Comms Dealer

Channel-only SIP and hosted carrier tIPicall has introduced phase one of its new WorldSIP product.

Initially the offering will cover 13 countries in Europe and the USA. Second and third staged rollouts throughout 2015 will cover the Far East, Australia, Africa and South America.

End customers will have the ability to break calls out locally in each country utilising local calling routes such as emergency services and non-geographic numbers while still using tIPicall's cost-effective international routing.

Local numbers with porting capabilities are also available at a reduced cost. Resellers will have the ability to offer a single bill solution with one global rate card, reducing complexity whileoffering a one-stop-shop approach for multi-national end users.

Guy Miller Managing Director at tIPicall, said: "Resellers no longer have to try and deal with large cumbersome carriers which can take many months, even years, to design and implement solutions.

"Our offering can be deployed in weeks and allows partners to attack markets that were previously unreachable."

Senior management at telecoms product recycling specialist DTC International have completed a management buyout following the company's founder and chairman Tony Jones's decision to retire.

James Norden has taken over as CEO after many years of service with the company in a variety of roles.

The new board of directors aim to expand DTC's global reach, its portfolio of services and the management team, while continuing to deliver a value proposition built around telecom lifecycle management.

Norden said: "We will reduce operating costs, maximise investment recovery, ensure brand protection and support environmental sustainability initiatives for a significant global customer base."

He also noted that DTC's core services are focused on recovering, re-engineering, re-selling and recycling a broad range of telecommunications equipment, ranging from customer premises equipment, fixed line/wireless operator networks and private dedicated networks to data centres and copper cable infrastructure.

Talk Straight is certain to blip larger on reseller radar screens following the roll out of a £200 incentive scheme for new and existing channel partners on the sale of leased lines, EoFTTC or EFM.

Established in 2007 Talk Straight belongs to a select group of Fortinet Managed Security Service Providers enabling it to offer additional benefits such as a cloud-based multi-threat protection service.

Talk Straight's incoming Partner Manager Rod Lawrence (pictured) has 15 years channel experience under his belt and he is keen to emphasise the company's service delivery and provisioning levels as stand-out attributes. "We are determined to set ourselves apart from other companies," he said.

Service Delivery Manager Sara Arrowsmith also prioritises the implementation of services to deadlines and key to success is Talk Straight's collaborative relationships with its suppliers.

"It's not always straight forward to juggle the companies we rely on to meet delivery deadlines," she stated. "But our close relationships with supplier partners and our proactive service delivery team ensure that service delivery is fully optimised."

This formula for achieving success has been recognised by ISPA which crowned Talk Straight with its Best Business Use of Cloud 2014 accolade.

The £200 incentive scheme runs until the end of January and deals must be based on a minimum 36 month contract. Incentives are payable on installation of lines and there is no limit to how many rewards Talk Straight will offer per company or person.

SBL is to offer Swisscom hosted telephony solutions following a link-up with the European telco.

In an early market success SBL is delivering a cloud-based telephony solution into one of the leading global Hotel Group's UK headquarters, with plans to expand this solution to over 100 of the company's UK hotels over the next few years.

The alliance with the Swisscom Hospitality Services division is the first to be made by SBL following a change management programme and significant new investment.

"Mobile phones and smart devices have disrupted the old model for hotel phone systems," said Adam Hardman, Sales Director at SBL.

"Telephony systems are quickly becoming a drain on hotel resources, rather than a means for adding value to a hospitality service. New hosted and cloud-based models, especially ones where costs are directly related to occupancy, can tip the balance back in the hotel's favour by reducing expenditure.

"You can't remove phones from hotel rooms completely because not only are they an important safety feature, but they are still a primary means for guests to contact guest services. What you can do is make the operational cost relative to your usage, and build a solution to support new applications that can offer cost-saving opportunities or new revenue streams."

Chris Brassington, CEO of SBL, added: "Across different markets and geographies the shift from capex to opex models is offering competitive advantages to many businesses.

"It's not just hotels where pay-per-use models work - schools and universities can see dramatic savings during the holidays and retailers can scale their usage up or down in response to fluctuations in the market or seasonal demand."

Distributor ASM Technologies has passed over £15 million worth of IT spend from the IT channel directly to SMEs since the launch of its SME Access Service just over one year ago, representing over 51% of ASM's sales in the year.

