Comms Dealer

Mitel has increased its proposal to acquire all of the outstanding shares of ShoreTel common stock to $8.50 per share in cash and stock, representing a total equity value of approximately $574 million. Mitel proposes to deliver to ShoreTel shareholders $8.10 per share in cash and $.40 per share in Mitel common shares, or approximately 2.72 million shares.

This increased proposal represents a 31% premium to ShoreTel's unaffected stock price on October 17th, 2014, and a 38% premium to ShoreTel's enterprise value.

The increased proposal was extended to ShoreTel's Board of Directors in a letter from Mitel's President and CEO, Richard McBee.

"We continue to believe that the combination of our two companies offers a compelling opportunity to add sustained value to both organisations, and to solidify our combined leadership position in a highly competitive and rapidly consolidating market," said McBee.

"In addition to the obvious benefit of an immediate and significant premium for ShoreTel shareholders, a combination of our two companies would create far superior value than could reasonably be obtained by ShoreTel as a standalone entity."

London-based IT services and solutions provider Kelway has undertaken the buy-out of all shares held by Core Capital.

The management team, led by founder and CEO Phil Doye, has at the same time announced a significant investment by CDW Corporation which will help extend both firms' ability to deliver IT services and solutions internationally.

With current revenue in excess of $10bn, CDW Corporation has acquired a 35% stake in the Kelway business. In the deal, backed by Barclays and HSBC, Doye and Kelway MD Dan Laws remain the majority shareholders in the business.

Under the new structure, Kelway and CDW plan to integrate more tightly to extend the global supply chain services they provide to customers in Europe and North America.

This will help drive Kelway towards its business objective of achieving over £1bn in annual revenue within the next three years. Together the two organisations will enable customers to realise the benefit of consistent procurement and deployment services across multiple international locations.

Kelway has grown rapidly in both the UK and internationally over recent years, achieving revenues in excess of £500m in 2013/14, reflecting year-on-year growth of 49%.

The company was founded in 1990 by Doye who has since guided Kelway through significant organic growth and a series of successful acquisitions.

Kelway has achieved an aggressive increase in market share for its Data centre Infrastructure business and designed and built its own cloud computing platform called ServiceWorks.

"The investment from CDW will enable us to accelerate towards our £1bn revenue goal." said Doye. "Having worked with CDW for over 18 months on joint client opportunities, this investment feels like a natural next step in our partnership."

Tom Richards, Chairman and CEO of CDW, added, "For more than a year Kelway has been a strategic partner, helping support our customers' growing international business needs.

"The investment solidifies our partnership with Kelway and strengthens our ability to provide a more comprehensive solution to our customers and ensure we deliver a consistent brand experience, regardless of where the solution is delivered."

Kelway has recently been awarded Cisco Global Commercial Partner of the Year and HP Enterprise Partner of the Year. In 2014, Kelway signed a five year Infrastructure Services contract with Atos with an estimated value of £150m.

Kelway was advised in the transaction by William Blair, Reed Smith and PWC.

Daisy Group has approved the interoperability of Yealink's range of handsets for use on its CloudSelect Voice and Hosted Voice Exchange services.
 
Daisy's Director of Architecture and Strategy, Tim Meredith, said: "The partner programme represents an opportunity for us to strengthen our already close relationship with Yealink, as well as enhance our hosted telephony and UC services."
 
Yealink's ITSP Business Development Manager Peter Holland added: "Thorough interoperability testing has confirmed that harnessing Daisy's hosted telephony services with our flagship handsets creates a cutting-edge proposition for end users."
 
Yealink handsets will be supplied to Daisy pre-programmed so that they will automatically connect to the company's provisioning server.

Gamma has launched a new build option for its SIP trunking service called Resilience+.

As an alternative to the Active Standby and Loadshare build options that were already available with Gamma SIP Trunks, Resilience+ provides two SIP endpoint connections where each endpoint is active to selected DDIs while standby resilience is provided by the other endpoint.

With dual endpoints both in Active and Standby mode, this new design offers additional failover and more flexible configuration, all managed via Gamma's online portal.

Paul Wakefield, SIP Product Manager at Gamma, commented: "Extending our suite of standard resilient builds gives our partners and their customers added peace of mind.

