Comms Dealer

Voice and data recording firm Red Box Recorders has strengthened its position in the APAC region with the appointment of Lee Anstiss as Sales Director APAC.

His remit is to continue increasing the company's presence across the region which includes doubling the number of staff and growing the business by around 20% in the next year.

Anstiss is based in Singapore where he has previously been employed for the past five years, working most recently for BT as Account Director - Unified Trading Global Banking & Financial Market. Prior to that he was Sales Director (Singapore) at Mitel.

Lee Jones, CEO at Red Box Recorders, said: "Lee's appointment signals the next exciting phase in our development in APAC which will see us increasing our staff on the ground to drive sales and further support our growing customer base.

"His proven experience, particularly in the finance market, will prove invaluable as we continue our strong growth in the region and beyond, further cementing Red Box's position as a serious global player."

Anstiss added: "I have been involved with Red Box many times over the years. There is a real drive within the business to succeed and I am extremely pleased to be part of it."

The evolution of SIP trunking from a cost-effective ISDN replacement product to full enabler of UC adoption is complete, according to Gamma.

The company says SIP trunking has become a 'pivotal tool' in the journey towards UC. And Paul Wakefield, SIP Trunking Product Manager, cannot overstate the significance of a strong and strategically focused SIP trunking proposition in today's UC-hungry marketplace.

"That means offering business-grade availability, scalability and value," he said. "A clear and agile roadmap is a prerequisite and an essential tool for remaining competitive and relevant."

According to Wakefield, rapid changes in market dynamics means taking a 'sitting on hands' or 'wait and see' approach is not an option for the comms provider.

"Gamma regularly releases product updates and enhancements such as the launch of two new build types - Resilience+ which is a new resilient build option for dual endpoints, and an enhanced build option for customers with single endpoints," he explained.

Wakefield also noted that free fraud protection comes as standard, along with free call termination in the UK including 01, 02 and 03 number ranges.

Gamma has also introduced a pricing initiative that offers free call termination to UK mobile destinations.

Chris Russell, CEO at Arrow Business Communications and a proponent of Gamma's market approach, said: "It's important that the communications partners we work with are forward-thinking and can effectively support us to deliver reliable and scalable solutions."

In an update on trading for the financial year ended 31st March 2015 Phoenix IT Group expects profits to be 'comfortably in line with market expectations'. 

The firm has reduced net debt from £56.1m to £49m, and executing strategic priorities set out by Chief Executive, Steve Vaughan early last summer have paid off, said the firm.

The Group expects to announce results for the year ended 31st March 2015 on 8th June.

Vaughan' strategy included managed service renewals such as Phoenix's long-term relationship with Costain Group for the provision of a wide range of infrastructure services, including Business Continuity and cloud services.

Growth in Business Continuity planning and consultancy has been aided by the release of an upgraded version of the Group's ShadowPlanner product.

A key objective for the second phase of the strategy is to sell additional services to existing customers, particularly those in Business Continuity.

The Group is seeing this cross-selling happening, particularly in the expansion of existing BC relationships into full-time hosting arrangements involving private or hybrid cloud provision.

The Group's proprietary public cloud offering, CloudSure UK, is performing well, said the Group, having secured its largest contract to date with a newly formed Joint Venture business involved in improving the National Infrastructure. 

The Group now has a total of 12 live CloudSure UK customers, double the number at the end of the half year.

Gateshead-based IT firm Advantex Network Solutions has completed a five figure contract to supply superfast broadband services to a Newcastle hotel just 10 days after receiving the initial enquiry.

The 11 storey 170 bedroom Sandman Signature Hotel complex in Gallowgate can now provide faster connectivity for guests and an improved offering as demand for WiFi usage grows.

The work was carried out as part of the Government funded Broadband Connection Vouchers scheme with assistance from Newcastle Councils Go Digital team.

The Sandman Hotel is the latest success for Advantex, which as a registered supplier of the vouchers, has helped around 50 businesses on Tyneside to install superfast broadband.

Mitch Gaglardi, MD of Northland Properties Corporation (which operates the Sandman Hotels brand in the UK) said people using his complex will benefit from high quality access to faster services.

He said: "We have to be able to provide our guests with the very best in fast, secure and reliable internet and email services.

