Comms Dealer

Daisy Group has acquired Damovo UK, a provider of UC solutions to the public and private sector serving more than 250 organisations, including a number of high profile customers in aviation, transportation and government. As a strategic technology partner of Cisco, Mitel and Microsoft, its portfolio includes unified communications and collaboration, enterprise networks, contact centres, as well as cloud services and global managed services.

Daisy Group founder and Executive Chairman Matthew Riley (pictured) said: "This is the first acquisition we have undertaken since Daisy's privatisation and enhances our capability in the enterprise space. With strong vendor relationships and an expert team in place, the business is well positioned for growth under our ownership.

"The converging world of traditional telecoms and IT continues to present exciting opportunities and with a rapidly expanding cloud and managed services division the acquisition of this highly scalable UK business is a clear strategic fit for the Group."

RELATED NEWS: Oakley Capital Private Equity acquires Damovo Europe - Matt Riley appointed Executive Chairman

Avaya has launched new cloud services following a collaboration with VMware.

The enterprise-class hybrid cloud services for customer and team engagement leverage the VMware vCloud Air platform to deliver a flexible approach to implementing solutions that seamlessly bridge private and public clouds, said the vendor.

Avaya Hybrid Engagement as a Service includes Avaya Engagement Solutions and the required VMware vCloud Air resources to host the solution in a usage-based model.

"This new set of cloud services from Avaya provides additional flexibility and cost efficiency to enterprise customers who want to take advantage of a public cloud model for our customer and team engagement solutions," said Joe Manuele, vice president, SI/SP, Alliances and Cloud, Avaya.

"Avaya and VMware provide a services solution that extends strategic investments in private cloud unified communications and contact centre applications with the flexibility and reliability of a public cloud platform."

Ajay Patel, VP Application Services, vCloud Air, VMware, said. "VMware vCloud Air becomes a seamless extension of an enterprise customer's private cloud, allowing critical applications to be moved between cloud environments, and delivering on the operational, technical and licensing requirements of enterprise customers."

UK satellite and triple-play provider Sky intends to launch an MVNO on O2's network in 2016 in a deal that includes LTE.

Martin Scott, Head of Analysys Mason's Consumer Services research practice, said: "This move will leave Vodafone and TalkTalk with more apparent under development in their portfolio.

"With a potential tie-up between EE and BT in the works, this move further evolves the UK telecoms market into one of a limited number of converged 'big hitters'.

"Sky could become a market disruptor, especially if BT's appetite for change is dulled by the acquisition of EE.

"BT has a desire for disruption. It has followed the launch of BT Sport with an 'inside-out' business model for mobile operations, with the fixed network playing a leading role in supporting and delivering mobile services.

"By acquiring EE, BT would become the largest fixed operator and one of the largest mobile operators, with little incentive to disrupt the quad-play market (it would have the most to lose).

"Sky has previously proved its ability and willingness to disrupt the telecoms market, notably its low-price high-speed broadband services - quad-play, and converged fixed-mobile services, could be Sky's next logical move."

IDC estimates that global PC shipments fell 2.4% yr/yr in Q4 to 80.8 million - a bigger decline than Q3 and Q2's 1.7%, but better than its expectations for a 4.8% drop. Gartner is more positive, estimating shipments rose 1% to 83.7 million.

Both analysts say that emerging markets, where tablet cannibalisation remains a major issue, remain in worse shape than developed markets. IDC also says that commercial PC demand (boosted earlier this year by the ending of Windows XP support) has slowed, and that "market progress has been fueled by low-priced systems, including growth of Chromebooks and [Microsoft's] promotion of Windows 8 + Bing.

The US consumer market is expected to return to positive growth in 2015, aided by slowing tablet demand and the Windows 10 launch. IDC believes all top-5 vendors gained share from rivals with less size. A quarter after cracking the top 5 for the first time with a 6.3% share, Apple's unit share is believed to have risen to 7.1% (+130 bps yr/yr) on the back of 4.9 million shipments (+18.9%). Given higher ASPs, revenue share might be around 15%.

Market leader Lenovo's share rose 140 bps to 19.9%; #2 HP's rose 300 bps to 19.7%; #3 Dell's rose 140 bps to 13.5%; #4 Acer's rose 40 bps to 7.7%. Non-top 5 firms saw their share drop 740 bps to 32.2%, with their shipments declining 20.7%. We await Intel's results later this week, with interest.

