Comms Dealer

Voice and data recording specialist Red Box Recorders has partnered with TeleWare to provide a mobile phone recording solution designed to meet the ongoing challenges of regulatory compliance faced by the financial sector.

This technology partnership means that TeleWare's sim-based recording system, which works on any mobile device, is now fully integrated with Red Box's Quantify Recording Suite.

This enables financial institutions to store mobile communications on-premise alongside all other voice and data recordings captured by Quantify, making it quick and easy to retrieve and supply information for compliance purposes.

Recording all telephone calls, including ones spoken on mobile devices, is a key requirement of financial regulators worldwide. In the UK, mobile recording is a requirement of the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) and is enforced by the Dodd-Frank Act in the US. Mobile recording is also expected to form a key part of MiFiD II when introduced across the EU in 2017.

By capturing all calls and communications across an organisation, Red Box helps financial institutions around the world to validate trades and other business activity, accurately reconstruct events for auditors, rapidly resolve disputes and investigate fraud.

Alan Arnfeld, Product Director at Red Box Recorders said: "We are committed to delivering recording solutions to help financial institutions around the world meet and exceed increasing regulatory demands.

"By partnering with TeleWare we have a highly flexible, scalable and device agnostic mobile recording solution to add to our portfolio which helps financial organisations achieve compliance with regulations."

Danny Hensby, Head of Product Management at TeleWare, added: "TeleWare and Red Box share a number of customers in the finance sector so the successful integration of both recordings solutions is great news for them, as well as other financial institutions that have a need to record mobile calls."

Tom Corrigan is to join the Avnet Technology Solutions UK leadership team as Sales Director as of 1st January 2015.

This promotion follows five years at Avnet UK during which time Corrigan has held management positions within the organisation's IBM and NetApp businesses. 

For the last two years he has been business unit leader, open storage and Cisco, responsible for developing and executing growth strategies for suppliers such as EMC, Cisco and VCE.

In his new role Corrigan will report directly to Miriam Murphy, senior vice president, North region, Avnet Technology Solutions, EMEA. She said: "Tom's talent for planning and executing innovative business development strategies will help us accelerate growth and drive opportunities for our customers and suppliers. 

"His experience and enthusiasm will guarantee a smooth transition into the new position with colleagues and business partners."
 
Corrigan added: "Success in the channel depends on the ability to build and organise high performance teams. An integral part of my new responsibilities will be to ensure close teamwork between Avnet and its business partners, including systems integrators and managed service providers. 

"During my time with Avnet I have witnessed a transition from selling technology to the delivery of innovative business solutions and my goal will be to further enable that change while meeting our customers' needs."   

A social media measurement and ranking service deigned to help technology vendors score the online influence of their partners has been rolled out by Prompt Communications.

The service, called Channel Social Influence (CSI), uses Prompt's social media listening capability to help vendors determine the performance of partners across relevant online platforms.

Social media insights are broken down into digestible categories, ranks, tables and charts, giving vendors visibility of the social media status of their partners in the context of specific projects, market trends and product segments, ranking individual partners.

Prompt CEO Hazel Butters said: "There are technology vendors spending substantial marketing budget on channel marketing programmes, but when it comes to understanding the social media influence of their partner base they are flying blind.

"Our CSI analysis gives vendors the opportunity to understand the social influence and reach of partners and harness those partners with the greatest reach and assist those that have room to increase their social media activity." 

Prompt CSI uses algorithm-based analysis alongside opinion and sentiment analysis on business-relevant social media channels including LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook and blogs.

ICT services provider PSU Technology Group (PSU) is set to raise funds for its local animal shelter while offering fans of the X-Factor the chance to win tickets to this year's final.
 
The Cheltenham-based company has organised a raffle with tickets to the live TV talent show final at the SSE Wembley Arena on Saturday, 13th December up for grabs. The raffle will raise money for the Cheltenham Animal Shelter which works to rehouse unwanted pets.
 
Everyone that makes a minimum donation of £5 to the Gloucestershire Animal Welfare Association (GAWA) will be automatically entered into the raffle for the chance to win the two X-Factor final tickets. Entries will close at 12.00 lunchtime on Monday 8th December.
 
PSU will also contribute £200 towards the cost of overnight accommodation for the ticket winners.
 
PSU Technology Group's MD Michael Lounton said: "We're delighted to raise funds for the Cheltenham Animal Shelter and will be making a £1,000 donation to get things started. 

"This is part of our 12 Dogs of Christmas campaign to raise awareness about some of the animals in the shelter waiting to be re-homed. We would like to encourage as many people as possible to foster or adopt a dog."

Virtual1 has ring-fenced the IP and assets of its partner portal with the acquisition of Upshot's Trinity Portal division for an undisclosed sum. Upshot is a developer of telecoms portals including Virtual1's 1Portal and the acquisition, Virtual1's first strategic buy, also provides the company with a dedicated resource of developers to focus on planned enhancements for 1Portal.

Virtual1 CEO Tom O'Hagan said: "Our ambitions have always been to differentiate from our competitors by providing the fastest quote-to-order process and 1Portal is key to achieving that."