"Advantex moved quickly to deliver an improved service in record breaking time."

Advantex Director Stephen O'Connell, who is looking at supporting possible internet upgrades at other Sandman Hotel sites in the UK, added: "As a supplier of connection vouchers we are helping companies like Sandman Hotel Group improve their brand offering through the provision of quality advice and services.

"It's a further example of helping our customers to benefit from the voucher funding - from the initial application to the final installation - with expert advice and competitive solutions."

Pictured above: The Sandman's Mitch Gaglardi (left) and Advantex's Stephen O'Connell

Former Great Britain rower Sean Dixon has hung up his oars and is now pulling in sales alongside reseller partners at Henley-based service provider Fidelity Group.

At six feet four inches in height Scotsman Dixon has the perfect frame for a rower, but it's not just physical strength that gets you to the top in this highly competitive sport: There's mind games plus, of course, a teamwork ethic that he has replicated in his new telecoms career at Fidelity. Dixon joined the company in August 2014 as Sales Manager and wasted no time in building a like-minded sales team, a strategy that quickly paid off with a growing number of IT and mobile resellers benefiting from the resale of Fidelity's hosted voice solution and recurring revenue model. Dixon believes these achievements are due to his sporting background and a desire to win. And recognising these qualities as intrinsic to the sporting environment he has cleverly expanded the sales team with ex-professionals from rowing, golf and cricket.

Dixon's own sporting career began at school in Edinburgh. "Rowing was an extracurricular activity and I started for fun," he said. "My coach always taught me never to be satisfied with whatever level I occupied. I'm a highly competitive person and I always put myself in environments where I am challenged and out of my comfort zone. Working at Fidelity has filled the void left by rowing."

Dixon made his international debut for Great Britain at the tender age of 16. He won a silver medal at the World Championships two years later, an achievement that drew great interest from US universities. He was eventually awarded a full scholarship to row at Boston University where he read finance.

"Rowing in a US college team is highly competitive," Dixon recalled. "There's 50 guys training twice a day to be ranked in the first Eight, and all this while maintaining academic eligibility. During the winter we trained to improve techniques and strength, while keeping an eye on teammates for any chinks in their armour that could be exploited to move me up the rankings.

"But once selected for your crew the dynamics change. Rowers who were threats to my advancement could literally be in the same boat and you go from an individual looking to exploit weakness to one who wants to band together as one unit, working with combined strengths and covering individual shortcomings. There are many analogies between rowing and work, but the core of each is the same - a desire to win and doing so with your peers."

Dixon returned from America having contributed to a record year for Boston University winning all regular season 'duals' in the first Eight, except the last clash which he lost by 0.3 seconds over a six minute race. Naturally, Dixon wanted to carry on his rowing career in the UK and moved to Henley-on-Thames, home to the Royal Regatta as well as the most successful rowing facility in the world, the Leander Club.

Here, fired-up by ambition Dixon would row 30-40km on the water and rowing machine in the morning followed by a session throwing weights around, finishing training at 1pm. But rowing is an amateur sport and those not in the Olympic team have to fund themselves through part-time work, so Dixon docked at Fidelity Group in the afternoons to pay the bills. When his 2016 Brazil Olympic dream paled, Dixon hung up his oars and within six months had propelled himself to Sales Manager of the Top 10 Tech Track £7 million group, which also enjoys high status as a Gamma Platinum Partner and exclusive O2 JUC Partner.

"Sean has brought his success and hunger from rowing and applied it to his new role," commented Fidelity Managing Director Alan Shraga. "During his winter training he saw the productivity of the team diminish as individuals were focused on beating each other. Sean saw the same problems within the Fidelity sales team. They were focused on their own target rather than the company number and there was no motivation for peer collaboration. Sean changed the structure at Fidelity, aligning the targets with the team and company goals."

No longer stirring up the calm surface of an Olympic waterway Dixon is now focused on making bigger waves in the channel, and he has no regrets. "Since I hung up my oars I haven't looked back for one second," he added. "To compete at the Olympics for Great Britain is an honour, but I came to a crossroads where my work was suffering because of my rowing and vice versa - one had to go."

In his new role at youth led development agency Restless Development, Jim Sewell, former Sales and Marketing Director at Alternative Networks, hopes to recruit telecoms champions for an 'Entrepreneur Panel' to support fledgling enterprises in the developing world.

