Comms Dealer

Phoenix has been selected as preferred supplier for Cegedim Rx, a key provider of computer software solutions and services to the UK pharmacy market.

The three-year contract will see Phoenix deliver a fully outsourced and tailored managed hardware support services to 3,500 of Cegedim Rx's customers across 4,000 pharmacies and retail outlets across the UK.

As part of the contract, Phoenix will deliver a break fix service, service desk, remote support and logistics management.

Steve Vaughan, Chief Executive of Phoenix, said: "With Cegedim Rx we recognised some initial challenges and therefore recommended a more tailored approach which aims to deliver services and solutions designed to empower Cegedim Rx's customers, to improve and optimise day-to-day operational tasks, reduce risk and control costs.

"We have seen a strong pipeline of contract wins in the first few months of 2015 and I look forward to replicating this success going forward."

Phoenix has a longstanding relationship with Cegedim Rx's sister company, INPS, for over 15 years, delivering a dedicated service desk and supporting hardware and applications to increase infrastructure resilience and IT security across the business.

Barclays has injected £100m into fast growth technology companies following the launch of a fund to back some of the most innovative UK technology businesses with lending of up to £5m repayable over three years.

Because fast growing technology firms develop more rapidly than the 15 year average of traditional businesses, they stand to benefit from new access to debt finance as an alternative to selling equity.

This will also allow leading entrepreneurs to retain control of their company's development and concentrate on accelerated growth, said the firm.

A recent report by Barclays showed that UK technology businesses are expected to grow four times faster than GDP in 2015.

Launching the new fund during a visit to high-growth technology firms in Cambridge, Ashok Vaswani, Chief Executive of Barclays Personal and Corporate Banking, said: "This new fund offers a welcome boost to growing UK technology firms and will provide a catalyst for their development into larger companies.

"We identified a significant gap in the traditional way technology businesses were financed, and with this new drive we will be truly able to support businesses right from their inception, to becoming major global players.

"Entrepreneurs and SMEs are the life blood of the UK economy and the technology sector is an incredible incubator for many of these talented individuals and businesses.

"The rapid growth we've seen in the UK rivals the activity and dynamism of Silicon Valley with record levels of investment from the US into London-based technology firms in particular."

Sean Duffy, Managing Director, Barclays' Technology, Media and Telecoms team, added: "Fast-growth technology companies in the US have long been able to access debt finance early in the life cycle, and some of the most successful US technology firms, including Facebook and Google, have grown their businesses with help from this type of funding.

"We believe it is important for fast-growth technology companies in the UK to be able to access a similar range of financing solutions, including early-stage debt funding, which together with existing equity investment can provide businesses with a more efficient capital structure."

Adept Telecom has acquired Avaya reseller Centrix. The deal is structured with an initial consideration of £7 million plus the adjusted cash balance of Centrix, payable in cash at completion.

Centrix provides UC and managed service solutions that fit with the demands of Adept's existing and targeted enterprise and public sector customer base.

Approximately 80% of Centrix' revenue is generated from recurring revenue streams.

With over 300 Avaya solutions in the UK and across the world Centrix has one of the largest customer bases backed by specialist knowledge of the Avaya Aura solution in particular.

Centrix offers smart building technology via the Medusa product, which is five products rolled in to one. Medusa is a bandwidth shaper/slicer, a firewall, a switch, a reporting engine and a billing engine.

Medusa allows multi-tenanted buildings to take one or more internet connection and to share those connections to multiple businesses and then to report and bill those end users independently for their usage.

Centrix provides high end communication solutions to larger enterprise customers, particularly in the public sector, business centre and healthcare sectors which account for approximately 70% of Centrix total revenue.

It is anticipated that the proportion of revenue derived from public sector and healthcare customers for the AdEPT Group will more than double as a result of the acquisition.

Centrix will retain its current presence and customer service operation in Hook, Hampshire.

The vendors of Centrix are to be retained in their current capacity within the business for a period of at least 12 months post-acquisition.

The audited accounts of Centrix for the year ended 31 December 2014 reported turnover, operating profit and profit before tax of £8.75m, £2.26m and £2.26m respectively.

Initial consideration of £7 million plus the cash balance of Centrix at completion is payable in cash. Further consideration of up to £3.5 million may be payable in cash dependent upon the trading performance of Centrix post-acquisition.

The total consideration will be funded out of AdEPT's existing bank facilities which were renewed and extended on 23 April 2015.

