Comms Dealer

An accreditation scheme introduced by Union Street Technologies aims to increase the professional qualifications of practitioners in the comms billing market.

The qualification, called Union Street Accredited Professional (USAP), will certify the knowledge and capabilities of billing professionals and their competence in using the company's aBILLity billing system.

To gain the USAP accreditation aBILLity users must attend training provided by the company and pass online assessments.

Union Street will offer accredited billing experts access to aBILLity user group meetings, a dedicated USAP specialist support line and discounts on consultancy services.

Union Street has also restructured its training programme, subdividing its courses into three stages - Telecoms Regulatory Stage, delivered by Michael Eagle, former Trade Association and General Manager at the Federation of Communication Services (FCS), which provides an overview of the industry regulatory framework affecting resellers with advice on how to achieve compliance.

A Foundation Stage offers courses aimed at newcomers to telecoms; while a Process and Practice Stage offers courses that advise on managing a bill run from start to finish, with particular emphasis on the inbound and outbound process, mobile billing, and best practices to deploy for compliance and boosting efficiency.

Union Street MD Tony Cook commented: "Our USAP programme is intended to raise standards in the industry, inspire excellence in our partners and their staff and recognise the expertise, knowledge and competence of the professionals that perform this valuable role for their companies.

"By rebuilding our training programme around the USAP accreditation structure we are also able to offer a cost-effective, end-to-end training process for existing telecoms professionals and newcomers.

"We believe this will make it significantly easier for employers to recruit staff from outside the industry and help to address the skills shortage that currently exists in the billing arena."

IDI Billing Solutions is to provide the billing and OSS support for Mitel's operations in the UK, supporting EMEA operations.

IDI's cloud-based CostGuard billing and OSS solution will run on the Microsoft Azure platform to support the regional rollout.

CostGuard will be hosted in local data centres on Microsoft Azure, an open cloud platform that enables solutions providers like IDI to quickly build, deploy and manage applications across a global network of Microsoft-managed data centres.

In the UK rollout Mitel will use CostGuard's workflow capabilities to track and automate orders and create market-specific products and services using the solution's product management capabilities.

"We are excited about our global prospects and our ability to create competitive offerings for the UK wholesale market," said Jon Brinton, Mitel's Executive Vice President and General Manager Global Cloud.

"The combination of CostGuard and Microsoft Azure gives us the ability to deliver a communications solution with the reliability, flexibility and efficiency that is crucial in today's wholesale communications space."

Tim Wrona, Vice President, Marketing and Product Strategy for IDI, added: "There are many considerations when service providers expand outside their domestic market. With our cloud-based CostGuard billing and OSS solution, we are able to help providers eliminate their most pressing back office concerns and provide the speed-to-market that's required to compete in a global communications marketplace."

Westcoast is gearing up to stage a series of regional roadshows to help resellers prepare for the end of Microsoft's support for Windows Server 2003 in July.

The company is running three 'Time for Change events' - in Birmingham (24th February), London (March 5th) and Manchester (March 12th) - that are deigned to enable resellers to successfully migrate their customers from Windows Server 2003.

Clare Leetham, Microsoft Account Manager at Westcoast, said: "We want to make sure resellers fully understand the risks of not upgrading and are also able to articulate the benefits of migration to more modern infrastructures or cloud solutions.

"That way they can inspire their end users to upgrade with confidence and optimism."

The London event will include a presentation delivered by Alistair Campbell (pictured), the former Downing Street communications chief.

He will address some of the key issues facing leaders and business today and sign copies of his book, 'Winners and how they succeed'.

Every attendee will automatically be entered into a draw to win a pair of Rugby World Cup tickets to see the England versus Wales group match.

EE is to invest £1.5bn between now and 2017 as part of a new manifesto called 'signalling the Future' designed to tackle the UK's changing digital infrastructure needs.

In this second phase of its network strategy EE will focus on extending its 4G network to more than 99% of the population and 90% of the UK's geography.

EE CEO Olaf Swantee said: "Stage one of our network strategy saw us overhaul UK mobile networks, launching 4G and changing the way people and businesses use their smart devices.

"This revolution of the mobile landscape has made the UK a leader in global communications once again.

"Today we're announcing the next stage with a commitment to radically improve mobile coverage, this time with a strong focus on rural UK, all while continuing to increase speeds and capacity with deeper coverage in more cities."

Tech firms in the UK will grow four times faster than GDP in 2015 with business leaders predicting an average 11% growth. The results of Barclays' latest Fast Growth Tech survey also showed that 58% are expecting their business to grow by up to 10%, with 18% forecasting 10% and 20%, while 9% predicted significant growth of over 20%.

Sean Duffy, MD and Head of Barclays' Technology, Media and Telecoms team, said: "These remarkable growth predictions reveal the optimism and drive of the UK's tech sector.

"The fact that many firms are expecting further growth in 2016 shows that this trend isn't transient and the UK is a launchpad for innovative tech businesses.

"Investors are seeing the UK as an international talent magnet and a platform to grow or launch their business for a number of reasons, including the culture, light-touch regulation, supportive Government policies and access to finance."

Duffy also noted that strong leadership 'rang out loud and clear' as being critical for growth, particularly important in the first few years of a business' life. "Leadership is even more relevant for fast growth businesses experiencing unique stressors and demands on their cash flow, requiring their leaders to make many major decisions at speed in order to keep pace.

"It takes an extremely strong and dynamic individual to have a clear vision and the energy to lead their workforce to success in this type of supercharged environment."

Exclusive Group has posted 627m euro in revenue for 2014, up 91%, and is on course to reach its 1bn euro target within two-three years.