The fact that Sewell is now working round the corner from where he helped established one of the UK's most successful reseller companies is purely coincidental but ironical all the same. For Sewell, going 'full circle' has two connotations, not only the geographical location of the Restless Development charity in Waterloo, London where he now spends a lot of his days, but also his long association with the organisation that goes back over 25 years. For it was after leaving Radley College at 18 and before meeting up with Alternative Networks founder James Murray, that Sewell taught English, history and maths for nine months in a rural school in Zimbabwe with an organisation called Student Partnerships Worldwide, which is now Restless Development.

Sewell, now 44 and married with three children, describes that early experience as extremely formative and one that also gave him a love of Africa, and a great respect for the people there. After Zimbabwe he returned to the UK to 'study' geography at Manchester University and, on finishing there in 1993, spent a year buying and selling products from auctions in Manchester and selling them to students. "It was way before you could do this through eBay," recalled Sewell. "So I used to advertise in LOOT. We were the only student house with five microwaves and endless stereos and the odd very second hand car outside!

"I had known James Murray since we were 18 and in 1994 he explained his plans to start Alternative Networks and in October 1994 I joined as a start up alongside James, Chris Wilson and Ben Marnham. Nearly 20 years at Alternative was enormous fun, extremely hard work, and a constant learning experience working and playing with a great team of people. With the rate of change in our sector it's also been a constant challenge to keep up with the technology and which products and suppliers to work with. Alternative Networks is now an amazing, multi-faceted business and one I'm very proud to have been part of growing."

Jim had kept in touch with Restless Development and been inspired by the work they do. As Alternative Networks grew and diversified, so did Restless Development and Sewell became a Trustee in 2008. Hence, when his time at Alternative drew to a satisfactory close on both a financial and personal level, Sewell was free to put something back into the charity that set him on the path to success. "Over the last few years it has been my ambition to have more time to work on the Restless side and help set up and run some new fund raising projects, as well as having more time with the family and to do more fund raising events," he said.

Sewell cycled from John O'Groats to Lands' End with a team from Alternative in 2012 and has completed sections of the Tour De Force, which cycles the route of the main Tour de France the week before the professionals for charity. Of the livelihood projects Restless run he chose the Restless Hub concept in Tanzania and plans to visit this annually and meet some of those who use the hub.

"It is vital that local entrepreneurs in Tanzania, and other countries, have access to a central hub where they can receive training, use IT facilities, share ideas, debate successes and failures and receive small amounts of financial support where required," said Sewell. "This is no different to what we need in the UK and I completely understand the benefit and need these fulfil. I also love the concept of donating with groups of friends and visiting the projects together, as this is an experience that you simply do not get in your normal life, and is also a good excuse for a trip abroad each year with mates that is hard for the other half to turn down!"

Restless Development launched the Entrepreneur Panel concept at the House of Lords in February. It aims to bring successful entrepreneurs together and get them closer to Restless Development's work by providing financial assistance and expertise to young entrepreneurs in Africa and South Asia. "There is a natural entrepreneurial spirit in Africa as people find ways to earn a living," added Sewell. "With the right training, very small amounts of financial support and access to IT, we can make a huge difference to not just individuals but whole communities.

"We are looking to fund a wide variety of livelihood programmes, from entrepreneurship training programmes to internship schemes, and we can provide detailed costings for each project so that supporters get a sense of how many businesses and people their donations will support. Restless has 30 years experience working in these communities and understands how to deliver successful entrepreneurship programmes. The charity is run very much like a business, with money carefully invested and programmes monitored in extreme detail."

Sewell wants to launch the Entrepreneur Panel concept into the comms industry by bringing successful charity minded business leaders from the channel round a table to share thoughts, set targets and conceive events to raise funds. "I really believe that companies want to work closely with charities but often find it hard to know how, unless someone internally has a specific passion," he added. "It's important for entrepreneurs and businesses to get something back and to be able to see first-hand the work that they support.

"Engaging in charitable activities improves staff motivation, retention and workplace culture and also helps businesses to live their own values. Alternative Networks, like so many other resellers, are all about the people who work there and bringing staff together is always of huge benefit which can be delivered incredibly successfully with charity at the centre of things.

