Comms Dealer

A new report from West states that over 88% of organisations expect digital customer interactions to overtake voice by 2020 or sooner, and 92% say customer experience can be linked to revenue, but just 29% are confident they can deliver a seamless customer experience across multiple channels.

The report also reveals that the biggest obstacle to designing and delivering an exceptional customer experience revolves around flexibility, the ability to integrate and the costs linked to creating the required architecture.

Over half (57%) of companies say that ensuring technology keeps pace with changing customer behaviours is a top priority, yet organisations across the board have been slow to adopt consumers' favoured communication methods.

While 49% say they offer email as a customer communication channel, only 39% use webchat and just 21% offer web self-service, which is rapidly becoming a top preference for consumers.

Just 47% of contact centre decision makers strongly agree that 'my contact centre meets my needs as a customer', highlighting the gap between the ideal customer experience and the one many organisations are actually able to deliver.

Even though a majority (92%) agree that customer experience can be linked to revenue, just 35% of organisations are using customer experience as a performance indicator and only 25% are currently measuring customer effort, confirming that customer service metrics have failed to keep pace with the changing priorities of organisations.

Enda Kenneally, VP Sales & Business Development UKI at West Corporation, said: "With digital interactions set to overtake voice within just a few short years, organisations are going to need to make fundamental changes to people, processes and technology.

"Yet our study shows that while customer experience professionals understand the challenges ahead, they are preparing for the future against a backdrop of outdated technology and organisational structures, as well as dated processes and management practices.

"The pace of technological change and consumers' willingness to embrace new communication methods means that your customer service operation needs the ability to add new channels without large capital investment and have the ability to re-configure your contact centre within hours or even minutes if necessary.

"It may sound obvious, but it's important to offer customers a range of communication channels, including self-service, or risk losing customers and revenue to more agile competitors."

Our thoughts and prayers go to the victims and anyone caught up in the horrific Manchester Arena attack.
This is a devastating day for your city and our country, but we know you will go about your business as normal and we know there are people in our industry doing everything they can to help people find missing relatives. Stay strong Manchester, everyone is behind you.

Node4 has been awarded a place on G-Cloud 9, the UK Government's cloud services procurement framework.

"A number of public sector organisations are increasing their use of cloud services due to its flexibility and cost savings," said Paula Johnston, Head of Public Sector at Node4.

"G-Cloud 9 makes it easier for organisations to check which types of suppliers meet the Crown Commercial Service's (CCS) approval criteria and readily engage with them.

"Being a G-Cloud9 supplier means that public sector services have better access to Node4's solutions to run mission-critical systems and services."

According to G-Cloud figures, updated on 10 January 2017, approximately £1,696,137,364 of G-Cloud sales (ex. VAT) have been reported since the initiative launched in 2012.

Just over half (56%) of total sales by value and 64% by volume, from all reported G-Cloud sales to date, have been awarded to SMEs. 77% of total sales by value were through Central Government; 23% through the wider public sector.

The CCS, which oversees the G-Cloud framework and Digital Marketplace, acts on behalf of the Crown to drive savings for the taxpayer and improve the quality of commercial and procurement activity.

CityFibre has appointed George Wareing (pictured) as Sales Director with a remit to lead the sales and business development team and drive growth across the carrier, wholesale channel, mobile and public sectors.

His 18 years experience in the cable and mobile sectors includes a 15 year stint at Virgin Media Business where he built a commercial team and transformed the mobile backhaul market through a £100 million national backhaul deal with MBNL.

He left Virgin Media Business to become UK Sales Director for Telecity Group in 2014 (now Equinix) where he led many record contract wins.

Wareing said: "As an alternative, full-fibre communications infrastructure provider we have the ability to transform digital infrastructure, alter the status quo for the benefit of all and meet rising demand and expectations for better service and affordable gigabit connectivity. As Sales Director, I'm looking forward to playing a lasting and significant role in this journey."

