Comms Dealer

2015 is the year for small and medium-sized businesses to seize their own opportunity from the economic revival and upgrade their technical capabilities for growth, according to Mike Smith, Director SoHo & SME, Virgin Media Business.

"Driving their online footprint and extending customer reach will be key to how well SMEs fare in the year ahead," he said. "Embracing the ongoing transformation of digital skills and content? will make this achievable.

"This is the year to go for growth. As the economy rebounds and begins to pull ahead, the company that skills up and re-engineers for growth is the company poised for early returns.

"Businesses bold enough to ?invest now in digital skills and technology are likely to reap the benefits, not only in financial terms, but to the betterment of their staff, workplace and customers.

"Our SMEs are uniquely placed to make the rebound of UK PLC even more powerful. The latest figures show that the annual income of small businesses grew by 7.4% in 2014, the highest rate of growth for more than 14 years. Businesses that seize the digital challenge will do even better."

A pipeline of 50 resellers are poised to on-board a 'simple to use' video calling solution offered by Nimans.

The distributor formed an agreement last year with BlinkPipe, a company that enables video to be added to calls.

According to Paul Burn, Head of Category Sales at Nimans, the solution puts video conferencing 'within the reach of all businesses, big and small'.

"Users simply walk in, sit down and dial - that's it," he said. "They can experience wide angle HD images, 3x optical zoom and face tracking technology for a fraction of the price of other enterprise room systems. Tiered subscriptions suit different business needs."

Based on 'lip sync' technology (fusing voice over the phone and video over the Internet) users plug a BlinkPipe camera into a TV and a traditional meeting room audio conference unit, and HD video calls can be instantly made and received.

In addition to the camera, a BlinkPipe Hub cloud service delivers group video calls and screen sharing between BlinkPipe hardware, PCs, Macs, tablets and smartphones.

Dave Gwilt, BlinkPipe Co-founder, added: "High quality video gives so much more feedback than voice alone. It can change the outcome of a call."

Timico is campaigning to push disaster recovery (DR) further up the IT manager's agenda and has launched a solution that will help IT bosses plan ahead for unforeseen circumstances.

The move follows a survey by the cloud and hosting specialist that revealed just 34% of IT managers are 'reasonably confident' that their DR solution is fit for purpose. Only 9% reviewed and updated recovery plans once a month or more.

Tom Moores, Sales Director for, said: "IT managers are renowned for having a lot on their plate, but when things go wrong there's nowhere to hide.

"DR plans are effectively worthless if they are not tested, reviewed and updated as there is no way to guarantee whether the back-up plan will pull through.

"From burst water pipes to natural disasters and simple human error, the threat of downtime is more likely than many people realise - which makes an unproven plan a huge risk."

Timico has introduced Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), a cloud-based pay-as-you-go solution that enables businesses of all sizes to protect themselves from downtime.

Moores added: "Disaster recovery is an essential component of IT management, but in the past it has always been seen as a headache with businesses having to invest heavily in duplicate equipment before they could be 100% confident and conduct thorough testing.

"With DRaaS, testing can be conducted with no disruption to the production environment. Using our cloud platform as back-up in the event of a major disruption, precious data is protected almost instantaneously until a business is ready to fail back to its primary site."

Softcat has been named Egress Software Technologies' Top Performing Partner for 2014, recognising the significant sales growth of 100%-plus in Egress Switch encryption services made by the VAR.

Egress UK Sales Manager Kelly McCann said: "Working closely with the Egress team, Softcat has been able to drive substantial business through its local and central government teams, as well as considerable growth across the corporate team with wins in banking, insurance and the gaming industry.

"This effort is reflected in their exceptional year on year Switch revenue growth of over 100% in 2014."

Jamie Burke, Sales Director at Softcat, added: "As one of the fastest growing IT providers in the UK we have built our success on a portfolio of innovative technologies. By investing in a best-of breed-software and service approach we are able to offer our customers solutions that deliver genuine value and end user results. The growth of our Switch business demonstrates the success of this approach.

"What excites us for 2015 is not only the continued progress in traditionally strong markets that include UK Government, but also the number of opportunities being identified by our corporate teams.

"Data security and encryption will be high up on the decision-making agenda for most organisations in 2015, so we feel uniquely placed to take advantage of this opportunity."

Collaboration software and services firm PGi has snapped up Modality Systems, the dedicated Microsoft Lync services and software firm.

PGi funded the purchase through its credit facility.

"Modality Systems is one of the most well-respected Lync practices globally, and we are excited to deliver their value and expertise to our customers," said Boland T. Jones, PGi founder, chairman and CEO.