"If we could embrace this as a sector then we could make a massive difference as a group. The drive and values of people at the core of Restless Development is awe-inspiring, often in very difficult scenarios, and is something we could all learn from and help all our businesses become stronger and more successful."

Restless Development has a strong track record of corporate engagement and won six awards in 2014, including the Charity Times Award for Corporate Social Responsibility Project of the Year for its successful partnership with KPMG.

For more details email jim.sewell3@gmail.com or ella@restlessdevelopment.org

Marston's PLC has long been known as one of the UK's largest independent pub retailing businesses and brewer, not so well know is its burgeoning telecoms business headed up by Operations Director Rob Derbyshire.

Marston's Telecoms was formed in 2008 by Mike McMinn, Group IT Director at Marston's PLC, to generate savings for the group through purchasing comms services on a wholesale basis from Openreach. These savings proved to be substantial and the move provided a platform for expansion under the guidance of Derbyshire. He joined Marston's Telecoms from the University of Birmingham where he was responsible for the procurement and management of all of the telecoms services. "When the role at Marston's came up it seemed like an exciting opportunity to do something similar, but also very different and with the scope to develop the business in new ways," he said.

A big turning point for Marston's Telecoms was its transformation into a true wholesale provider of comms services. "Previously we just resold broadband from PlusNet and TalkTalk, but since we made the decision to implement our own network we have improved our margins and crucially gained more control over our solutions," added Derbyshire. "Our main customer is of course Marston's PLC, but our growth is coming from external clients. We have contracts to supply two other pub companies as well as some corporate customers. This demonstrates the attractiveness of our proposition outside of our historical vertical."

Marston's Telecoms was born out of a retail operation and its approach is influenced by this. "Our priorities are high levels of customer service, a strong value proposition and a degree of uniqueness," explained Derbyshire. "Also, the management of Marston's Telecoms originates from an enterprise IT background and our core network was designed with the principles of being always-on and fully resilient."

Marston's understanding of the market and how to operate in the wholesale space has advanced by leaps and bounds. And coming from a reseller-only background this has been a big challenge, particularly for the provisioning team. "Our main challenge now is how to grow the business with a lean staff base," commented Derbyshire. "We've addressed this by selectively outsourcing certain administrative tasks while keeping key customer interactions directly managed by us. Maintaining our growth will no doubt require investment in additional roles."

Marston's Telecoms has four full-time staff and last year turned over £2.6 million with a £300k profit. This year the company is forecasting a 40-50 per cent increase in sales and a greater rise in profit. "My immediate goal is to grow the business to an EBIT of £1 million," added Derbyshire. "We're now looking to expand our proposition and offer our capability to both channel partners and also businesses within our vertical. To achieve this we have developed strategic partnerships with connectivity partners such as SSE and TalkTalk, as well as hosted VoIP through MyPhones.com."

Derbyshire also noted that Marston's Telecoms' growth strategy to date is down to the size of the business and being able to deliver bespoke business grade telecommunications solutions to customers. "We see bigger players in the market offering good products but in an inflexible way," he added. "We're able to choose products for our portfolio that offer the best for our customers, and then present these to them in a complete value-for-money solution. Our challenge will be to maintain this approach as we grow, create sustainable and long-term growth for the business, diversify income streams, and develop new markets for Marston's Telecoms."

The current state of the market is a point of interest for Derbyshire: Broadband has become commoditised, pricing has fallen, but the wholesale price of broadband to carriers has remained broadly stable while bandwidth requirements are ever increasing. "This dichotomy means that some diversification must occur to remain stable," he said. "I see the development of Ethernet products as a key market trend, allowing access to cost-effective connectivity with synchronous bandwidth and crucially an SLA.

"Alongside this, the market for hosted VoIP is strong. MyPhones.com offers a strong product set at a disruptive price. Hosted VoIP is now a part of every new business conversation we have, and makes sense for companies that are going through a whole telco suite refresh. This, coupled with great value 3Mb GEA from TalkTalk, creates an interesting opportunity."

Moving into the ISP industry from a Higher Education background and learning how it all works ranks as Derbyshire's biggest career achievement to date. He has re-shaped Marston's Telecoms to the point where it can offer cogent, innovative services to customers outside its traditional vertical, including channel partners.