Rob Hamlin, Commercial Director, CityFibre, added: "George is one of the most respected and highly sought-after Sales Directors in the industry. His achievements in previous roles are renowned and this appointment marks a significant milestone in CityFibre's ambitions to transform digital infrastructure in the UK.

"With George on board, we are positioned to secure fast-paced, well scaled strategic growth with a focus on developing high performing teams and customer satisfaction.

"He will be an asset to the team and we're all delighted that he joins CityFibre at such a pivotal time as we focus on accelerating the number of Gigabit Cities across the UK."

Report by IT Europa: Veeam is targeting more enterprise and cloud business for its data availability and backup systems, and now thinks it has the right person at the top to push its many partners to generate the big ticket sales it craves.

Just before Veeam kicked of its VeeamON customer and partner event in New Orleans this week it promoted recently hired president and chief operating officer Peter McKay to a co-CEO role as the company looks to break the $1bn in annual sales barrier by 2019.

He replaced William Largent who was only made CEO last year, but who is now moving to a board administration role instead, although he remains a director.

McKay will be co-CEO with joint founder Andrei Baronov who will also continue as the company's CTO.

Since his arrival from VMware last year, McKay, a sales veteran, is credited by Veeam's founders for generating thousands of new high value customers every month.

This is only Veeam's third such global customer and partner event and this writer has now attended all three. It seems unbelievable now that at the first event in Las Vegas, the main media announcement was a free data backup tool for consumers' laptops and other gadgets. But that small fry initiative, from a company that started ten years ago, has been followed by a rapidly growing channel with all business products and services sold through partners.

Additionally, the company's 'premier' partners at its events include Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, NetApp, Microsoft and Cisco, and one of its strongest technical partners is VMware.

And even though Dell EMC has its own backup solutions to sell, many Dell EMC customers prefer those from Veeam. Which is maybe why Dell EMC are here in New Orleans.

With data backup continuing to get plenty of market exposure helped by last weekend's global ransomware attack, Veeam is regularly portrayed in the media as a potential acquisition target for a major vendor, including those mentioned above.

Ex-CEO and joint founder, and continuing director Ratmir Timashev is on record as saying that if a 'big enough figure was offered' the owners would certainly consider it. But as those sales figures continue to rapidly click up, that big figure is certainly going to have to get fatter

"Peter has taken Veeam to the next level in the short 10 months since he joined last summer," said Timashev. "He has played a pivotal role in strengthening our go-to-market sales and marketing strategy and teams, and taking the company into the enterprise and cloud segments. We are making a rock-solid platform for future growth."

To help with that growth, in New Orleans, Veeam unveiled its Availability Suite v10 which comes with the new Veeam CDP (continuous data protection), to deliver "SLAs of seconds using continuous replication to private or managed clouds", said Veeam. There is also now full "cloud native" support for data located in Amazon Web Services. And a Veeam agent for Microsoft Windows data on companies' physical servers and for workloads in Microsoft Azure can automatically backup and recover data.

Last month, Veeam said first quarter new enterprise license bookings grew 17% annually. Also, cloud revenue enabled by Veeam Cloud and Service Providers (VCSPs) grew 59% YoY. At the time of the results, McKay said: "Looking ahead, we expect continued growth for the remainder of this year, fuelled by new Veeam product releases, joint product offerings with our Alliances partners, and further share gains in enterprise and Veeam-powered cloud solutions."

At the last count, there were 47,000 Veeam ProPartners and 15,000 VCSPs globally, and don't expect these numbers to fall if McKay has his way.

TeleWare has been accepted onto Microsoft's Technology Adoption Program (TAP) for Trusted Application APIs. This gives TeleWare the ability to integrate its products with Office365, in particular, Skype for Business voice recording. 
 
TeleWare holds a number of Gold and Silver competencies with Microsoft. Acceptance onto the Trusted Application API program is the latest in a string of achievements hot on the heels of two world firsts. 

In September 2016 TeleWare became the first to route record and analyse a call in real-time through the Azure platform in a fully encrypted, compliant environment, removing the need for physical hardware and servers.  Shortly after, TeleWare was also the first to migrate their fixed line call recording operations into Azure.
 