Ian Fishwick, Chief Executive of Adept, said: "Centrix is an excellent fit because, like Adept, it is asset-light, complements and builds upon Adept's existing expertise and skills, and further extends its offering in the unified communications space.

"Centrix has a high level of recurring revenue and offers a well-developed customer base with long-term relationships across a range of medium and large enterprises, including the related vertical markets of public sector and healthcare. The acquisition is expected to be earnings enhancing from completion."

Evolution Capital acted as exclusive corporate finance advisors to Adept Telecom Telecom.  "We are pleased to have used our significant experience in the telecoms sector to play a part in this exciting transaction,\" said Nigel Cook, MD, Evolution Capital.

Former Virgin Media Business partner chief Jason King (pictured) has joined Virtual1 as Sales Director.

Having been in the industry since 1994 King has notable stints under his belt including Vodafone, Energis, Colt and most recently Virgin Media Business where he built the Business Partners Channel from scratch to £60m per annum revenue.

King said: "It's great to have joined Virtual1. I believe in the direction the company is moving in, both in London and nationally, and I look forward to working with everyone."

Tom O'Hagan, CEO, added: "Jason's values tie in with our culture and vision, and his strong leadership skills will ensure he makes a swift impression with our partner base."

Telford-based Entanet will again be supporting local charity Severn Hospice, this time in a new event (on May 9th) that will see three national firms each take over a charity shop for a day in a BBC Apprentice-style challenge.

Severn Hospice is a local charity that provides specialist care and support to families across Shropshire and North Powys who are living with incurable illness.

The Entanet team will take over the charity's Wellington branch and be responsible for the day's trading in the shop.

Furthermore, the communications provider will go up against two other locally-based companies (Interserve and Capgemini) in an Apprentice-style challenge to see which team can generate the largest sales revenue on the day.

Prior to the event Entanet staff are collecting and donating items for sale. A team of approximately ten volunteers will then process, price, sell and promote their items and other stock from the shop to raise valuable funds. The winners will be the team with the highest sales revenue by 3pm on the day.

Entanet's CEO Elsa Chen said: "We've participated in several of Severn Hospice's charitable events over recent years and we were eager to create a new initiative to generate even more awareness for this wonderful charity.

"We are excited to be the headline supporter of this event and are delighted by how the businesses involved have come together for a great cause.

"Our staff are amazing charity supporters and are looking forward to driving great sales revenue for the shop on the day. We are a naturally competitive bunch of people, so to know that all of our hard work will go to this deserving charity make us even more motivated."

Daniel Smith, Fundraising Officer Income Generation, from Severn Hospice, said: "We are excited to launch this new event and delighted by the positive response we have had so far. It's going to be great fun and will hopefully help us to raise some vital funds and generate further awareness of our charity, our shops and the services we provide, whilst providing the teams with some great team building activities."

The event will be held from 9am-3pm on Saturday 9th May across three of Severn Hospice's charity shops located in Wellington (Entanet team), Lawley (Interserve team) and Madeley (Capgemini team).

Data centre operator Next Generation Data (NGD) has built out additional colocation space to meet channel demand and has launched an entry level all-in-one hosting solution.

The firm is close to completing an £8m data hall expansion project at NGD Europe, its M4 corridor data centre location.

This follows new business wins from a clutch of multinational companies as well as increased demand for more space from the company's Channel Partners.

NGD's Channel Partner business is expected to be boosted further by the launch of an entry level Data Cube solution designed for supporting smaller business users, offering resellers who are new to data hosting a straight forward, low cost route to adding new annuity revenue streams, claimed NGD.

Data Cube comprises a quarter server rack configuration, metered pay-as-you-go power supply and a range of high speed connectivity options.

"Our out-of-the box Data Cube hosting solution is for resellers looking to enter the hosting market, and rounds out our portfolio for more established reseller and SI data centre services providers looking to capture emerging market opportunities from smaller users," said Steve Davis, NGD's Marketing Director.

NGD's 750,000 sq ft facility was opened five and a half years ago and so far the company has invested £25m in the campus.

The latest £8m expansion project requires approximately 100 contractors on site to construct and fit-out the new self-contained halls which in total will allow a further 500 high density server racks to be accommodated.

To support the increased power requirements NGD is able to draw on its 180 MVA supply which is sourced directly from the National SuperGrid via an on-site sub-station.

The five new halls will be completed in the next six weeks and NGD expects the commencement of a further expansion phase by the end of this year.

