Comms Dealer

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?"

When Voicenet Solutions was acquired by US giant 8x8 Inc in December 2013 for $18.4 million the UK-based cloud comms provider suddenly looked very different...

Following the acquisition and now known as 8x8 Solutions the Bucks-based company found itself on a springboard to growth with access to a leading technology platform and the resource, investment and financial strength of its NASDAQ listed parent. "The brand and platform is attractive to new resellers and we are benefiting from these door-opening credentials," said Charles Aylwin, Director for Channel and Public Sector, 8X8 Solutions.

Strategists working within 8x8 Inc's 'brain department' showed incredible foresight when they identified Voicenet Solutions as a prime acquisition target. The timing of the deal quickly proved propitious and the outlook is getting brighter, according to Aylwin. "The rapid growth now being seen in the economy is enabling companies to review and upgrade their technology," he commented. "They are concentrating on improving productivity through better collaboration. The move to the cloud has reached a tipping point and our experience with this technology puts us in a strong position."

Aylwin fully expects to augment his partner base with companies more adept at complex selling techniques. "As products continue to integrate we will work with future partners to develop the skills and knowledge they will need and take them with us on the journey."

He also pointed out that a priority for 8x8 Solutions is to ensure that the market is aware of new technology and its benefits to drive demand for channel partners in the hosted space. "The time for cloud-based communications is now and it touches almost every aspect of business today," he commented. "The opportunities to start a discussion with an organisation, no matter how large or small, on how the cloud can help them are plenty and varied."

8x8 Inc has developed its own technology and gained control over it having been awarded 100 patents. "We determine what happens with our product and will continue to invest in the R&D supporting our roadmap," added Aylwin.

The firm has also established best in class product partnerships with leaders such as Knoahsoft, Teleopti, Zendesk and Salesforce. Such link-ups enable the company and its channel partners to discuss integrated business systems with customers, and therefore appeal to a wider audience. "These partnerships address the mid-market which obviously helps existing partners grow, but it also attracts new partners that are working with larger enterprises," added Aylwin. "We are encouraged by the new great enterprise deals we have won with our partners this year."

8x8 Solutions enables partners to work with it in a way that best suits their business. Some address niche verticals and geographies and partners come in all shapes and sizes. "We try not to be overly prescriptive so give partners the choice of being an Affinity Partner, a Dealer Partner or a Co-brand Partner," noted Aylwin. "To capture the massive opportunity in front of us we need to ensure that we provide our partners with the right training, support and incentives. For this reason we are constantly reviewing our programme and refreshing our training scheme."

According to Aylwin there are four primary enablers of growth: Technology, a sound roadmap, a pure cloud offering and the best people. Also blipping bright on his radar screen is the critical role of training as a driver for gaining market share. This is something the company takes seriously and its Academy testifies to the high priority status given to partner education.

"Our Academy is a permanent resource with full time staff and support," explained Aylwin. "We ask our partners to attend a full two day course as part of their accreditation. The Academy has been expanded this year and the courses are modularised so they can be revisited for refreshers, and the curriculum is expanded on a monthly basis and supported by webinars. Our channel team follow up partners immediately after they have attended courses to reinforce their learning in the real world of revenue generation. We aim to enable our partners to differentiate themselves with real expertise as a basis for long-term relationships with their customers."

When Voicenet Solutions transformed overnight into the UK arm of 8x8 Inc's US operations 15 months ago a remarkable growth story unfurled as uptake of the firm's UC and Contact Centre portfolio began to accelerate. Notably, these solutions are proving popular with mid-market and enterprise customers and this trend continues to gather pace.

"Our journey from Voicenet Solutions to 8x8 Solutions has been fast and exciting," said Aylwin. "We have a fantastic team, are recruiting good people and will build on the success we are already experiencing. We work hard in this business every day to make sure we get all the basics, as well as the value adds right. There is a massive opportunity and we are pedalling hard to make sure we maximise the potential for us and our partners."

Darren Garland once patrolled the world's seas unnoticed but today he's plain sailing in the channel as Managing Director of highly visible distributor ProVu Communications.

