Comms Dealer

Nine Wholesale has renewed its sponsorship of Porsche Carrera Cup GB 2014 Champion Josh Webster for the 2015 racing season.

Josh Webster flew into the history books in 2014 by becoming not only the youngest champion, but also the first Porsche GB Scholar in history to win the championship in his first year of racing.

Josh said: "It's fantastic that Nine Group are supporting me again this season. They are an ambitious and dynamic business and it's great to be associated with them. I'm particularly grateful to the many Nine staff and resellers who turn up to support me at every race - it makes a huge difference."

Josh's father, Nine Wholesale MD Nick Webster, will attend all of the race days and will be joined by a selection of Purple Partners who get the chance to watch the racing action from the trackside, meet Josh in person, sit in the car and attend a Q&A session.

The season officially kicked off on 17th March with a media day hosted at Silverstone.

James Palmer, Nine Group CEO, commented: "We're delighted to be sponsoring Josh for a second season of racing. We were thrilled with his incredible success last year, so our continued support was a no-brainer. Nine employees apply a sporting ethos and fierce desire to win to everything we do - this makes us a perfect partnership."

Cash rich Excell Group has announced a new acquisition strategy headed up by Finance Director, Edward Pettit.

Pettit played a pivotal role in the recent acquisition of Resource Utilities and Green Mobile customer bases which increased the London based comms provider's turnover to £27m.

He told Comms Dealer: "The Group's strong cash reserves leave us well placed to capitalise on such opportunities.

"Acquisitions are targeted to complement the existing products, expand our base and provide cross selling opportunities with a focus on hosted and managed services.??"With changing demands of technology becoming increasingly prevalent and complex and with new regulatory changes on the horizon, any acquired customer bases will benefit from Excell Group's support and range of cloud products and services.

"We will remain focused on our customers and strengthen and build on our offerings to deliver even greater value."

Excell Group Chairman Darren Strowger stressed that recent acquisitions utilise charity affinity schemes that 'further support Excell's commitment to social value and adds to charitable commitments already made to Teenage Cancer Trust and local charitable projects and initiatives'.

Following Ofcom's decision to implement new regulations for B2C business using NGNS (Non Geographic number services), Elitetele.com is offering free consultation to any business set to be affected by the changes which will come into force from 1st July 2015.
 
The team of experts behind Elitetele.com's numbering solutions will now be available to educate and assist any business that uses or advertises 08, 09 or 118 numbers which consumers can call.

The organisation will also provide advice on the changes to unbundling charges, reduced price points and the removal of set-up fees from call charges.
 
Working with carriers, Elitetele.com can provide insight on how the changes to service charges will impact 08 and 09 wholesale charges, revenue share and the change in 0800 rates to accommodate calls from mobile networks.
 
Matt Newing, CEO of Elitetele.com, said: "The changes are widely acknowledged in the industry to be confusing. All businesses using affected numbers need to decide how to manage their numbering estate moving forward.

"There are various options available depending on the set-up, and our team of experienced experts are now on hand to offer free, impartial advice to any business which needs it "

IT provider SCC has strengthened its play in the data centre and hosted space following an investment in Fluidata by Rigby Group (which owns SCC).

Th deal signals Rigby Group's 14th piece of M&A activity since hitting the acquisition trail in 2013, and the first in 2015.

The investment is another milestone in the accelerated growth of SCC's services division, with services turnover alone increasing 8% to £148m by the end of September 2014.

SCC witnessed growth of 69% from data centre and cloud services alone last year following a succession of key customer wins including Gist, Aggregate Industries, BOC, IBM, Oxfordshire County Council, CAA and Highways Agency.

Founder and managing director of Fluidata Piers Daniell said: "Collaborating with SCC is good news all round - to our customers, their customers and the market - as together we are able to deliver a wider range of connectivity and data centre services based on our shared values."

SCC CEO James Rigby added: "SCC and Fluidata provides additional services capability and a stable foundation for us to enter the data telecoms market with a full and flexible DCS offering."

Rigby Group is the parent company for a portfolio of privately owned and successful businesses operating across Europe, the Middle East and North Africa.

The £2bn company, owned by Sir Peter Rigby, has interests in the technology, airports, hotels, real estate, financial and aviation sectors.

Abzorb has rolled out a national, fully white labelled PBX maintenance and support package to its channel partners as it moves towards total UC service provision.

The service provider is claiming to turn quotes around in eight hours under a simple two level cover programme.

"We wanted to make this easy so we decided to make the highest level of maintenance cover as standard at no extra cost, with only 24/7 covers as an extra add-on," said Darren Smith, Head of Data Services.

Abzorb is also set to roll out a hosted solution called ZORB IP, promising simple administration for channel partners through its tiered portal system.

