Comms Dealer

Since moving to new offices in Buckhurst Hill one year ago to accommodate its expansion plans Channel Telecom continues to put its new platform to good use.

Clifford Norton, MD, said: "The premises move allowed us to expand our operations and to recruit additional staff."

Upon opening the offices in 2014, local MP and Deputy Speaker to the House of Commons, Eleanor Laing said, "It's good to see a business that started locally staying local while going from strength to strength, in fact doubling its turnover every year. It is also great to see employment opportunities for bright and enterprising people in the local area."

Hadas Hughes (pictured) has been appointed Director of Marcomms and Programmes at Exclusive Group.

Hughes will be responsible for coordinating all marketing activity for the Exclusive Group, and generating propositions on behalf of the global Exclusive Networks, Big Technology, Exclusive Capital and ITEC brands.

With 20-plus years experience in marketing management in both the B2B IT and financial services industries Hughes joins from Exclusive vendor partner Aerohive Networks where she successfully spearheaded international channel marketing, supporting strong growth in new markets over successive years.

"Hadas is a highly motivated, proven operator who'll work closely with all our marketing teams in more than 30 offices around the world," said Barrie Desmond, COO at Exclusive Group.

"As well as underpinning much of the great marketing work we do alongside our vendor and reseller partners, her skills will be put to good work communicating the Exclusive Group value-added services propositions, and explaining to the world how we are truly disrupting distribution in an ever-evolving market."

After consultation with the European Court of Justice over the long running case of Lock vs British Gas Trading, an employment tribunal has ruled that previously earned sales commissions must be compensated pro-rata, in the calculation of holiday pay for sales people.

Clive Jefferys of recruiter JMA Network said: "This is a landmark decision with far reaching consequences for any company employing sales people within the European Community."

Sales people may be entitled to backdate claims for a two year period, based on full paid holiday entitlement of at least 5.6 weeks in the UK.

For example, salespeople earning £60,000 pa, of which 50% was drawn from commission, could be entitled to an extra £3000 pa from their employer.

The ECJ has left the implementation of this ruling to national courts for the moment, but it does seem likely that it will become part of UK employment law in the not too distant future, noted Jefferys.

Cwmbran-based UC solutions provider SIPHON has secured a substantial equity investment from Finance Wales.

Since it was established in 2009, SIPHON has achieved impressive organic growth, doubling its revenues year-on-year.

The investment from Finance Wales will accelerate the next phase of its growth plan as SIPHON looks to increase its presence in the UK and Benelux, as well as expanding into other European markets.

"Securing this investment is a significant milestone for SIPHON and demonstrates Finance Wales' confidence in our business model as well as in our professional and technical expertise," said Steve Harris, co-founder and Managing Director of SIPHON.

"Finance Wales' investment provides us with the capital to continue the rapid expansion of SIPHON and achieve a further step-change in our growth.

"A high-calibre team of knowledge workers is integral to our success at SIPHON and we expect an active recruitment drive over the next two years to keep pace with our growing business."

Rob Smith, co-founder and Technical Director at SIPHON added: "As SIPHON has grown over the last six years we've expanded our portfolio to encompass cloud Infrastructure and cloud services, as well as targeting the wealth of deployment and integration opportunities for enabling real-time communications within Microsoft UC environments.

"Steve and I decided that securing equity investment from a long-term backer would help us take SIPHON to the next level."

Senior Investment Executive, Stephen Stolliday and Investment Executive, Leanna Davies structured Finance Wales' investment.

Stolliday said: "SIPHON has a strong product portfolio supported by a comprehensive suite of professional services.

"It's a combination that enables SIPHON to deliver innovative, end-to-end solutions to its world-class customer base.

"SIPHON is well placed to take advantage of an exciting time in the telecoms sector and scale up its operations."

In 2012, SIPHON acquired VCOMM Distribution in Newbury, boosting its warehousing and logistics facilities and enabling the rapid fulfilment of Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) contracts.

The company has continued to enhance its portfolio, recently establishing a Microsoft UC Technology Practice.

Invosys is hoping to motivate great demand for its new Enterprise Number Manager product through an incentive scheme that will culminate with the five top sellers winning tickets for a VIP Grand Prix Karting day this summer.

The competition, which kicks off on 1st April and runs until 31st June, is open to new and existing partners who will compete to sell the most new Enterprise Licenses.

Enterprise Number Manager is aimed at the SME market and is the first product in a new Enterprise Suite from Invosys.

The drag-and-drop provisioning tool removes complexity when building complex plans and brings more flexibility to the Number Manager platform.

Sales Director Steve Glaister said: "This is the first time that we have run an incentive on this scale for all of our partners to take part in, and it is also open to resellers we may not already be working with.

"With such a great prize on offer, we are hoping it will create a real buzz, and we are sure there will be some healthy competition as our partners push for extra sales - and then battle it out on the race track at the Karting day."

A white labelled cloud solution for the channel has been unveiled by two industry veterans who have joined forces to launch Cube52 following a two year period of setting up.

CTO Matthew Munson and Commercial Director Robin Ellis share 25 years experience in the data centre industry and have reinvested £3m from the sale of BlueSquare Data, the data centre-based provider of colocation services they sold in 2010.

"Resellers have to broaden the scope of their offerings for their increasingly cloud-savvy customer base," said Munson.