Garland submersed himself in communications and command and control systems when he joined the Submarine Service after leaving school. During his 14 year stint in the Royal Navy he also achieved an honours degree in Electrical Engineering and became a Chartered Engineer. Two commercial roles followed his departure from the Services and with comms being a strong theme in his career story Garland set up his own company selling lines, minutes, PBXs and mobile contracts to businesses. "This is where I learnt the nuts and bolts of selling telecoms," he said. "I then helped to establish a SaaS company before anyone had heard of cloud. From there I moved to ProVu."

ProVu was established in 1999 by Chairman Peter Bryant and Sales Director Ian Godfrey. The business was set up to capture the nascent video phone market. But with broadband replacing ISDN-based services and demand growing for SIP-based communications ProVu shifted its focus onto SIP and phones and signed UK distribution agreements with snom and Sipura. "ProVu has grown year-on-year since its creation, but the last three years have seen us ratchet up growth significantly," said Garland. "With our secure financial position developed through organic growth ProVu is now considering expanding via acquisition within our chosen market area."

He attributes this uptick to the growing popularity of hosted telephony combined with the value added services that ProVu has developed to win additional business. Since 2012 ProVu has grown sales from £2 million to almost £5 million. Staff headcount has also increased and is forecast to number 19 by the summer. "Our location in Huddersfield is a key asset to ProVu," stated Garland. "Not only do we benefit from lower property overheads, our staff also benefit from more realistic house prices coupled with short journey times. Equally, Huddersfield has excellent education facilities and we have a sensible supply of capable dedicated people.

"Our staff turnover is extremely low which has allowed us to build a knowledgeable and committed team that understands our products and services. We have also recently taken on our first apprentices which is working out well. I am proud of all the team. Every member has contributed to the ProVu success story."

As a specialist VoIP distributor the majority of ProVu's sales are for the supply of SIP handsets to service providers and resellers. "We have selectively widened our portfolio of products to cover most of the hardware areas that a service provider or reseller would require," explained Garland. "We have also got better at communicating and connecting with our widening customer base about what we do and how we can make their life easier and better by dealing with us."

ProVu took an early decision not to sell services such as connectivity. "We complement rather than compete with our customers," added Garland. "We felt it was the correct strategy to develop close customer relationships. We have therefore invested heavily in developing systems that automate the process of ordering, deploying and managing hardware, thereby more efficiently serving our resellers. We can automatically provision handsets for our customers across all of our ranges."

Resellers buy through ProVu's ordering and provisioning portal called ProSys. The distributor also sells supporting kit such as gateways, IP PBXs, access control and paging equipment. ProVu has become a one-stop-shop where resellers can source all the hardware they need to deploy a VoIP solution. It also offers a technical service across all aspects of its portfolio.

Not one to sit on his hands, Garland has recently engaged with two vendors that are bringing UC applications to mobile phones. "Mobile will continue to converge with fixed line comms and the technology is moving at a rapid rate," he noted. "Wireless networks will also continue to gain traction and bring more flexibility to how communication devices are deployed. The more control you have over the customer's infrastructure the easier it will be to sell services to them. For example, if you do not control the LAN it's harder to put kit on the network and subsequently trouble shoot that equipment. Resellers need to invest in these areas of expertise and sell infrastructure to sell communications."

By Elvire Gosnold, Director, Blabbermouth Marketing: We are all pressured to do more, especially when it comes to marketing - have a presence on more social networks, write more blog posts, send more emails, run more reports, capture more leads, generate more sales etc. Doing more works well most of the time. Blogging more, for example, can increase website traffic, improve brand awareness and generate leads. But other times, doing less can be a much better idea.

Adding more to your plate is likely to make your marketing activities less effective. And with only so much time in the day, you have to figure out how to get more results without doing more work. You have to be ruthless about cutting ineffective tactics from your marketing so you can focus on the effective ones.

Here's what should you cut out from your marketing: Don't engage on social networks that are not working for your business. It is a good idea to do some research and find out the most popular networks for your specific industry and audience.

Also, cut out trying to create new content continuously. It is hard for any business to write new content on top of all the day-to-day work. However, content marketing is a key component of online marketing and SEO, primarily acting as a tool to drive customers to your website. Re-purposing and recycling your existing content can be the solution.

Putting too much emphasis on the use of keywords to improve SEO can also be 'overworked'. Search engine algorithms place less importance on keywords because of their overuse as an SEO technique. However, keywords are still important. You may want to mention your chosen keyword in the title or throughout the article in order to catch your reader's attention about a specific product.

