Comms Dealer

Mitel's new 'digital transformation strategy' allows companies to use existing investments, migrate to the cloud at their own pace and access productivity applications 'to compete in the emerging digital business landscape', stated the Canadian vendor.

Mitel said that its strategy also unlocks the power of the Internet of Things (IoT), effectively giving machines a voice with Mitel's call routing technology.

"One of the biggest challenges customers face today is how to keep up with the pace of change, and what they should do first, at a time when digital transformation is recasting traditional business models," said Rich McBee, President and CEO, Mitel.

"Our reference architecture provides a pragmatic, practical roadmap for customers to begin the journey today, no matter the starting point. It also opens the door to the opportunities associated with giving voice to 20 billion IoT devices with more than 450 million voice endpoints."

A new Automated Speech Transcription solution introduced by Liquid Voice helps contact centres and control rooms to more effectively locate and replay stored recordings when used in conjunction with the company's interaction recording and quality monitoring platforms.

Andrew Barrett, Technical Director, said: "The system will also help organisations to comply with the stringent GDPR standards that become mandatory in May 2018."

The solution enables recordings to be searched via any word or phrase and results can be viewed in seconds, eliminating the limitations of traditional phonetic-based systems, said the firm.

Search results can include inbound/outbound calls, emails, SMS and letters sent to customers, and are ranked by relevance and displayed as text summaries with search words automatically highlighted.

Liquid Voice (UK) MD Chris Berry said: "Automated Speech Transcription also makes 100% quality monitoring realistically achievable by enabling organisations to focus on outliers rather than just taking an average view.

"This provides the fullest picture of contact centre performance and revolutionises the way that contact centres can acquire and use speech technologies to improve customer satisfaction at every touchpoint."

The core European co-location hubs of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris had a 'strong' start to the year, with 26.6MW of take-up and 38MW of new supply in Q1 2017, according to research from global real estate advisor CBRE.

London was responsible for 17.5MW of take-up, which equates to 60% of the European total. "The market saw significant further activity by the hyper-scale cloud players, which resulted in London's second-largest quarterly total on record," said CBRE. In contrast, Amsterdam (3.5MW), Frankfurt (3.2MW) and Paris (2.3MW) were relatively quiet in the first quarter.

While continued activity from cloud service providers has again been the bed-rock of a strong first quarter, CBRE expects an increase in activity from corporate and enterprise occupiers as the year goes on, which will provide a "more balanced take-up".

Andrew Jay, executive director, data centre solutions at CBRE, said: "We predicted a strong 2017 in the European markets and Q1 has certainly delivered. Given the momentum built up in 2016 we weren't surprised to see a strong start to the year. The key question is whether 2017 will surpass last year's record breaking 155MW. Our view is that we will have another really strong year of at least 100MW, which is astonishing considering that the record take-up prior to 2016 was 78MW."

Q1 came very close to reaching a milestone of 1000MW of supply across the four markets, ending the quarter on 996MW. "We expect a substantial amount of further new supply to come on board during the course of the year, including new entrants in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London," said Jay.

Highlight has given Daisy Group 'Most Effective Up-sell Campaign' recognition for an initiative that targeted SMB customers with the Highlight product as an add-on to their existing Daisy connectivity service.

Highlight provides real-time alerting and monitoring service on Ethernet connectivity.

With Highlight in place account managers were able to gain visibility of the customers' connectivity usage and launch an up-sell campaign that was specific to the customers' requirements.

Dave McGinn, MD of Daisy SMB, stated: "The analytics that Highlight provides is detailed, and as a result we were able to specifically target customers who were using 80% or more of their bandwidth and offer them the chance to upscale to ensure that their connectivity experience wasn't degraded. These customers are now benefitting from an improved connectivity service."

CityFibre has achieved full ISO certification in all core management systems. The project was supported by certification body NQA and completed in 12 months.

John Franklin, Operations Director at CityFibre, said: "This achievement provides reassurance that we not only comply with recognised accreditations, but that this is built into the core of our business."

Matt Gantley, MD at NQA, added: "Certification in all of these management systems requires strong leadership and a clear commitment to linking strategy with business processes, as well as continuous improvement in quality, safety, environmental performance and risk prevention and control. To achieve this within 12 months shows a clear focus and dedication from CityFibre and its people."

Entanet has expanded its Service Review Programme and appointed Ryan Berrisford to the newly created role of Customer Relationship Manager.

He brings more than ten years experience having worked in first line technical support and latterly the company's premier support team as Team Leader and then Team Manager.