James Rodd, Modality co-founder and CEO, added: "Since starting Modality in 2007, we have focused on helping organisations improve collaboration, productivity and business processes through the successful implementation of Microsoft Lync.

"PGi shares our focus and dedication to customer success, and we are thrilled to join forces to help companies worldwide reach their business goals through the power of unified collaboration."

With over 75 employees and offices in London, Seattle, San Jose and Sydney, Modality Systems is home to 45 Lync certified professionals, including six Lync Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and three certified Lync Masters.

IBM has opened a new services centre in Leicester and  revealed plans to create 300 new jobs within the next three years.

The new hub will focus on high value application development and maintenance as well as test and systems management services that help organisations benefit from cloud, big data analytics, mobile, social and security technologies.

The centre will also join IBM's globally integrated capability network for public and private sector customers in Europe and around the world.

The hiring process is expected to begin immediately and, since the company will also offer the internships and hunt for local talents, it will work closely with the universities and institutions.

IBM's investment in the city should help increase the economic growth of the region and, to this end, the company will collaborate with Leicester City Council and the Leicester and Leicestershire Enterprise Partnership.

"This investment in job creation aims to inspire the next-generation workforce from local technical colleges and universities who will deliver the technology skills needed to drive business innovation in the UK," said Chief Executive, IBM UK and Ireland, David Stokes.

"The new centre will help to position Leicester as a hub for global businesses and reflects IBM's commitment to developing skills and providing technology services to business across the UK."

Mitel has announced that it will release its fourth quarter 2014 financial results on February 26th, 2015.

The company will host an investor conference call and live webcast on the same day.

Zen Internet is offering what it claims is a 'super-easy' self-install option across all of its FTTC products.

The option gives partners and their customers the freedom to install fibre broadband on their own timescale, removing many unnecessary headaches and delays, said Zen.

All new orders for Fibre 1, Unlimited Fibre 1, Unlimited Fibre 2 and Unlimited Fibre Office can be provisioned as Self-Install; and Zen will provide a next-generation 'Plug n' Play' TG589vn router worth £60 for free.

The router will be added to the partner's shopping basket automatically and delivered direct to the customer for £6.

"At our Annual Partner Event in November, partners talked about wanting more flexibility and choice around how their services are delivered," said David Barber, Senior Product Manager, Zen Internet.

"Since then we've been working on a number of ideas to make life easier for them, one of which is Self-Install.

"Opting for Self-Install removes all reliance on third parties to successfully get a next generation broadband customer connected. That's welcome news for many who often feel the pain of engineer visits and missed appointments."

Zen Partners can still choose between Self-Install and a managed/engineer install at the point of order. "Managed installs will still involve an Openreach engineer visiting the customer's premises, and partners can request a preferred installation date and time slot for the visit," added Barber.

"This gives Zen Partners the ability to cherry-pick the experience their new Fibre Broadband customers receive and manage the install on their terms."

Lifecycle management company Network 2 Supplies (N2S) has recorded impressive recycling figures despite a 23% increase in the amount of equipment it handles.

The equipment N2S primarily handles comes from redundant or decommissioned computer or communications equipment and associated cabling.

Much of the equipment can be refurbished for reuse or resale, which brings a revenue stream back to N2S clients in an environmentally friendly manner.

During 2014, the company (which has sites in Bury St Edmunds and London) handled over 800 tonnes of equipment, of which 99.6% was recycled.

Detailed figures show 70,730 kilos of the equipment were reused and 716,790 kilos was recycled. Just 3,295 kilos was sent to landfill.

Jack Gomarsall, N2S Managing Director, said: "To record a figure of just 0.4% of 800 tonnes going to landfill is quite remarkable. This serves as a real testimony of our Green credentials and our commitment to the circular economy.

"We deliver services which consistently return perceived technology waste back into resource for re-use, which has huge benefits for our clients but also the environment; it is a win, win situation."

N2S deals with global vendors hardware, decommissioning on client sites to transport and make sure equipment is transparently re-used or recycled.

Materials regular salvaged by N2S include precious metals such as gold, silver and copper, hazardous materials such as mercury and even steel and plastics.

Inclarity has been awarded a place on G-Cloud 6 (for SaaS), the Government's latest cloud procurement framework which includes the Digital Marketplace, an online catalogue that gives public sector organisations the option to choose services which best fit their needs.

Enzo Viscito, MD of Inclarity said: "The framework allows us to extend our cloud offerings to public sector organisations, and enables them to procure IT services without a lengthy tendering process, which will importantly allow them to become more efficient.

"As the demand for cloud continues to grow, more organisations than ever before are investing in cloud-based solutions."