By Anton Le Saux, Head of Connectivity and Partner Sales at O2 Telefónica UK: We attended this year's Mobile World Congress at the beginning of March. It reminded us again about the influence and growth of new technology and the transformative power of the Internet of Things and m2m.

Did you know there will be over 50 billion connected devices by 2020? Even more by some predictions. These m2m solutions are already creating 9.5 trillion bytes of data every day. That means more and more opportunities for businesses to keep control of their assets and provide added value to their customers in a myriad of ways.

Some of the leading tech players brought their newest devices to the event in Barcelona. Many will assist m2m solutions for businesses, keeping 'things' connected and contributing to the growth of the IoT. And even more devices will keep business itself connected with consumers, including wearables. It's clearer than ever that the business landscape is in the middle of a massive transformation, with the two strands of tech combining into a truly mobile workforce, with access to greater insight than ever before, greater control and the ability to offer ever better experiences to their customers, who are researching, shopping and engaging with brands globally, 24/7/365.

As some brands adopt these new technologies early they will raise the bar for the rest. Consumers quickly expect a higher level of service and brand engagement, and woe betide those who fall behind the curve. It's going to be interesting to watch this year which brands get there first and which lag behind. It's often in these periods that new front runners appear and the market sees a shift towards smaller, more agile businesses.

For more information emailanton.lesaux@telefonica.com or visit partnersdigital.telefonica.com

Tech Data Europe has extended its distribution agreement with Logitech to cover the distributor's full European footprint.

The new agreement means that Tech Data resellers in Germany, Austria, Poland and Czech Republic now have access to Logitech's range of products, building on existing long-standing distribution partnerships with Logitech in the UK, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland.

Klaus Schlichtherle, head of distribution EMEA at Logitech, said: "Tech Data Europe has been a strategic and valued partner to Logitech for many years. Extending our relationship to complete coverage of our European footprint made perfect sense to us."

Resellers wanting more speed, automation and visibility throughout the leased line ordering and provisioning process have welcomed ICUK's new addition to its web-based control panel.

Ordering leased lines can be complex and frustrating for a reseller but Surrey-based ICUK reckons it has made the process a breeze with the introduction of a new provisioning tool within its web-based control panel. Designed and developed in house, the control panel sits at the heart of ICUK's channel engagement methodology and enables resellers to place orders, create tariffs, manage customers, run diagnostics in real-time and book Openreach engineers in just a few clicks. Customers can also log-in under a reseller's own custom branding and manage their own services.

The tool came about as a direct result of the service provider's ongoing success with Ethernet sales, as ICUK's founding director Paul Barnett explained: "Our Ethernet sales increased by over 400 per cent last year and continue to grow month-on-month. This posed a challenge as the leased line provisioning process was not nearly as automated and slick as other products in our portfolio, so we worked hard to fix it."

ICUK says it has taken the approach it applies to all its other products - ADSL, FTTC, WLR3, Wholesale calls and web hosting - to address the issue. Paul Lydon, Senior Developer, said: "We wanted to make sure that the quoting, delivery and diagnostic experiences of an Ethernet circuit were the best we could develop. And we wanted to ensure consumers know where they stand at all times, giving them full confidence that we are working for them throughout and beyond the provisioning process."

Regardless of an order's complexity ICUK has devised a simple flow chart (see below) showing the state of a current Ethernet order and the steps required to reach completion. Resellers can follow the exact movement of a provision and get real-time notifications confirming when a new stage has been reached. "The notifications are an important element in providing assurance and removing any unnecessary anxiety the customer may have by outlining what event has just happened, what happens next, what the customer needs to do now, and most importantly when we will next be in touch by," said Business Development Manager Neil Barnett (pictured).

ICUK has also included white label step-by-step install guides with the managed Cisco routers they supply with each circuit, removing the need for channel partners to visit the end user site. Paul Benn of Enterprise Connected Cloud commented: "When ICUK gave us a demo of the leased line quoting tool it generated a customer-ready PDF showing prices for various speeds provided by BT Wholesale and Virgin Media Business, including our chosen margin, in less than 60 seconds. Needless to say, we were impressed."

 FLOWCHART: ICUK's ORDER OF THE DAY