Microsoft's TAP aims to help support and integrate the next generation of technological innovation into their suite of solutions. In this instance, the TAP allows Microsoft's selected partners the opportunity to deliver services natively into Office365. A privilege only offered to those partners who have proven capabilities and value add for Microsoft users. 
 
TeleWare has been accepted onto Microsoft's voice recording call flow workstream, meaning it will be the recording partner of choice for call recording users on Office365 using Skype Online.
 
Steve Haworth, CEO at TeleWare, commented: "Over the coming months TAP will provide a host of benefits to both TeleWare and our customers. Customer's need to ensure their technology choices offer migration paths."

Four directors from South West Communications Group will tackle the Three Peaks Challenge next month to raise money for the Prince's Trust.

swcomms' MD Brian Lodge and board members Jon Whiley, John Holdstock and Sean Doyle will attempt to scale Ben Nevis, Scafell Pike and Snowdon in less than 24 hours on June 20th.

The challenge will see the quartet visit three different countries, climb 3,064 metres and walk 29 miles.

Lodge said: "We are of varying ages, sizes and abilities, so this really does represent a challenge. More than that though, we want to raise as much money as we can for the Prince's Trust, for which we became a patron last year. They carry out some fantastic work across the South West and we want to support the young people they help every day."

swcomms' CEO and chairman Tony Rowe OBE will chauffeur the group 470 miles between each peak. "Tony has a pretty big part to play in achieving our 24-hour target time," added Lodge. "He will need to drive overnight to deliver us at the foot of each mountain in a safe and timely manner. He will also oversee nutrition on the move and the all-important motivational talks, not to mention sharing a pint or two with us at the end!"

Distribution is undergoing rapid change and, especially in Europe, is finding a new role as a provider of cloud services, e-commerce, specialist logistics and support for the channel during its transition to new revenue models.

So says a new report for the Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC) by IT Europa.

As well as providing coverage, onboarding and recruitment of new channels in all the markets in Europe, which usually means some element of localisation and cultural fit in IT supply, the report identifies some of the ways that distribution is now able to work to develop new business lines, especially in services, where the move to cloud adoption makes it a lot easier for developers and solution providers to create solutions, but where they still need ways to reach their markets.

Vendors cited in the report say they are using distribution for access to markets that would otherwise involve them in setting-up local offices and providing local more resources.

As Scale Computing CEO Jeff Ready says, "In the past we have used a single-tier model, but now we can use distribution to run and promote the channel relationships."

"Having a true value-adding distributor is important and it plays a big part in making the channel part of an effective community."

Channels are often faced with a wave of new potential product lines, each requiring careful evaluation. Few channel players have the resources to research the market continuously.

"Work closely with distributors and they will be able to guide you as to which products are going to be the winners," GTDC Europe's General Manager Peter van den Berg told the Managed Services and Hosting Summit in Amsterdam in April.

Distribution is no longer just about pick, pack and ship, he said. The services on offer are many and varied, and are used to complement what the channel is doing.

"65% of the business of one of the GTDC largest members is now in services," he told the conference, and in the last two years, the GTDC members "have added over 600 new vendors, so they are a good source and indicator for channel partners looking to see which products and services are likely to be successful."

The report draws on GTDC's own research which points to a heightened sense of confidence in the European IT industry this year and identifies key growth areas for distribution and partner channels, including IoT, mobile, managed services and cloud.

Report by IT Europa: Cloud data availability firm Veeam says the channel distribution model is rapidly changing as distributors become aggregators and resellers morph into service providers.

As a result, the intelligent data backup solutions vendor is rejigging the way it develops its channel, mainly as a result of its growing cloud and enterprise business.

Last month Veeam said first quarter new enterprise license bookings grew 17% annually. Also, cloud revenue enabled by Veeam Cloud and Service Providers (VCSPs) grew 59% YoY.

At the last count, there were 47,000 Veeam ProPartners and 15,000 VCSPs globally. A large number of ProPartners - predominantly resellers - are now expected to turn into a VCSP to reflect market changes.

