Comms Dealer

Logicalis UK has completed a significant business analytics implementation with ASM Assembly Systems' Printing Solutions Division (ASM) using the latest software from the IBM Cognos suite.

ASM specialises in the equipment and processes to enable fast, high quality production of advanced electronics, semiconductors and fuel cells for sectors including automotive, telecoms and energy generation.

Achieving the objective of converting large quantities of its data into valuable, actionable knowledge, ASM has saved hundreds of man-hours and equipped a large group of 'super-users' to execute decisions that realise efficiencies in existing processes, improving customer relations and proactively addressing issues and opportunities with this project.

"ASM is relied upon around the world for its accuracy, quality and innovation, so having access to business intelligence is enormously valuable," said Ian Bleazard, CIO at ASM.

Chris Gabriel, Chief Technology Officer at Logicalis UK, added: "It's been a successful and rewarding project, helping ASM realise their business aspirations in the areas of forecasting and financial reporting."

Outsourcery has secured its first G-Cloud contract having been selected by Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust to provide its Microsoft Lync SaaS solution, delivered from Outsourcery's O-Cloud PGA OFFICIAL Internet Platform.

The Trust provides mental health and community health services and employs over 4,000 staff across 100 hundred sites.

Piers Linney, Co-CEO of Outsourcery, said: "The G-Cloud framework provides significant benefits to all public sector organisations, whether at a national or local level by enabling them to engage with innovative SMEs such as Outsourcery that may not be on existing procurement frameworks.

"With the launch of the revamped Contracts Finder portal, public sector opportunities will become less complicated and costly to bid for, making deals such as ours with Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust more common.

"The new Contracts Finder portal is a huge opportunity for SMEs to gain visibility across a wealth of public sector opportunities."

Mark Davison, Director of IM&T at Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, added: "Using the G-Cloud gave us access to a much broader range of suppliers that we would not have considered had we followed previous procurement approaches outside the framework.

"Importantly, this meant receiving tenders from a range of smaller providers who were able to be more competitive on price and flexible in the service they offered."

Vodafone and ip.access have launched consumer based presence services following a successful deployment of ip.access' presenceCell across multiple locations in Turkey.

presenceCells fit within operators' privacy and permissions frameworks to capture user location and identity information from mobile devices and direct it to approved value added services for a wide variety of business applications. The high quality data captured by the presenceCell monetises Vodafone's spectrum assets and provides retail intelligence in a uniquely valuable way.

The first stage of this growing deployment saw Vodafone roll out presenceCells across its stores in Turkey. The technology enables Vodafone to recognise customers as they enter the store and so provide a personalised service to each individual customer. Stage two of the deployment will now see the proliferation of presenceCells into third party retail and m-commerce locations.

"This innovative collaboration is particularly exciting for us, as it's the first commercial proof point within the Vodafone Group for this high value monetisation model," explains Rob Jones, Senior Vice President Worldwide Sales & Operations, at ip.access.

"We see continued strong interest across the market for our presenceCells offering with a particular emphasis on delivering secure mobile payment capabilities with the introduction of Closed Loop Authentication."

Simon Smith has been named as Elitetele.com's first Head of Cloud Sales.

His remit is to educate new and existing customers on hosting infrastructure, expand Elitetele.com's cloud services and launch a series of new offerings in 2015.

Smith is well practiced at advising teams on the security, application, connectivity and disaster recovery aspects of cloud solutions, and has successfully managed business for international companies.

This new hire builds on Elitetele.com's acquisition of a data centre in 2014, a move that completed the company's transition from a switchless reseller to a full ISP with carrier capabilities and multiple data centre facilities.

With the acquisition, Elite officially launched a range of data centre services, including managed firewalls, unified threat management, colocation and its very own hosted PBX, Elite Plus Talk, which is embedded within its own core MPLS Network.

Smith said: "Cloud is an area many organisations still struggle with and Elitetele.com has a successful track record in understanding its customers' issues and providing quality solutions underpinned by great products."

Matt Newing, CEO of Elitetele.com, added: "With over a quarter of our customers using three or more of our services we're in a strong position to build on this with our new cloud offerings launching later this year. I know Simon will help us reach our goal of providing our customers with the right cloud services."

Hampshire-based M12 Solutions has secured a deal to supply a SpliceCom VoIP system to Port Regis Prep School in Shaftesbury, Dorset.

The deal encompasses the main equipment, phones, maintenance, SIP trunks and calls.

M12 Solutions MD Andrew Skipsey said: "We worked closely with the school to provide a solution for many years to come. We recognise that Port Regis, with its boarding facilities, needs a mission critical level of round-the-clock backup as well.

"With our conversion from ISDN to SIP lines which work over the school's Internet connection we can reduce the costs of lines and calls which helps to provide a strong cost justification for the new platform."