"Resellers offer the ability for businesses to buy niche or bespoke services," he added. "It's an exciting time for the channel with opportunities to innovate and create compelling solutions."

With election fever mounting service provider Channel Telecom has unveiled its own manifesto which calls upon the Government to rethink its approach to the telecoms sector.

The document calls on Westminster to stamp down on telecoms fraud, improve the UK connectivity infrastructure by ensuring a more competitive market and widen Ofcom's regulatory powers. The statement was unveiled at an exclusive event held in the Churchill Rooms at the Houses of Parliament last month where the special guests were Secretary of State for Media Sajid Javid and Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons Eleanor Laing.

Channel's Head of Partners Steve Yates urged the Government to take telecoms fraud seriously and help businesses financially devastated by the crime which cost the industry upwards of £1.3 billion in 2014. "Fraud is something Channel Telecom takes very seriously," said Yates. "Often companies hit by fraud are left to foot the bill for thousands or tens of thousands of pounds. This can put small organisations out of business. We could remove the profit on fraudulent call charges, but then we are asking the carriers to do the same and as a supplier we don't know what our carrier's true costs are.

"We can provide our partners with billing and other services that highlight to us when fraud is in progress, and also use our carriers to extend that even further. But we cannot totally prevent it from happening. We are suggesting that the Government establishes a fraud repayment plan for all businesses affected, enabling them to repay over a period of time interest free. This approach may help them stay afloat."

The manifesto also calls upon the Government to increase awareness of toll fraud, treat it with the same amount of energy as credit card fraud, set up a fraud prevention unit within the police and legislate to ensure fraudulent calls are charged at cost price, thereby stopping carriers from profiting from the misfortune of victims.

Channel Telecom should be applauded for also taking the Government to task on improving nationwide connectivity. Its manifesto calls for greater competition and legislation to encourage more sharing of infrastructure. "Our copper network now needs updating," said Yates. "Although our average connectivity speeds are improving, as a nation we are still well behind global leaders South Korea, Japan and Hong Kong. The Government voucher scheme is helping, but the rollout of services like FTTC and the reluctance to introduce it into main cities such as the centre of London is a hindrance for smaller businesses wanting to achieve high speed bandwidth at a reasonable cost. However, the BDUK vouchers are important and I advise all of our partners to get heavily involved."

In his address, Secretary of State Javid admitted that the telecoms industry has had to put up with Government inaction on telecoms for too long. "As the world accelerated down the digital highway, the authorities here in Britain stood on the hard shoulder and waited for the private sector to do all the hard work," he said. "For example, back in 2010 less than half of UK premises had access to superfast broadband and that simply wasn't good enough. It is a vital piece of infrastructure, just like roads, canals, railways or telegraph wires."

The minister applauded the enterprise of private companies in the telecoms sector for building the road to digitalisation, especially the roll out of 4G, and promised Channel Telecom's partner guests that any Government he was part of in the future would be ‘committed to working with business leaders in driving forward Britain's economic recovery'.

The minister added: "Britain's telecom industry is a serious business, one that must be supported. Channel Telecom's own figures say that the sector is worth £38 billion to the economy and employs over half a million people. That is an incredible contribution. We have canvassed your views on our digital communications infrastructure strategy which I'll be publishing shortly. And that's why, for example, we will be consulting with industry on the electronic communications code so that it can be fit for the future."

Pictured above: Channel Telecom's Managing Director Clifford Norton (left) with Sajid Javid and Eleanor Laing

Comms service provider Plan has unveiled an ambitious strategy to ramp up profits for its mobile reseller partners by adding a complete range of comms solutions to its portfolio.

The additions include fixed line voice and data connectivity through BT along with the full suite of Microsoft communications apps and software.

The strategy is pinned on a total overhaul of the Plan partner portal and seven new 'channels' which were revealed to an enthusiastic audience of 350-plus partners at the Plan.Live partner event at Manchester's Media City on March 19th.

In what will be seen as a major challenge to full service channel competitors, the new Plan offerings include fixed line, data and VoIP services, a complete hardware ordering mechanism with free delivery plus mobile broadband, IoT (Internet of Things) and a suite of Microsoft apps and software with a promise to pay 'the best commission' in the UK on Microsoft 365 deals.

