Comms Dealer

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.

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."