"The Cube52 platform enables the partner community to build and deploy its own branded applications on an infrastructure that can scale, from dedicated private cloud to fully elastic public cloud."

The proposition is based on the Microsoft Cloud OS and Cisco/Netapp Flexpod architecture.

A self-service cloud portal provides a single point of access, configuration and control 24x7 from where resellers can manage workloads, applications and solutions from a 'single pane of glass', said the firm.

"The partner community has been slow to truly embrace the cloud because of the barriers of entry," added Munson. "Key to success is ubiquitous access. Our cloud access portal has been designed around this requirement."

He also noted that Cube52's partner programme has been developed to accommodate cloud novices as well as established cloud services providers and independent software vendors.

"Whether a partner is considering adding cloud services to its business for the first time, or has been investing in cloud capability for some years, Cube52's partner programme can help further their offerings," added Munson.

As economic confidence rises, you might be forgiven for thinking that this is good news if you are recruiting new staff. However, the latest market data indicates that a 'perfect storm' is approaching as demand outrageously exceeds supply, writes Clive Jefferys of telecoms recruiter JMA Network.
 
The latest Jobs Outlook report by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation determined that 56% of businesses surveyed have 'little or no spare capacity to take on new work without hiring extra staff'. It also revealed that a whopping 79% of businesses intend to hire more staff in 2015!
 
However, we already have record high employment in the UK and the number of people seeking a move between jobs has fallen consistently, month on month for the last year.  

The Boogeyman of the recent recession has made people highly risk-averse when it comes to looking at a new job.
 
Yet in the same REC survey only 19% of companies foresee any problems with recruiting extra permanent staff. So where are all these extra people going to come from? It seems that the gap between perception and reality is getting wider by the day.
 
What can resellers and dealers do to overcome this hiring challenge?
 
Well it's not rocket science - just take a broader view on candidate suitability at CV and interview stages. Look for a person's potential to develop into what your business will need. There are very few quick fixes or ideal candidates today, so you will have to grow them for tomorrow. Invest in their training and most importantly, invest in their £worth.

Coms has forged closer ties with BT Wholesale following the launch of its new hosted UC product during an event staged at the BT Tower for Coms Wholesale customers.

The white label cloud proposition offers online access to self-configuration portals (one for channel partners and one for end users) and provides the full functionality of a traditional PBX.

Presenters from Coms included Andrew Jeffrey, Sales and Marketing Director and Jon Poole, Sales Manager. Also presenting were BT luminaries Marc Timmermans, Director of Portfolio Development , Ajit Jadeja, Voice Sales Specialist, and Sean McMahon, Senior Account Manager.

Poole commented: "This event signifies a time of great excitement at Coms with this fantastic opportunity to work alongside BT."

Timico's upcoming Connected Enterprise Conference will ensure that partners are not in the dark when it comes to facing some of the most impactful disruptive forces in the comms industry today.

The company cautions against a 'head in the sand' approach to technological innovation and network security threats and has identified key themes in its conference agenda that address the most pressing issues while emphasising the associated market opportunities for partners.

The 'sell-out' invitation-only conference (to be staged at Stapleford Park, Leicestershire, April 28th) will be hosted by broadcaster Natasha Kaplinsky and includes sessions on cloud-based disaster recovery; identifying major security threats; empowering remote users with secure access to corporate information; the future role of WebRTC and how SDN will redefine corporate networks.

Among the industry heavyweights supporting the event are Microsoft, Cisco, BT Wholesale, Juniper, Genband and Fortinet. And a keenly anticipated closing session will be delivered by Microsoft's Envisioning Officer Dave Coplin.

Timico CEO Tim Radford said: "The Connected Enterprise Conference brings prospective partners, current partners and our larger customers together under one roof, alongside some of the industry's leading providers with a conference programme that will get to the heart of the issues facing today's IT professionals."

8x8 Solutions has introduced two new product integrations based on the Salesforce1 Platform.

Since 2008, 8x8 Solutions has enabled thousands of Salesforce Sales and Service Cloud customers to improve operational efficiencies build more effective sales organisations and optimise customer engagements with its integrated Virtual Office and Virtual Contact Centre solutions.

This latest announcement means it will now be even easier to combine call data with customer databases to offer world-class customer service.

An ISVforce partner, 8x8 Solutions' latest Virtual Office and Virtual Contact Centre AppExchange integrations are built on the Salesforce1 Platform utilising Salesforce's OpenCTI toolkit.

These integrations fit seamlessly into users' Salesforce environments with screen pops of Salesforce contacts, click-to-dial from within the Salesforce application and new functionality that automatically logs call activity into the Salesforce application, enabling customers to gather call metrics directly from the Salesforce reporting engine.

Kevin Scott-Cowell, CEO of 8x8 Solutions, said: "Salesforce is one of the most in demand business applications that our customers want to integrate with their unified communications and contact centre system. By integrating with Salesforce, it will help our customers continue to deliver excellent customer service, improve productivity and, ultimately, drive growth."

Ron Huddleston, senior Vice President, ISV & Channel at Salesforce, added: "Companies are looking to transform the way they connect with customers, partners and employees to thrive in today's connected world. By leveraging the power of the Salesforce1 Platform, 8x8 Solutions provides customers with the proven social, mobile and connected cloud technologies to accelerate business success."