Confessing to '30 sleepless nights' preparing for the launch, Plan CEO Dan Craddock said the company had a big war chest to call on plus the skill sets and passion to fund the ambitious rollouts and urged partners to work with him and his team on changing comms provider paradigms.

"We run lots of successful companies around the world and have a massive infrastructure at our disposal, and we want to share our vision for the future with our partners because we could not have achieved success so rapidly without them."

At the core of Plan's channel strategy is Version 3 of Plan Portal which has undergone a 'top to tail' revamp at the front and back-end and aims to offer partners what Operations Director Ched Willard described as 'a seamless user experience with maximum usability, flexibility and performance'.

He said: "The Portal is the tool that connects us together. It has been remodelled over thousands of man hours to give partners full control. The key is customisation and a completely new dashboard experience that users can organise in a way that suits their business."

Plan demonstrated its resolve to cater for the growing demands of partners and the entire business communications needs of the organisations they serve by announcing a range of valued added services all designed to add margin and glue in dealer/customer relationships.

These include a Recycling channel for partners to cash-in on end of life smartphones; a Mend channel offering a 72 hour quick fix repairs service for the 35 out of 100 users who manage to 'break' or 'drown' their devices; and a Wallet back-end to the Plan Portal enabling partners to stack up as many channels as they like and administer all customer services.

A mobile version of the portal is also being rolled out to enable partners to react 24-7 to business customer demands (for example, weekend broadband barring, data expenditure etc).

Plan also pledged to introduce a support and training programme to help partners get to grips with the new services and portal upgrade.

Plan co-founder Keith Curran said Plan's entry into the Internet of Things market and simplification of M2M connectivity orders for partners via the Plan portal was a response to market predictions.

"The Internet of Things is a planetary game changer for the mobile industry," he commented. "It is forecasted there will be 70 billion M2M connections made worldwide in the next five years at the rate of 130 a second. The market could be worth 14 trillion dollars. It is a massive untapped opportunity for our partners."

Craddock said Plan has no strategy at present to introduce a wholesale reseller model or enter the consumer market but he did not rule anything out in the future. "We are in this for the long haul and we are open to all ideas," he said.

Pictured above: The Plan team at Plan.Live

Whether supplying cloud, on-premise PBX or a mixture of both, the future of business communications should be based on a multi-channel approach, providing choice, flexibility and placing full control and value into the hands of customers.

Multi-channel adoption and integration with information systems are two of today's big trends, a turn of events that Content Guru predicted some time ago when it adopted its storm communications integration positioning. "Multi-channel has moved from being an ambition of end users to a necessity," said Content Guru Managing Director Sean Taylor (pictured). "Without it, web chat, email and social media will grow out of control in their separate silos. Anticipating customer needs and personalising service experiences is another key area. That applies as much to delivering personalised online web experiences as it does to live agent contact centre interactions."

With most companies now running one or more core IT systems providing CRM, WFM, ERP and other TLAs, the ability to connect properly between corporate communications and these packages, many of which are cloud-based, is becoming a compelling call to action for customers and a 'massive' opportunity for resellers, believes Taylor, who also says that empowering the consumer is a key driver behind Content Guru's strategy.

"When customers make contact with an organisation they want choice in terms of how, when and where they make contact - and they want control," he stated. "If our clients can't provide that control their consumers will simply look for a competitor who can. Enabling omni-channel, or integrated multi-channel, communications is critical to helping companies deliver excellent and consistent service quality across every device consumers use to interact."

The UC technology space is not only competitive, but also increasingly convoluted. End users are faced with a bewildering array of products and services with many claiming to do the same job, and the terminology and acronyms used often exacerbate matters. "It's our role as a service provider to cut through the jargon and make life as simple as possible for our channel partners," added Taylor. "It's not just a question of having clear pricing plans, brochures and documentation, it's also about building propositions that deliver a clear value to clients. The future will be less about product and service selling and more about solution selling where the value to clients is clear in terms of pounds and pence."

But the one thing Taylor wants to change at a stroke is to make it easier, quicker and more transparent to order and receive data circuits to the customer location. "We have put a great deal of design and effort into making our reseller portal simple and intuitive to use, but the circuit side is still a realm of mystery and darkness, where the reseller must navigate a perilous path through the unknown just to get a circuit delivered correctly to the customer," said Taylor.