"With three build types now available, our partners and their customers also benefit from more flexibility and freedom of choice. While our standard build options are designed to cater for most typical deployments, we can also provide bespoke advice and solutions when required."

Chris Daffin, Network Services Director at Maintel noted: "Resilience is important to us and our customers and it's great to see that Gamma is continuing to stay ahead of the game with the addition of Resilience+."

BT has rewarded the TOFS charity with a grant of £700 to recognise the charity's commitment to providing emotional support to families of children born with Tracheo-Oesophageal Fistula, Oesophageal Atresia and associated conditions.

The grant has been awarded through the company's employee recognition scheme, the BT People Awards.

The scheme recognises and rewards BT's volunteering heroes who offer their time and skills to help people in their local communities, by providing grants to organisations in which they are involved.

TOFS beat off national competition to win an award in the Education category of the awards for the contribution it makes to the local community.

TOFS (Tracheo-Oesophageal Fistula Support) was set up in 1982 by parents of children born with TOF and associated conditions. Their aim was to reach out to other families in a similar situation.

Over 30 years on and now a registered charity, they continue to help families through the challenges of bringing up a child with TOF/OA, VACTERL and associated conditions. They do this by providing one-to-one support and a range of information and resources to families. TOFS is a recognised source of information for professionals with an interest in TOF/OA.

Diane Stephens, TOFS, said: "Without volunteers we could not support and educate as many families and professionals as we do. Volunteering is a special thing someone can do and we are eternally grateful for those people who do give up their time."

BT Business Partner Sales' Kay Leech volunteers for the charity and nominated it for the BT People Award. She said: "I got involved when my daughter, Harriet was born in 2008. The charity was there to support me and my family when I need them and I wanted to give something back.

"We have some fantastic ideas of how we can use this money to give the maximum benefit to both existing and new families and I can't wait to help those ideas become a reality."

451 applications were received for this round of grants and 84 applicants received awards totalling £50,980.

Applications were submitted by BT people from all over the world including Peru, India and Belgium. These included a wide range of community organisations from football clubs to police cadets to red squirrel protection, illustrating the wide variety of activities in which BT people are involved.

For more information please visit: www.btpeopleawards.co.uk

NEC has launched its SMB solution UNIVERGE SV9100 in the UK.

Also being released is the new MyCalls Operator Console application plus new terminals including the DT800 and DT400 series, as well as the touchscreen UT880, a desk phone integrating a traditional desktop phone and an Android tablet into one device.

"The new SV9000 series continues NEC's trend of creating a natural migration path for customers, while evolving the technology to meet the needs of today's businesses," said Osamu Noda, General Manager, Enterprise Networks Division, NEC Corporation.
        
The SV9100 offering is designed as an all-in-one unified communications (UC) platform for SMBs with simplified installation and management.

By offering a broad set of UC applications, including mobility options, NEC enhances its approach to vertical markets such as hospitality, healthcare and education.

Andrew Cooper, UK Sales Director says: "Picking up where its predecessor the SV8100 system left off, the SV9100 is five times more powerful and comes with a host of brand new on-board applications. Initial reseller feedback has been positive."

AKJ has strengthened its team with a number of appointments across the business including Account Management, Development and Production.

AKJ's Managing Director Derek Watson said: "We work with many of the largest Telecoms and ICT resellers in the industry and this requires professional and experienced staff to manage.

"At the same time data and cloud are without doubt the reseller market's main ICT sales product and AKJ's billing platform Affinity is an integral part of being able to sell and bill these still fairly new products accurately, so we need the right type of people to support this."

Steve Redman, AKJ's Commercial Manager, added: "The communication landscape is rapidly changing and AKJ is ensuring it can support the channel with a scaleable billing platform which is always designed with its customers business outcome in mind."

To support these changes, Samantha Collins has joined AKJ from Vodafone as Senior Account Manager, bringing a wealth of experience of reseller billing operations with the advantage of already understanding the Affinity Platform.

Recently promoted to Telephone Account Manager is Charmelle Hobbs. Formerly bureau based, Hobbs has been with AKJ for eight years.

Three new graduates have also joined the development and production team.