The value added services company has expanded its presence in new and existing territories as well as developing new service capabilities.

The result has seen year on year revenue almost double bringing it to within striking distance of its stated 2017 target of 1bn euro. Organic growth with both established and emerging vendors has continued to be extremely strong at 36%.
 
"These are outstanding results, but we remain fully focused on making 2015 another record breaking year as we strive for more organic growth and bring on stream substantial new capabilities in financing, leasing and global services support," said Olivier Breittmayer, CEO of Exclusive Group. 

"We anticipate more growth in 2015 and good uptake of new services."
 
Exclusive Group made significant inroads into new markets in 2014 with the purchases of value-added distributors Bilisimcim in Turkey (January) and WhiteGold in Australia/NZ (August), and expanded existing Italian operations through the acquisition of Sidin (October). February saw the launch of Exclusive Networks operations in Denmark. 
 
The acquisition of ITEC Intelligent Services in December has further enhanced the Group's global services capabilities and reach into 90-plus countries worldwide and bringing in-country presence into the United States and mainland Asia for the first time. 

The Group's latest acquisition of Fibail System and subsequent launch of Exclusive Capital, a new IT asset financing/leasing division fell outside of this reporting period, but will have a major impact on future service revenue growth.
 
Among the other highlights of Exclusive Group's 2014 financial performance is the first full year of its Big Technology value added distribution division, focused on data centre transformation opportunities. 

BigTec Germany, Spain and Benelux have all set up in recent months alongside the UK and France, with the combined entity posting nearly 40m euro in revenue for the year. 

Elsewhere, revenue for Exclusive Group's Passport brand of professional services, 24/7 local language support and training has also performed well, with double-digit growth for the period.
 

Dimension Data has been certified as a Top Employer: Europe for its 'outstanding' employee offerings.

Dimension Data Europe has 4,500 employees and is one of the few companies to achieve the Top Employers Europe 2015 certification being certified in seven countries in Europe - Belgium, France, Italy, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland and the UK.

The Top Employers Institute's annual international research recognises leading employers around the world that provide excellent employee conditions, nurture and develop talent across all levels of the organisation, and strive to optimise employment practices.

Judith Oude Sogtoen, director of International Business Development for the Top Employers Institute, said: "Our research concluded that Dimension Data Europe forms part of a select group of employers that advance employee conditions worldwide."

Andrew Coulsen, CEO of Dimension Data Europe, added: "We invest in all our employees from graduates to fast tracking our young talent to providing mentoring, and online learning and development opportunities open to all our 4,500 people in Europe.

"As a service led business we know we can only be as strong as our people."

Salford-based JMC IT has won the highest three star status from Best Companies for the fifth consecutive year and is named as one of The Sunday Times 100 Best Small Companies to Work For in 2015 for the 11th year.

JMC displayed high levels of employee engagement with staff providing detailed anonymous survey feedback in categories including personal job satisfaction; managers' ability to care and motivate staff in fulfilling their potential; and overall excitement about the company's future.

The survey also achieved a response rate of 86 per cent from JMC's staff, who spend on average 12 years at the company.

Andrew Burgess, JMC's MD, said: "We truly believe our employee engagement engenders excellent client service, which in turn creates a 'virtuous circle' whereby clients love our staff and love working with JMC. It takes a huge team effort to achieve this, so we're delighted that everybody's hard work is continuing to pay off."

The two accolades add to a list of previous employment awards for JMC, which has led to the company playing an active role in promoting these initiatives to the wider industry.

JMC has been asked again to sponsor the upcoming Salford Business Awards Best Employer category, encouraging other local businesses to enter the award in recognition of their commitment to employee development and creating a rewarding place to work.

Nimans' reseller support for its hosted telephony service GS-hosted has moved into a new phase and the distributor is urging more resellers to become authorised suppliers.

Demo kits, white label marketing and training support are on hand to help resellers drive their GS-hosted sales, said the firm.

GS-hosted was launched last year and includes a three year hosted seat licence with every handset purchased.

A choice of three models are available with upfront margin potential of 45% or recurring margins of 65%, said the distributor. As part of the expanding service resellers can now add music on hold functionality.

Nimans' Group Sales and Business Development Director, Richard Carter, says becoming an authorised partner is the best way for resellers to develop their sales.

"Resellers simply need to carry out a short online test to become fully accredited and open the door to a world of compelling support services," he explained.

"We are constantly adding to our support strategy to ensure resellers can maximise every sales opportunity. In addition they can use an official 'authorised partner' logo on their marketing and sales material to reinforce their overall expertise.

"We are also sending out a quarterly newsletter to keep resellers up to speed with all the latest developments."

US-based Perforce Software says the number of partners selling the company's portfolio of version management and collaboration software grew by 50% in 2014, bringing in-country customer support in nine of the world's ten most spoken languages.

Partners who joined the program in 2014 include: EDAWay in Italy, InTENSO in Poland and Cohort (previously Legal Softwave)in Russia. Perforce offers a version management and collaboration platform, aiming to protect customer IP and to enables teams to collaborate without conflict on any type of file-from source code to industrial designs to business documents.

"We understand that our international customers want the option of in-country support and we're committed to fulfilling those needs with an array of top-class partners across the globe," said Dave Robertson, vice president of channels. "Our channel network brought in a substantial amount of new business in 2014, and we expect the same to continue this year, especially with our forthcoming product announcements and enhancements."

Perforce continues to expand its partner network across multiple territories. "There is strong growth potential for Perforce-based solutions in multiple markets and we will continue to address this opportunity through the expansion of our channel," said Robertson.