Berrisford said: "I've been heavily involved in our Service Review Programme since its inception and I'm keen to see partners benefit from working closer with us in the future."

TeleWare has enhanced its cloud-based TeleWare Communication Manager (TCM) solution based on customer feedback and investment in the user experience to bring a streamlined login process means customers now only need one single login to access all communications activity.

Other enhancements offer greater supervisor control of agents, training and monitoring, increased in-call information, live outbound call statistics, customisable reporting, while existing reports and analytics can be added to and built upon, without having to create new dashboards for each item.

Daniel Hensby, Head of Product Management, said: "Businesses need the ability to react in real-time to call volumes and critical business situations, making immediate changes to their contact strategy based on real-time or historic data.

"TCM is the first of our products to move over to a centralised control dashboard, or central hub. The hub is a location from which customers will be able to access all their TeleWare services in one portal, as opposed to needing separate logins to access different services. In time, this hub will house all TeleWare services, communication recordings and reporting tools."

Tollring has set out plans to extend its Uxbridge-based office facilities and ramp up its partnering campaign across EMEA, Australia and the USA.

The move follows a year in which Tollring recorded 42% turnover growth and a doubling of profits.

In 2016 the company launched integrated cloud analytics, call recording and real-time fraud and credit management, on-boarding over 50,000 endpoints across more than 2,000 business tenants on its hosted service platforms.

This growth brings the number of monitored endpoints to over 250,000 across 11,000 business customers.

MD Tony Martino said: "To stay relevant and provide customers with the right information at the right time is a constant challenge as communication continually evolves.

"Full credit to our UK and International teams who have remained flexible, agile and dynamic throughout this period of exceptional growth."

With less that one year to go until tough new EU data laws come into force the level of preparedness appears woeful.

When the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into effect on May 25th 2018 all organisations that retain or process personal information will need to comply or face crippling fines. 

But according to law firm Blake Morgan many organisations across the public and private sectors are far from having their houses in order and could be fined up to £17m or 4% of worldwide turnover.

Bruce Potter, Chairman of Blake Morgan, said: "We are just a year away from a major shake-up of information governance laws at a European level and it's fair to say that many businesses and public sector organisations are under prepared.

"The huge growth of the digital economy requires a more robust legal framework to ensure public confidence in the protection of information, and organisations need to adapt to these higher standards now."

Just half of respondents in a NetApp survey published last month had 'some' understanding of GDPR. "We have a long way to go and only a year to do it," stated Dr. Dierk Schindler, Head of EMEA Legal & Global Legal Shared Services at NetApp.

"As the cloud continues to transform the way we do business GDPR lays the foundations for our data-driven future and provides a strong incentive for all enterprises that process EU citizens' data to build a robust data privacy compliance framework.

"C-suite staff and IT managers, however, are still uncertain when it comes to data compliance, which is both striking and concerning as it lies at the heart of GDPR.

"Their understanding of compliance and ability to embrace the responsibility for any data they handle will directly affect their capacity to fend off future fines."

According to Gartner, non-compliant organisations will outnumber those that comply by the end of 2018. "The GDPR will affect not only EU-based organisations but many data controllers and processors outside the EU," said Bart Willemsen, Research Director at Gartner.

The GDPR replaces the Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC and is designed to support the single market and harmonise data privacy laws across Europe.

Sheila Fitzpatrick, Worldwide Data Governance & Privacy Counsel/Chief Privacy Officer, NetApp, added: "Brexit and the outcome of elections will have little to no impact on whether UK businesses need to comply with GDPR. It applies to any businesses that comes into contact with data on an EU citizen.

"As such, companies of all sizes need to take an active look at what data they hold, what they use it for and where it's stored."

Elitetele.com has netted Leeds-based Nexus Telecommunications, its largest acquisition to date, adding £16m revenue and 35 staff. The deal is Elite's 15th since 2008 and boosts revenues to £50m-plus with underlying EBITDA of over £8m, representing growth of 37% and 43% over Elite's FY7/16 results.

The enlarged group will have in excess of 165 staff across seven locations and extends Elite's customer base and geographic presence.

Elite founder and CEO Matt Newing said: "Nexus has a great reputation and we share a similar culture. The combination of our two companies' unified comms and IT products and services will deliver a stronger client offering."

"Nexus has some bespoke service wrap solutions for corporate and enterprise clients that we will offer to our wider customer base.

Nexus CEO Rob Sims, who is staying with the business, said: "Our customers will benefit from Elite's range of services including hosted IT services, PCI compliance, SIP services, phone systems and numbering services, which will complement the Nexus offering."