The SME Access Service, which ASM launched in October 2013, was designed to help safeguard margins in the IT channel in light of increasing government requirements to award significant proportions of public sector IT contracts to SMEs.

The service provided SIs and VARs with access to one of the UK's most extensive portfolios of technology suppliers on ASM's distribution network, allowing them to meet the government requirements while retaining margin.

At the same time as helping the channel to continue to participate in large public sector tenders, the SME Access Service introduced sizeable new revenue opportunities for niche SME suppliers.

Often lacking the resources, contacts and proven track records of delivering large-scale projects that the large SIs and VARs benefit from, many niche SMEs are locked out of participating in large public sector contracts.

By joining ASM's agile distribution network of 1,200+ SME vendors and other suppliers, many niche SMEs have been able to participate in many of the major public sector IT projects in 2014 tendered by the large public sector SIs and VARs.

Iain Tomkinson, sales director at ASM Technologies, said: "We discovered last year that many resellers were finding it difficult to meet the government's new requirements without seeing significant drops in their profitability.

"The sheer cost of on-boarding so many SMEs onto their supply chain just to remain compliant was proving too much to bear, so they were looking for a solution.

"By taking advantage of our existing supplier relationships and agile channel infrastructure, the SME Access Service has proven to be the solution the channel needs.

"With over 1,200 SMEs available through just one supplier relationship, many resellers have been able to continue to bid successfully for government contracts, and with over £15 million of sales to SMEs, we have been able to help many innovative companies to grow during this time as well."

Research released by Ovum argues that an increase in the influx of customer communication, from phone calls to text messages, emails and tweets, have necessitated a shift towards integrated communications and customer management.

Organisations will have to embrace this if they want to drive employee productivity and improve customer experience, said the firm.

The white paper, entitled 'Gaining Competitive Advantage with Intelligent Communications', examines how organisations can exploit intelligent communications to drive productivity, improve customer experience, ensure compliance and deliver cost savings.

Steve Haworth, CEO of TeleWare, which commissioned the research, commented: "Organisations must consider using intelligent communications to maintain and strengthen their competitive positioning.

"Not only that, it can enable them to realise the strategic benefits that would otherwise require significantly greater investment or large scale communications infrastructure transformation."

The report discussed the benefits of moving to an integrated solution in a modern workplace, including improved employee engagement, businesses agility, process efficiency and improved customer satisfaction.

"It also discusses the leading IT trends for 2014-15, which are focused on data capture, risk management, security, compliance and the continued popularity of bring your own device (BYOD).

"IT departments are under increasing pressure to combine existing resources and infrastructure with emerging technologies, in a seamless, cost-effective and time-effective manner," added Haworth.

"With the increasing popularity of BYOD and smartphones emerging as a key medium for customer service communications, enterprises need to provide appropriate tools to deliver a compelling and well-integrated customer experience via mobile devices to remain competitive."

Saurabh Sharma, Senior Analyst at Ovum, added: "The real value from intelligent communications lies in its ability to bridge the gaps between traditional services, mobile communications, and emerging collaboration applications. This in turn can then support business growth through analysing the captured data.

"Intelligent communications allows enterprises to extract maximum value from their investments in communications infrastructure and collaboration platforms."

4net Technologies have been awarded Avaya Platinum Partner status - the vendor's highest level of partner accreditation in its new Connect programme.

4net Technologies has also retained Partner in Customer Excellence status, based on a higher number of Customer Satisfaction responses and at a significantly higher score of at least 88%.

Richard Pennington, 4net's Managing Director, said: "Over the past 18 months we have won a number of awards in recognition of our dedication to service and project delivery.

"Our customer satisfaction scores, a 99.96% customer retention rate and a reputation that has been built through providing implementation and support services to other Avaya partners added weight to Avaya's decision.

"But above all the award is a testament to all the work and effort that everyone in the company has put into building our service reputation and technical ability, which has enable us to be considered as one of the leading players in our industry."

Futuristic tools and technologies like augmented reality, virtual holography and the Internet of Everything will shape the office of the future, and the interplay of social and cloud systems with these technologies will drive greater collaboration at enterprises, according to Frost & Sullivan.

"The changing communication patterns of users and the need to collaborate anytime and anywhere has led to the evolution of next generation technologies," said Frost & Sullivan Information & Communication Technologies Senior Research Analyst Vaishno Devi Srinivasan.