As part of the investment, Peter Francis, CEO of Upshot, will act as an advisor to Virtual1.

He said: "The team at Virtual1 were as passionate about the capability and potential of the Trinity assets as I am. Over the years they have contributed to the feature rich capability of Trinity and this is a great move for Virtual1 in securing the IP and assets.

"We've worked closely with Virtual1 to ensure a smooth transition of both assets and resource with our development team being introduced to Virtual1 during the early stages of negotiations."

1Portal serves over 1,500 portal users and the number of placed quotes exceeds 100,000.

Calyx has added back-up and DR capabilities to its Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution.

Steve Clark, CEO, said: "We've seen exceptional growth in demand for our standard IaaS offering because it delivers a solid, stable infrastructure that offers long -term return on investment.

"But data security and protection are also important. That is why we have invested in these new and enhanced services. We now have infrastructure replicated in data centres in both the north and south of the UK and a solution that brings with it a guaranteed availability supported by SLAs."

The solutions form part of Calyx' Hybrid Cloud portfolio which enables customers to bring a variety of infrastructures - physical, virtual, public and private cloud - into a single secure and scalable environment.

The portfolio is backed by Calyx' 24/7/365 service desk which offers in-house 1st, 2nd and 3rd line support and is based at the company's headquarters in Manchester.

Clark added: "Gartner predicts that IaaS will achieve a CAGR of 41.3% through to 2016, so it's clear that this is a growth area."

The success of a Government initiative to create a paperless NHS by 2018 will depend on whether it can win the hearts and minds of staff, according to Andrew Smith, Head of Professional Services at Annodata.

"Going paperless would challenge even the leanest of SMEs, let alone a hospital employing hundreds of staff," he said.

"The shift in working practices required is as much organisational as cultural, so getting staff on board will need to be a priority.

"There may be reservations surrounding a paperless environment so it's important to clearly set out the environmental imperatives and the efficiency benefits it will bring to staff.

"Having seen first-hand the efficiencies that can be achieved through centralised print and document management, we know that there are vast swathes of the NHS that are ripe for modernisation."

Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has indicated that £1.5bn of additional funding will be allocated to the NHS in 2015/16 and it will be contingent on hospitals to be 'efficient and sustainable' and to deliver 'a commitment to a paperless NHS by 2018'.

Smith added: "This initiative has our full support and with the correct partners and advisors, we believe it's achievable. But there's no denying that the challenge ahead is a formidable one."

IT solutions provider Imerja, in partnership with Insight (UK), has been selected by Alder Hey Children's NHS Foundation Trust to provide IT infrastructure for the new build hospital and IT support in a five-year contract win worth upwards of £2.5 million.

Imerja will install secure IT infrastructure across the campus which will cover the hospital's LAN, wireless LAN, telephony and unified communications solutions.

The company will also provide a fully managed service across the infrastructure for a 5 year term liaising with the hospital's internal IT teams to provide performance monitoring, fault diagnosis and rectification as well as problem and change management for the Trust's new hospital and peripheral sites.

Alder Hey provides care for over 200,000 children every year. The project, 'Alder Hey in the park', will be a specialist children's hospital built inside the Trust's park grounds and aims to create a relaxing environment for patients while they receive care.

Cathy Fox, Associate Director of Informatics at Alder Hey, said: "These core services will underpin day-to-day activities across the Trust and will include a focus on improving the experience for our patients and their families. This will include dedicated wi-fi which will be available free of charge across the Trust."

This latest win builds on an existing relationship with Alder Hey. The firm currently provides a range of hosted services from its data centre in Lancashire as well as the Video-as-a-Service (VaaS) used in Alder Hey's neurosciences department.

Ian Jackson, MD and co-founder of Imerja, added: "We know the healthcare sector and are acutely aware of the pressures, the budget constraints and how critical the patient experience is, and this has been reflected within our solution. The work done at Alder Hey Children's Hospital can be life changing so it's crucial that we ensure everything works smoothly."

Genius Networks has partnered with Union Street to host its reseller portal.

The portal already integrates with Union Street's aBILLity billing platform to provide resellers with visibility of their bills, the facility to download CDRs and run detailed reports.

James Arnold Roberts, Genius Networks director said: "Our portal is integral to the Genius goal of simplifying the pre-sales and post-sales process for the reseller. Union Street's platform has fulfilled the billing requirements and it makes sense to align our provisioning portal solution with its platform."

Union Street MD Tony Cook added: "Genius has developed an interesting reseller service with its portal. As a supplier of billing software and associated services, Union Street possesses great insight into Genius's market proposition which makes us uniquely placed to deliver this service and to provide consultancy and further development of the portal should it be required in the future."

The portal can be provided as a white label service.

Sennheiser's Contact Centre & Office Headsets (CC&O) Division has gone live with a new website designed to provide more intuitive navigation, a consistent look and feel and easy access to all content across Sennheiser's range.

Five key navigation areas have been created to take customers directly to their destination: Products, UC, How to Choose, Dealers and Partners, and Try our Headset.

Marketing experts at Sennheiser will monitor how users interact with the site which also invites feedback from all customers.