"The ZORB IP hosted voice solution will go hand-in-hand with the Abzorb SIP service we suppy alongside BT which enables us to deliver converged voice and data over the same connection," added Smith. 

"In addition, we are planning to add QoS to the voice we supply. This will provide our partners with the ability to sell a true UC product.

"In today's marketplace you can no longer just sell single circuit connectivity, you need to focus on the consultative sell and really maximise the connectivity you supply."

Comms service provider Plan has unveiled an ambitious strategy to ramp up profits for its mobile reseller partners by adding a complete range of communications solutions to its portfolio. The additions include fixed line voice and data connectivity through BT plus the full suite of Microsoft communications apps and software.

The strategy is pinned on a comprehensive 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 even 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 full 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, 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 you, our partners, because we could not have achieved the success we have achieved so rapidly without you guys."

At the core of Plan's channel strategy is Version 3 of Plan Portal which has had 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 which 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 businesses 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 enabling 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 managed 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 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 and simplification of M2M connectivity orders for partners via the Plan portal was a response to market predictions.

"IoT is a planetary game changer for the mobile industry," he said. "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 £14tr 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.

Union Street has acted swiftly to upgrade its aBILLity software with new functionality, enabling resellers to more easily manage the impact of upcoming regulatory changes to non-geographic call services (NGCS).

In July this year Ofcom will introduce significant new regulations governing the way calls made by consumers (as opposed to businesses) to selected non-geographic number ranges are calculated and charged.

According to Union Street, these regulations represent a challenge for resellers' billing processes, particularly with regard to the requirement for segmenting consumers' call charges into separate service and access charges.

In its latest version of aBILLity, the company has taken steps to make charging consumers for NGCS a straightforward process and will be upgrading its clients over the coming months.

The firm has also introduced consultancy services to give clients the option of outsourcing the work involved in updating dial codes and charge groups to Union Street.

"The new regulations present a number of challenges to resellers with consumer customers," said MD Tony Cook.

"Resellers that deal exclusively with business customers will also be affected by the introduction of new charge groups and dial codes.

"We would advise all resellers to make any necessary enquiries with their suppliers and begin preparations soon to ensure they are ready by the deadline."

CorptelUK has linked up with American headset supplier VXi Corporation to distribute its range of VXi headset and Bluetooth products in the UK and Europe.

CorptelUK MD Paul Baxter commented: "VXi's high-performance products complement our portfolio and support our commitment to provide customers with the latest technologies and innovative solutions."

VXi Corporation Vice President of Sales, Janis Yuskaitis, added: "CorptelUK will play a strong role in introducing VXi solutions to office, enterprise, contact centre and mobile professional headset users in the UKL and Europe.

"VXi is a strategic alliance partner with Cisco, Polycom and Avaya DevConnect, so our product line will be a perfect accompaniment to Corptel's telephone offerings.

"Working with Corptel, we look forward to significantly growing VXi's business overseas."

Blackburn-based Unified World has been named Lancashire's first Vodafone Solutions Pioneer accredited company.

The accreditation recognises Unified World's technical support in supplying, installing and maintaining a range of Vodafone products including One Net.

Neil Jones, Managing Director for Unified World, said: "While we work independently with all the major mobile brands, its fantastic news to receive this accreditation from Vodafone as recognition of our technical competence and level of customer support in providing integrated communication solutions for our customers."

ITSPA (the Internet Telephony Service Provider's Association) has voiced support for the European Council net neutrality proposal after presenting the Latvian Presidency of the European Union an award, voted on by its members for their leadership in developing a workable council text on the Open Internet.

ITSPA has long campaigned for an open Internet to ensure effective competition in Internet-based services but has expressed concerns about adopting an extreme net-neutrality position that would prevent effective management of the Internet.
 
Eli Katz, chair of ITSPA, said: "We have been very active in this area over the last few years. We believe the Latvian Presidencies' Open Internet proposals strike the right balance between promoting competition while enabling innovation.

"They will put an end to abusive practices by a minority of ISPs who have tried to frustrate competition with their own services while at the same time allowing specialised services to be offered with enhanced levels of prioritisation.

"This is essential if the Internet is to reach its full potential, for example by delivering TV services over broadband to free up valuable radio spectrum for mobiles."
 
Eli Katz went on to express the hope that the European Parliament would not seek to modify the text.

"This is a carefully worded proposal that has undergone thorough review. This is a complex area and it's all too easy to create unfortunate unintended consequences which would be difficult to unwind. We urge the Parliament to accept the Council net neutrality text while keeping the area under review to ensure the internet remains open and vibrant."

Pictured: Guy Miller of ITSPA presents the award to Ildze Jansone, Coordinator of the Latvian Presidency of the Council of the EU at the Embassy of Latvia in the UK.