Virtual1 has been awarded a two star rating on the 2015 Best Companies accreditation. The rating categorises Virtual1 as 'outstanding' in the Best Companies ranking.

The annual accreditation standard recognises the UK's most engaged and supportive employers - based on employee feedback and an audit of policies and practices.

The three star scale ranks employee engagement from one star (first class), two stars (outstanding) to three stars (extraordinary).

Virtual1 CEO Tom O'Hagan said: "As an employer of over 60 people it's crucial that we measure, improve and recognise all areas of employee engagement. Myself and the leadership team at Virtual1 very much believe that we should look after our people and let them look after our customers.

"We're proud to see our employees rank us so highly on key areas. However, we will also be looking at what we could do better and will be working towards the three star ranking next year."

The company is putting in place a series of employee engagement strategies to build on the findings and to also maintain its employee retention rates (almost a quarter of the workforce has been with the firm for longer than three years).

Ash Patel has joined Cobweb Solutions as Director of Business Transformation.

Patel has been in the IT industry since he was 16 years old. Beginning as an IT lecturer at Uxbridge College, he went on to deliver networks for the RAF and the Commonwealth Games as a Wireless Strategy Architect at Locustworld, deploying wireless cloud infrastructure across sites around the world.

Patel joins Cobweb from Insight where he recently led the EMEA Cloud strategy programme.

Paul Hannam, CEO and co-founder, said: "Ash joins us as we prepare to show the world a transformation. We will soon be sharing new services with our partners and customers, giving them a brand new way of looking at the cloud."

Patel added: "I'll be working with the team transforming 'core' Cobweb as we evolve into an ever-more strategic IT partner for our customers. Our goal is to build mutually beneficial relationships with our partners and customers in order to help each other grow."

Jola was 'born in the cloud' almost one year ago and to mark its upcoming anniversary the company is launching an automated quotation tool for dealers.

Sales Director Lee Broxson said: "Ultimately the dealer decides the price to their customer and we share the recurring margin 50/50. The same with all our products, they set the price and we automatically pay them half the margin - every month. We offer as much assistance in sales and marketing as needed and we will never compete with our partners. We also handle billing, commissions and 24/7 support."

Andrew Dickinson, MD, added: "We have no base of calls and lines to protect and no leased circuits coming out of contract at 20% of the margin they went in at. This means we can be disruptive and we offer Premium Broadsoft licences with voicemail, SIP trunk, call queue, auto-attendant, UK landline calls and UK mobile calls for one low monthly rental."

Phoenix has bolstered its relationship with Redmayne-Bentley, one of the UK's largest independently owned stockbroking and investment management firms, with an additional fully managed IT contract.

The three year contract will see Phoenix provide a new Wide Area Network (WAN) based on an MPLS solution that will cover Redmayne-Bentley's 38 branch offices from Inverness to Exeter including its administrative and settlement operations and all its investment management and execution-only stockbroking services, plus the Phoenix DR and Data centre sites.

The contract will deliver Redmayne-Bentley a fully managed solution including the management of the circuits and router hardware (on-site), active and hardware monitoring along with network support (on-site) and break-fix of all router hardware.

The new contract win complements Phoenix's existing hosting contract which already delivers a Private Cloud service, providing secure hosting and supporting a suite of IT services. These include an 'anywhere, anytime' desktop with managed applications, email and Active Directory services.

Steve Vaughan, Phoenix Chief Executive, said: "The solution will include resilient Internet options and take advantage of the new technologies and network services to allow greater bandwidths to be available at less cost improving upload and download speeds.

"As a Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) regulated firm, having a secure IT network that complies with regulatory requirements is critical to Redmayne-Bentley. In addition the company wanted to secure significant savings and generate real efficiency improvements to support the growth of its services to clients."

Keltec, part of the Annodata Group, has been awarded a place on the G-Cloud 6 framework and will offer its IaaS and SaaS solutions via the government's digital marketplace.

The Annodata Group already has a strong footprint in local government and provides a range of communications, print, document management and data services, meaning the move will help more local government bodies take advantage of the G-Cloud.

Simon Pemberton, Sales Director at Keltec, said: "Local government take-up of services through the G-Cloud has not been as high as other parts of the public sector so we hope that our experience and existing customer base at the local level will help improve uptake.

"Local government is a different beast to central public sector organisations and it is important that providers are able to understand their needs to provide a flexible and personalised service."

The G-Cloud framework is designed to make procurement of cloud services by public sector bodies easier and more cost effective. It is also a crucial part of the government's plan to get more small and medium-sized enterprises supplying government.

Pemberton added: "This will be the first time that Annodata has joined the G-cloud framework and it is the latest step for the company as it continues to grow both organically and through acquisition. We are on course to reach our target of £100m turnover by 2016."