IT solutions provider Logicalis UK has bolstered its play in the consulting and solution services space following the acquisition of Trovus, a provider of analytics dashboard solutions. According to ABI Research this market could be worth $114bn globally by 2018.

Arnaud Spirlet, Head of European Markets for Logicalis, said: "Analytics is a crucial element of the SMAC model, since it provides line of business managers with the actionable insight they need to drive business innovation and competitive advantage from disparate business data."

The deal sees Ed Charvet, Managing Director of Trovus, appointed to the role of Director of Information Insights at Logicalis UK.

Charvet will lead the organisation's business unit strategy, extending the portfolio of consulting, solutions and managed services such as the company's Spatial Intelligence, wireless and behavioural analytics offerings.

Charvet stated: "Trovus and Logicalis have partnered successfully for some time, giving clients the benefits of Business Intelligence (BI) consultancy and the ability to then scale organisation-wide using Logicalis' technical resources and global reach.

"The fit positions Logicalis perfectly between the pure consultancy firms and the specialist vendors."

Providing business insight solutions, professional and managed services, Trovus enables businesses to turn data into tangible and transformative competitive advantage.

It extends that advantage to the widest possible executive user base, in some cases increasing user adoption from the industry average of 30% up to 70% within an organisation.

Spirlet added: "As a Line of Business executive myself, I need fast and actionable information insights across a range of data sources.

"Trovus will bring that ability to our customer's users, but without the need for costly and complex data re-structuring or application renewal projects, shrinking delivery timescales from many months to matter of weeks or even days."

Trovus' clients range from global businesses to regional market specialists across a number of verticals, including professional services, financial services, construction, technology, telecoms, healthcare and the public sector.

Charvet stated: "This is a fast-moving market and our clients increasingly need access to national and international services and expertise. We can now meet those needs."

Mitel has completed the acquisition of Mavenir Systems. The deal is said to help the vendor expand its total addressable market by circa $14bn by 2018, and
capitalise on demand for 4G LTE services.

"With Mavenir part of Mitel's business and market footprint, we are now able to fully address both the enterprise and mobile markets for IP-based communications," said Rich McBee, President and Chief Executive Officer of Mitel.

"The combination gives Mitel an opportunity to capitalise on the rapid growth of 4G LTE now, and the convergence of business and mobile IP communications in the future."

Mavenir CEO, Pardeep Kohli, joins Mitel as President of the Mobile Division.

"The move to LTE mobile networks has created a valuable opportunity for service providers to leverage a converged all-IP network to offer feature-rich business and consumer communication services on any device, anywhere, on any access network," said Kohli.

"Now, as part of Mitel, our mobile customers will be able to benefit from Mavenir's 4G solutions as well as the global reach, size and scale of Mitel's operations, IP and cloud communications expertise."

An insurance policy that provides cover against toll fraud is growing in popularity among its users.

Launched by Blizzard and managed with Union Street's LineGuard fraud detection software (a module included as standard in Union Street's aBILLity platform), the service currently has 2,200 customers covered by the policy which has been welcomed by the majority of its 70 channel partners.

In operation, LineGuard automatically searches call data records (CDRs) as they are imported for unusual calling patterns and charge groups.

If fraud is suspected the customer and reseller are immediately alerted and asked to verify the situation. If fraud is detected out of hours LineGuard automatically places a temporary 'out of service' on the line.

For additional protection, Blizzard has configured aBILLity to set maximum spending thresholds for each customer account on all services including mobile and fixed line telephony.

The service insures against any losses of £100 or more that are incurred as a direct result of fraud.

Commenting on the Fraud Limitation Cover, which was launched in March, Blizzard's MD Mark Jones said: "When fraud occurs it's often extremely damaging, both in monetary terms and to the customer relationship which inevitably sours as a direct result.

"Our Fraud Limitation Cover provides valuable peace of mind to consumers, and helps to preserve the customer relationship in the event of fraud.

"It also serves as a value add for our resellers who have given us positive feedback on this initiative."

Softcat and Dell have joined forces to service the National Desktop and Notebook Agreement (NDNA) for UK universities.
 
Education sector specialist Softcat is certified in six national framework agreements for the provision of IT in higher and further education.

Under the new agreement Softcat will sell Dell PCs, laptops and tablet devices via an integrated and joined-up cross-framework procurement process.

Nick Berry, Softcat's Head of Education said: "The NDNA agreement will allow our team of specialists to provide higher education institutions with an end -to-end proposition incorporating devices, server and storage, networking, security and software, all via the national frameworks."