In a channel revamp Citrix has introduced Citrix Solution Advisors (CSA) as part of a new scheme that encourages partners to focus on their particular specialisations.

Partners will be offered an opportunity to access Citrix technical expertise in the areas of virtualisation, mobility management and networking. Also, Citrix Specialisations will reward partners for their technical competency, sales capability and service delivery.

Under the scheme, the company will offer almost 9,000 Citrix Solution Advisors along with new benefits, adjusted revenue requirements and simplified certifications.

Both parts of the programme, CSA Programme and Specialisations, have been launched while the two other 'pillars' are expected to be rolled out later in the year.

The additional pillars refer to field and partner collaboration focused on engagement between Citrix and partners' teams; and partner enablement across the customer lifecycle with new tools, resources and programmes.

Arrow has added Oracle Cloud services to its portfolio and is set to roll out the service to the US and extend to Europe.

Sean Kerins, President of Arrow's Global Enterprise Computing Solutions Business, said: "This agreement represents a significant addition for solution providers seeking to move up the stack."

Through the global agreement, Arrow will offer Oracle's applications, cloud programmes and enablement services through the ArrowSphere cloud services platform.

"There are many corners of the market and globe Oracle simply cannot reach," said Bruce Chumley, Group VP, Worldwide Alliances and Channels, Oracle.

"Our success relies on our partners' ability to sell and implement Oracle Cloud services in the broad market. For this reason, we continue to invest more resources in helping partners maximize their cloud-based opportunities, in turn, extending the opportunities for our customers."

NCONNECT has expanded its range of terminals to include Yealink's T4 Series.

The certified Yealink VoIP-telephones include T41P, T42G, T46G and T48G terminals, the EXP40 Expansion Module and the EHS36 Adapter.

Bolton-based IT solutions firm Imerja has again been selected by Essex County Council to secure and maintain its end user devices with a contract worth £160K.

The deal will see Imerja conducting a health check of the IT systems and upgrading the endpoint security on 9,000 devices to the latest version of CheckPoint software.

The two-year deal builds on an existing relationship between the two organisations and is a renewal of Imerja's previous contract to offer an ongoing proactive and reactive support service.

Ian Jackson, MD and co-founder of Imerja, said: "Working in partnership we have developed a strong relationship with Essex County Council and understand the complexities of its IT system and the importance of securing the end user devices."

David Wilde, CIO at Essex County Council, added: "The documents we store are extremely confidential so IT security is paramount to us."

Hosted Voice Exchange (HVX), Daisy Wholesale's BroadSoft-based cloud telephony solution, was 'quickly swept onto the emerging rip curl' of cloud market adoption following its launch in January 2014, according to Product Director for Cloud Graham Harris.

He said: "As with any new technology, it takes time for resellers to gain confidence in the solution, however it is once that confidence has been established that you really start to see results. During the second part of last year, we witnessed a growth rate of 20% month-on-month."

The HVX service has developed over the year and now offers a monthly priced call statistics package that can deliver real-time business information.

"This statistics package, alongside the mobility solutions, call recording capabilities and CTI integration, means that there is no longer a gap when compared to the premise-based PBX," added Harris.

"In fact, when combined with the resilience and inherent disaster recovery facilities that HVX has to offer, it is clear to see that hosted voice can present far more to the modern business than the traditional PBX."

According to Harris this market moved from early adopter to early majority, a surge that he says is set to continue.

"Whilst there is no specific reason for this step change, undoubtedly the increased availability of competitively priced and robust data connectivity, including FTTC, has had a massive impact," he added.

"Customers have been able to benefit from reduced costs but still experience the excellent call quality of a hosted voice system.

"Another development that we have seen in the last 12 months is the increasing desire from end customers to minimise asset ownership and ensure the predictability of spend.

"Businesses have become increasingly keen to move away from spiky capital expenditure and are turning to subscription-based models for more and more services. 2014 proved to be a seminal year in cloud telephony as a significant tipping point was realised."

ScanSource Communications has expanded its relationship with Spectralink to include Germany, Austria, Switzerland and UK&I.

Through this expanded relationship, resellers in Europe will have access to Spectralink's mobile communication solutions for a range of verticals including healthcare, retail, warehousing and manufacturing.

Spectralink DECT and Wi-Fi wireless devices are qualified for deployment in combination with some of the leading unified communications and collaboration solutions.