Veeam held its annual VeeamON customer and partner event in New Orleans this week, which was attended by around 3,000, including Veeam staff.

At the event, Veeam senior vice president of worldwide sales Daniel Fried told IT Europa: "We are now seeing customer defined channel strategies with customers moving towards the cloud. It's not about large vendors anymore deciding whether to move into the cloud or not and moulding the channel as a result, we had that a number of years ago.

"Customers want agnostic vendors who can work with partners to deliver their cloud, storage and other infrastructure needs, which is what we are trying to be. While we have strong relationships with the likes of Microsoft, VMware, HPE, Cisco and NetApp, for instance, we don't dictate to customers what other technologies should be used in conjunction with our solutions."

Fried said Veeam was now spending more time in re-organising its partner structure instead of simply adding to partner numbers, which is what it has done in impressive fashion over the last three years to reach a critical mass to take a large chunk of the intelligent data backup space.

Fried said many distributors were now aggregators of many different technologies and were effectively becoming cloud service providers themselves in offering additional services to their service provider customers, like cloud training, technical services and marketing, for instance. He also added that 50% of Veeam service providers were also resellers.

Such changes are a major reason why Veeam used VeeamON to launch its Veeam Accredited Service Partner (VASP) programme, to enable members to deliver high-quality professional services related to Veeam solutions, to "help customers realise increased reliability" and 'achieve greater return of investment from Veeam solutions', said the vendor.

The VASP effort offers a range of member benefits including marketing promotion and visibility and increased technical services. There will also be dedicated senior pre-sales advisors, demonstration and training aids, and co-branding and marketing.

"We want partners who are enthusiastic about working with us and we want to make it easier for them by making sure they have the right specialisations and competencies," said Fried.

On partner numbers, Oliver Robinne, Veeam VP of EMEA sales, said: "With 22,000 in EMEA we've probably got enough in most parts of Western Europe but there are always places where we could do with more coverage to meet and generate market demand."

He said there are big differences in some geographies. Veeam only has around 100 VCSPs in Russia where it mainly supports large enterprises. But it has 430 VCSPs across the other major Eastern Europe markets, where the size of customers is more varied.

"Resellers increasingly have two jobs, to sell and to also support cloud and services business, so we expect a number of resellers will become VCSPs," said Robinne.

Cloud giants such as AWS, Microsoft, Google and IBM have swung their gaze onto the channel as a means to sustain and drive their stellar growth rates; and their interest in the enterprise and mid-market space where competition is fierce will see them prioritise indirect partnerships to extend their reach, claims Canalys.

In Q1 2017 AWS maintained its dominance, holding a stable global market share of 31% on 43% revenue growth. Microsoft grew revenues by 93% and Google was up 74% compared to the same quarter a year ago, while IBM witnessed 38% revenue growth.

The overall worldwide cloud infrastructure services market was up 42% year-on-year to reach $11.4bn, according to Canalys.

"Competition for enterprise customers is intensifying among leading cloud service providers which are investing heavily to secure key national and global accounts," said Canalys Research Analyst Daniel Liu.

"Timing is crucial, as many large accounts are assessing, formulating and executing strategies to move existing workloads and infrastructure to the cloud and develop new types of workloads as part of digital transformation initiatives."

Cloud players are looking to the channel to expand their reach, especially when it comes to mid-market opportunities, says Canalys Senior Analyst Jordan De Leon. "The channel has become integral to winning in the enterprise, with top cloud players focusing on channel expansion plans," he said.

AWS has an established channel programme that is growing and is cited by the company as helping to win key global clients. And Google has revamped its partner programme to reflect the the technology and feature requirements of large enterprise customers.

"Go-to-market strategy, including both customer and channel partner engagement, will ultimately determine vendor success in this segment," stated De Leon.

"Larger enterprises will adopt a multi-cloud strategy to distribute risk. Ultimately, to challenge AWS, vendors will need deep financial resources to continue to participate and advance."