Comms Dealer

Westcon Group's answer to the lack of marketing knowhow in many reseller businesses is to round up a posse of experts in the field and create a network of expertise that partners can call on at preferential rates.

The specialist help that can be accessed through the new Marketing Services Programme includes social media training, PR, content delivery and management, demand generation, design, video and animation and web analytics.

"The objective of the programme is to complement resellers' existing marketing activity or plug the marketing skills gap for resellers that don't have any marketing resource," said John Richardson, UK Marketing Director, Westcon Group.
 
Before plunging into the scheme Westcon surveyed its resellers to gauge their levels of interest in such an initiative.

Well over 50% did not have the cash resources to pursue viable marketing campaigns, while 32% lacked in-house marketing skills.

A notable 60% would use external marketing specialists but they were in the dark about which companies would work best for them.
 
"Our survey demonstrated that 57% of partners are too busy with their day jobs to keep up to speed with the latest marketing specialisations," added Richardson. 

"The Marketing Services Programme is a flexible initiative, enabling resellers to select different marketing disciplines from the marketing toolbox to create an integrated marketing strategy, all from a single point of procurement."

According to Westcon's survey, 82% of partners who conduct marketing do so on a reactive and ad-hoc basis, while 61% don't have the resource in place to analyse and monitor the results of campaigns.

"The Marketing Services programme is a shift in channel marketing, moving away from short-term tactical marketing activities and campaigns to long-term, targeted, integrated activities such as nurture-based demand generation campaigns that increase resellers' incremental margin," added Richardson. 

He also noted that the programme complements vendor template marketing campaigns and provides resellers with the freedom to increase brand awareness and differentiate.

The distributor has also appointed a Marketing Executive to help manage the programme and work with resellers to develop campaigns and content.
 
An early adopter of the scheme is Sheridan Bratt, Marketing Manager for Britannic Technologies, who said: "Having access to new ideas and an integrated basket of resources available through one channel will help Britannic Technologies remain at the forefront of marketing to our mid-market base."
 

VoIP provider Voicelinx has embarked on a channel recruitment campaign in a bid extend the market reach of its cloud-based services.

The company aims to onboard IT resellers and white label partners for its hosted comms platform and is urging them to take advantage of the Government funded Connection Vouchers scheme.

Stephen Shenkin, Voicelinx MD, stated: "We are looking for IT companies wanting to add to their existing portfolio of solutions under a white label agreement. 

"Not only will they be able to extend their offering to market, and therefore increase customer traction, they will also be able to take advantage of increased margins and additional monthly revenue streams.
 
"Now is the time for those traditional IT companies to extend their market proposition, ensuring greater customer satisfaction and increase margin and, as a result, income."
 
The Voicelinx solution incorporates hosted PBX, on-site PBX, Microsoft Lync, SIP and IAX trunks, plus call centre capabilities.

Leigh-based Key Computer Applications has added NCONNECT to its telecom portfolio in a milestone deal that signals the cloud telephony provider's 50th reseller to join its partner programme.

"Business has been booming for NCONNECT over the last 12 months, and we feel proud, excited and vindicated in achieving this milestone,\" said Rami Houbby, MD, NCONNECT. 

"We embrace the comms industry, but in fact 40-50% of our partners are traditional IT resellers, many of whom have struggled in the past to get on board with a telephony partner because of prohibitive accreditation and skills barriers.\"

Key Computer Applications MD Jonathan Heaton added: "Our customers are not only interested in the benefits of cloud because their consumption habits for enterprise technology are also increasingly subscription-based with a requirement for features, scale and flexibility. 

"We’re keen to get the technology in front of existing and new customers as soon as possible.\"

High skill levels in database design and management have helped Union Street Technologies to secure Gold Partner status for Data Platform Competency in Microsoft's Partner Network.

Key staff demonstrated their proficiency in using Microsoft products such as SQL and showed how these technologies are leveraged by Union Street in its aBILLity billing software.

Microsoft also based its decision on the results of a customer satisfaction survey, carried out by independent research company The TNS Group, in which Union Street scored top marks.

Union Street MD Tony Cook said: "Our expertise is crucial to developing the aBILLity billing platform which heavily utilises Microsoft SQL.

"Our skills in this area have enabled us to harness the power of SQL to deliver additional resiliency and enhanced cloud-based solutions.

"This knowledge is also something we share with our clients through certain training courses we offer at Union Street."

NEC's SV9100 comms platform is proving popular among Nimans resellers with hot demand pushing shipments 'well above target', according to the distributor.

The SV9100 is the latest addition to NEC's family of comms offerings and has evolved from the SV8100 model.

The UC enabled system can accommodate up to 1,000 users and has been designed to scale up from SMB to enterprise level businesses.

Head of Systems Sales at Nimans John McKindland said: "The SV9100 represents a significant step forward for our NEC resellers who have embraced the new system in great numbers."

To help drive more sales NEC is holding a series of training dates at its Ruddington HQ during the first three months of the New Year, including SV9100 basic training on February 9th and MyCalls Call Recording training on March 10th.

Azzurri has added a new dimension to its mobile proposition with the addition of EE's products and services and the hand-over of existing O2 small business customers back to O2.

Azzurri's enterprise O2 clients will continue to be managed by the company directly but under a new reseller agreement Azzurri will resell EE's products and services to enterprises under the Azzurri brand, while small business propositions will be sold under the EE brand.

"The motivation behind this partnership was simple, we wanted to ensure we had independence in our supply chain," said Chris Jagusz, CEO of Azzurri Communications.