"Mega trends such as urbanisation, smart cities, the growing dominance of Gen Y, and increasing network convergence demand the infusion of next-gen technologies into the UC framework."

Since the required back-end infrastructure that will enable this transition to a smart workplace is expected to be complex, the traditional UC ecosystem must embrace next generation technology vendors. Market participants will have to partner with or acquire firms that are specialists in emerging technologies to accelerate the delivery of integrated services.

"The adoption of augmented reality, Internet of Things, and social networks has caught on in the retail, manufacturing, defence, education, healthcare and automotive sectors, offering a multitude of opportunities for integration with UC," observed Srinivasan. "The vendor ecosystem must replicate this success story across enterprises, developing strong application specific use cases to build a robust value proposition for a digital workplace."

As people, processes and things get connected, stringent protocols need to be put in place for object recognition, tracking and rendering mechanisms, noted Srinivasan. Parameters to both guard and manage devices must be fully context aware for a relevant connected environment, said the analyst.

The market for UC solutions and services is undergoing a transformation with large enterprises and SMEs turning to new ways of purchasing, deploying and managing business communications technology, according to Ovum, and cloud-based communications services are among the root causes of this transformation, believes the analyst firm which has identified four trends in the UC market that it says will have the biggest impact on businesses in 2015.

The market for UC solutions is, and will remain, diverse, despite consolidation: There is consolidation around a few top vendors that enterprises will nearly always consider when expanding or replacing their existing business communications solutions. At the same time, the market is large and diverse, and there will be plenty of opportunities for second- and third-tier players not only to exist but to thrive.

Hosted UC services are becoming mainstream, particularly among large enterprises: Enterprises are no longer simply curious about cloud-based UC services, but are ready to invest in them. In large enterprises, hosted UC services often sit alongside premise-based solutions, either for a set transitional period or for the long term. This will create more market opportunity for hosted communications services, but will potentially complicate deployment and management.

Video conferencing is becoming ubiquitous: A wide range of video-capable UC clients, web-conferencing platforms, and consumer applications are now used in the workplace. End users are more familiar with videoconferencing software than ever before, and are demanding access to it. However, the sheer number of systems, applications, and services that facilitate corporate videoconferencing is making interoperability a significant challenge.

Hosted video conferencing is undergoing a transformation as providers introduce new services and revamp existing ones: Operators are revamping the hosted services that they have long sold to enterprises, while also introducing a new set of video services through partnerships, acquisitions, and internal development. Meanwhile, new providers are trying to establish themselves through differentiated services and videoconferencing offerings that are more tightly integrated with other types of communications solutions in use within the enterprise.

Brian Riggs, principal analyst of enterprise services at Ovum, said: "Enterprises considering UC solutions in 2015 will encounter a market undergoing considerable change. Video will become ubiquitous as consumerisation, WebRTC, and other factors make videoconferencing available from any application and any device. Meanwhile UC services will become better enabled to support complex hybrid cloud deployment models."

This winter is forecast to be one of the coldest in decades yet one in eight UK businesses do not have a disaster recovery plan in place in the event of adverse weather, according to research by Daisy Group.

Despite the growth of mobile business technology like cloud computing, adverse weather conditions prevent an estimated three million workers from completing their normal work responsibilities, says the firm.

The study found that a third (31%) of UK businesses were affected by transport problems, power cuts or broadband and phone line failures caused by inclement weather over the last two years. Of those, 40 per cent did not have a business continuity plan in place, leaving their staff unable to work from home or from another location.

Tim Meredith, Director of UC and Mobility at Daisy, said: "Too many businesses think that they are impervious to floods or adverse weather conditions, but as our research found it affects nearly a third of companies operating in the UK.

"Staff safety is understandably a business' number one concern, as workers cannot be expected to put themselves at risk in hazardous travelling or working conditions, so having a back-up plan makes good business sense.

"Although not every organisation is tech-savvy, most IT departments' servers today are virtualised, meaning disaster recovery plans are quite easy and cost-effective to create. The cloud, for example, can be used to enable staff to work from almost any location with an internet connection."

To assist businesses with continuity planning, Daisy is hosting a Twitter Q&A on the subject on 4th December.

Businesses can post questions using the hashtag #bizcontinuity and have them answered by a panel of tech experts, including Daisy's Director of Cloud and Hosting, and Director of Unified Communications & Mobility.