Connectivity issues may be slowing down cloud adoption but Mark Colquhoun, CEO at Solar Communications, is nevertheless clear about the role cloud will play in the future of his business despite a number of niggling issues that are holding back the market. "The perceived barriers to adoption seen by our customers include concerns over the security of data stored in the cloud, the integration between cloud systems and traditional systems and the loss of control of the system itself," he said. "These factors are taken into consideration as we select vendor solutions and also specify and build our own cloud offers."

Solar Communications is offering customers the opportunity to leverage the cloud by taking the risk out of the transition. "Cloud doesn't have to mean rip and replace, and we can bring cloud in slowly in a controlled migration as they start to retire legacy servers," added Colquhoun. "With new estates there's also no reason why cloud can't be offered on a par with premise options. The most important point is to talk to customers about their needs rather than putting the product first, and focus on making an informed decision on whether public cloud, private hosted, on-premise or a blend will be better. Flexibility is key."

According to Colquhoun's observations of the CPE PBX market the cloud was more quickly adopted by smaller SMEs, largely because of the benefits it offers in terms of price and simplicity. Public cloud is now well established in that space and is beginning to make inroads into the larger end of the market. "We are also seeing greater interest from SME customers in private cloud solutions rather than public cloud as this can overcome some challenges," explained Colquhoun. "With public cloud you're tied into a feature set. However, with a private cloud you have flexibility and retain feature control and control of release/version adoption. Loss of control is a key concern for those looking at cloud solutions.

"It's also possible for cloud and on-premise PBXs to work together and we expect to see some interesting vendor announcements in this area that offer customers a low risk path to cloud adoption," added Colquhoun. "This addresses another major area of concern - the payback on investments already made in CPE."

Colquhoun is focused on making sure he selects and packages a range of cloud solutions that enable Solar to offer choice to its customers, enabling the company to provide a solution that fits their chosen approach to cloud. "The potential for delivering hybrid solutions provides an extra dimension that few providers will have," he added.

Colquhoun would like to see vendors demonstrating how the promised benefits of moving to cloud have actually been realised. "Many customers adopt on the basis of reducing the cost of acquiring and maintaining IT systems and services," he commented. "There is no doubt that the capital expense of traditional CPE PBX deals is removed by cloud, but customers still need convincing that shifting to opex models truly delivers cost savings over an extended timeframe."

Fundamentally, partners want choice, and not just day one choice but continued choice as to what and how they sell to their customers, according to Keith Bartlett, EMEA Director Business Development, Distribution and Inside Sales at ShoreTel. "Our product strategy offers partners this ongoing choice as to whether they sell premise, cloud or hybrid solutions to their customers," he stated. "As a result of this significant evolution in our platforms, consideration from large systems integrators and service providers globally has increased over the last year. We expect this to continue and gather pace."

ShoreTel's plan is to continue to grow and invest in its CPE business. "This is still, by far, the largest percentage of the market and likely to be the case for many years to come," added Bartlett. "However, while our product strategy delivers choice and flexibility for our channel partners and their customers, our cloud business will naturally grow too."

Bartlett has seen a marked difference between low end, sub-20 user cloud subscribers and those wanting a more robust, CPE-like solution that drives business change and delivers full featured UC rather than simplex telephony. "We are focusing on this area of the market where the value of UC to a business's change strategy is paramount and of higher perceived value," he said.

Bartlett also believes that some VARs are still selling on ARPU rather than value. "As the ARPU declines so does the margin per seat and subsequently the ability for a VAR to invest in the sales cycle," he added. "We have to educate the channel and end customers that buying a service in the cloud is the same as buying the same service as CPE."

Overall, there is healthy demand for on-site and off-site solutions observed Paul Burn, Head of Category Sales at Nimans, who advises resellers to have a foot in both camps. He also pointed out how in many circumstances cloud-based applications can work seamlessly alongside CPE hardware, such as call centre and call management reporting. "For us as a distributor, and also for our customers it's important to evolve," he commented.

"Market analysts say the PBX is threatened, but in the real world we are seeing good growth of CPE as well as hosted. Technology simply evolves, and it's important to give customers choice as part of a consultative approach. Perhaps one day hosted will be the overall winner, but in what time frame and what guise, who knows?"