloud-based business applications.

The 'headless' thin client helps improve engagement, productivity and mobility by reducing the disruption caused by shifting in and out of applications or changing devices, said Avaya.

Founded in 1989, Esna is headquartered in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The transaction includes the acquisition of intellectual property, assets, employees and customers of Esna. Esna is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Avaya.
 
Gary E. Barnett, SVP and GM, Avaya Engagement Solutions, said: "It's time for the convergence of communications and business applications, time for enabling communications from the browsers of public or private cloud-based applications people use every day, and time for the user experience to be one click to engage. With Esna and Avaya, that's the value proposition - coming soon to a browser near you."