IT leaders need to take more leadership when it comes to meeting business need in a secure and efficient way, according to Andrew Mullen, VP of Sales and Marketing at Talon Storage.

The development of shadow IT has been dominated by the proliferation of external SaaS collaboration platforms as employees look to improve productivity, but the problem is that the documents and data in question are still being taken externally to the organisation's infrastructure - creating unknown quantities of risk that is hard to assess or manage, claims Mullen.

He said: "Shadow IT is a major risk for any organisation, and it's no easy task for IT leaders to eradicate illegitimate software as almost anyone can purchase low-cost subscription licenses and have new applications up and running in no time at all. IT leaders either approve the use of this software, without doing a full risk assessment, or procure their own version of it.

"IT leaders can solve the threat posed by shadow IT by reassessing their current IT estate's collaboration capabilities and to find ways to make sure that data never needs to leave the enterprise IT estate. Enabling collaboration on documents in such a way removes the need for employees to go to external platforms, such as the public cloud."

Intelligent file access and collaboration software within the IT estate that delivers optimal global file sharing, which overcomes the barriers of latency, bandwidth and network reliability, will not only significantly reduce the risk of shadow IT, but will lead to more effective document management and avoid file duplication, improving employee productivity, believes Mullen.

"Failure to do so will only result in the continuation of data leakage - a growing problem for large-scale organisations operating in multiple geographic areas," he added.

Resellers from across northern England converged at Nimans' Manchester headquarters for a workshop about the company's GS-hosted proposition that offers upfront or recurring revenue opportunities, or a combination of both.

A Manchester dealer said: "We've not sold hosted before but the event has opened my eyes to what is happening in the market and how Nimans can help us break new ground.

"This is the next chapter for telecoms and a new movement. We need to be on the journey before someone else offers that option."

GS-hosted includes a free three-year hosted seat licence with every handset purchased. A choice of three models are available - Standard, Advanced and Executive - with upfront margin potential of 45% or recurring margins of 65%. Already hundreds of resellers have signed up and made enquiries about the service that has turned the market on its head.

Head of Network Services Mark Curtis-Wood began the seminar by posing a 'why hosted, why now?' question.

"It is time for change," he said. "Some people try and ignore it and pretend it's not happening while some embrace it. Any change can be uncomfortable at first. The world of hosted can initially be a scary place but we are here to support you on that journey with a product set you've not sold before."

Resellers heard how Nimans is a 'good barometer' to measure changing market trends, with a huge volume of IP and Lync enabled end points now being delivered, emphasising how 'something is happening' in the wider comms world.

"Nimans wanted to stand out from the crowd and offer something different to enable you to differentiate in the market. We came up with something compelling," Curtis-Wood added.

Maingate has launched Connect Flex, a new data communications and connectivity solution designed for the smart energy sector.

Across the energy ecosystem there are hundreds of thousands of distributed assets, from smart meters to substations, transformers to cut-out switches, that each require monitoring and sometimes control.

Remotely monitored assets may be connected via a fitted SIM card, provided by the mobile network operator, that handles the communications coming from and to the devices.

If a utility or other asset owner wants to change provider in order to secure financial savings or better quality of service they are forced to also replace the SIM cards.

In practice this means an engineer visiting every one of potentially thousands of assets to physically replace the cards. As it stands, players are effectively tied in to one provider for the lifetime of their physical assets.

Maingate's Connect Flex service claims to tackle the issue of vendor lock-in. By supplying their own provider-agnostic SIM cards, Maingate's service allows owners and operators to remotely change providers, without replacing the physical cards.

As part of the Connect Flex service Maingate will handle any change of provider, to ensure that no connection or data is lost during the transition.

In addition, the Connect Flex service allows SIM cards to be fitted into energy hardware at the point of manufacture, which significantly reduces engineering costs.

Asset owners and operators are then free to choose the right provider for their needs at the point of installation, depending on coverage requirements and the best provider in each location.

"Connect Flex is an example of Maingate's push to develop solutions focused on decentralising the energy system and opening it up to change," said Maingate's UK Managing Director, David Owen. "The openness and transparency on which Connect Flex is built is the key to applying the Internet of Things to the smart energy ecosystem."