"By adding EE's services to our portfolio we are now able to provide our enterprise and small business customers with independent and individual advice on the best fit mobility package for them.

"O2 has been our partner for many years and we continue to have a strong and positive working relationship and shared customers."

Mike Tomlinson, Director at EE, added: "We are committed to working with the indirect B2B channel and this agreement demonstrates our ambition in the business market."

For the third year running south coast-based comms provider 4Com has received national recognition with a leading business award.

4com has been named as one of the Sunday Times 100 Best Small Companies to Work for 2015 having achieved three star award accreditation from Best Companies survey.

The accolade is a direct result of staff surveys and feedback conducted by Best Companies directly with 4Com employees.

These confidential survey findings are then attributed to the awarding of a one, two or three star Best Companies accreditation and a place in the Sunday Times Top 100 list.

Final positions for the Sunday Times top 100 small companies will be revealed at an awards ceremony at Battersea Evolution in London on the evening of Wednesday 25th February 2015.

The Sunday Times will then produce and print a feature supplement, distributed nationally with the printed edition of the newspaper on Sunday 8th March 2015.

4Com Chairman and MD Daron Hutt (pictured) told Comms Dealer "I am once again so proud and pleased for 4Com to be recognised with this award and accreditation. This award is so important to me and my fellow directors, as the award is awarded on employee engagement results. With over 98% of staff surveyed, the results are so pleasing, knowing that we have the best people, working so hard to achieve exceptional levels of customer service each and every day." 

Telstra has launched new Global Financial Trading Solutions to facilitate higher performance electronic trading around the world.

The solutions are said to combine reliable low latency trading networks with expert managed services including server infrastructure in financial hubs, managed cloud and global unified communications. 

Matthew Lempriere, Head of Financial Services Market Segment, Global Enterprise & Services, claims the new service provides UK businesses with a scalable, flexible and on demand ICT solution, helping them react to market events faster than ever.

"Backed by faster response times and higher scalability, Telstra's Global Financial Trading Solutions facilitate increased efficiencies, helping customers mitigate risk and address compliance concerns, while focusing on what's most important to them - driving revenue and sustainable business growth," he said.

NEC has scooped a top award for innovation in Unified Communications.

Based on its recent analysis of the UC infrastructure market, Frost & Sullivan has awarded the manufacturer with the 2014 Global Award for Technology Innovation Leadership.

NEC secured the award for leveraging software defined networking technology and integrating it across its Univerge UC and infrastructure product lines to deliver an optimised Software Defined Communications experience for customers.

"The level of integration NEC enables throughout its network, server, storage and enterprise communications product lines highlights the power of the technologies at play, as well as the application of those technologies to benefit customers," said Frost & Sullivan Industry Analyst Michael Brandenburg.

Gartner has slashed its 2015 global IT spending forecast from 3.9% to 2.4% ($3.8tr) blaming its downward revision on the rising US dollar and a modest reduction in growth expectations for devices, IT services and telecom services.

"The change in forecast is less dramatic than it might at first seem," said John-David Lovelock, research vice president. "The rising US dollar is chiefly responsible for the change - in constant currency terms the downward revision is only 0.1 percent.

"Stripping out the impact of exchange rate movements, the corresponding constant-currency growth figure is 3.7 percent, which compares with 3.8 percent in the previous quarter's forecast."

The US dollar spending growth rate on devices (including PCs, ultramobiles, mobile phones, tablets and printers) for 2015 was decreased by 1.3 percentage points to 5.1 percent. The smartphone market is becoming polarized between the high- and low-end market price points. On one hand, growth in premium phones with an average selling price of $478 in 2014 was dominated by iOS. At the other end of the spectrum, growth in Android and other open OS phones is in the basic phone segment, where in 2014 the average phone cost less than $100. As a result, the market opportunity is becoming increasingly limited for midrange smartphones.

Data centre systems spending is projected to reach $143 billion in 2015, a 1.8 percent increase from 2014. Growth for the enterprise communications applications and enterprise network equipment segments of the market have been increased from the previous quarter's forecast, while growth for the servers and external controller-based storage segments has been lowered. These growth fluctuations are due to extensions in replacement life cycles and a higher than previously anticipated switch to cloud-based services.

In the enterprise software market, spending is on pace to total $335 billion, a 5.5 percent increase from 2014. More price erosion and vendor consolidation is expected in 2015 because of fierce competition between cloud and on-premises software providers. In particular, in the customer relationship management (CRM) market, a key cloud battleground, seat prices for segments such as sales force automation (SFA) are expected to decline by 25 percent through 2018.

This will be caused by incumbent on-premises vendors discounting their cloud offerings heavily to try and maintain their customer base. There will also be increased price competition from cloud offerings in other areas (such as database management system (DBMS) and application infrastructure and middleware, albeit at a somewhat slower and weaker pace than for CRM.

The outlook for IT services in 2015 has been reduced to 2.5 percent growth, down from the 4.1 percent growth forecast in the previous quarter. Globally, reductions to software support services contributed disproportionately to a lower outlook through 2018, because of lower growth rates expected for enterprise software. Regionally, short-term growth rates were lowered slightly in Russia and Brazil, due to declining economic conditions and political uncertainty in both countries.

Telecom services spending is projected to grow 0.7 percent in 2015, with spending reaching $1,638tr. A multitude of factors have affected each national market - some positive, others negative - with the primary driver for growth being a reduction in expectations for mobile voice revenue across several markets in Western and Eastern Europe (such as Austria and Italy) as a consequence of the declining growth of new devices sold in the region over the forecast period.