Comms Dealer

Networking specialist Neill Bird (pictured) has joined Genius Networks as pre-sales consultant following a three year sabbatical during which he visited 49 countries.

He boasts a 30-year stint working in the networking arena including 13 years operating on British Rail's national network, considered to be the UK's first WAN and a pioneer of fibre optics technology.

He also worked for Energis, InTechnology and Griffin and claims to have project managed the first installation of Cat 6 in the UK.

Bird, an Incorporated Engineer and Member of the Institute of Engineering and Technology, said: "Reseller customers are demanding more speed and less delay. The big issue with voice is managing latency, particularly across global networks. Businesses are expanding internationally and demanding guaranteed service levels. This is where Genius scores."
 
James Arnold Roberts, Genius Networks Director, added: "Neill's expertise and experience in networking is second to none. Our reseller partners will benefit from the advice he can provide on the best solutions to meet their customers' needs. He will be a great asset to Genius Networks."

The Network Selector has completed three acquisitions to provide channel partners with access to a range of voice, data and video solutions. 

The acquisitions include Talkativo, a supplier of IP, broadband and SIP solutions, Ocean Telecom, a fast expanding provider of mobile and fixed telephony, broadband and hosting solutions, and Planet Hippo, which provides hosting and domain registration services. 

This is the latest venture for entrepreneur Mike Harris (pictured) who has successfully built a number of multi-million pound companies including Total Network Solutions which was acquired by British Telecom in 2005. 

He is also joint founder of SiFi Networks, a provider of Fibre-to-the-Home networks and Chairman of VoiceComms Warehouse, a distributor of Internet security and network communications technology.    

For resellers not wanting to invest in billing platforms and provisioning the company is offering a range of hosted IP, fixed and mobile telecoms solutions which can be accessed through approved distributors such as VCW Voice. 

Larger resellers with the appropriate infrastructure will be able to access wholesale minutes and circuits regardless of network providers.

"We can enable resellers to compete on a level playing field with national mobile and fixed telecoms providers and provide customers with a wider range of 'best of breed' voice communications solutions," commented Harris. 

"The Phones4u experience was a wake-up call to the industry that we have responded to by putting the power back with resellers to take full ownership of their customers and prevent network providers from pulling the rug out from under their feet."

The Network Selector enables resellers to deliver significant savings to customers by automatically routing call traffic, both fixed and mobile, to the most cost effective provider based on geographical location, tariff and time of day. 

For mobile users, this works in the same way as roaming when abroad and routes calls to the strongest network signal based on the current location of the customer for a single, fixed monthly charge. 

The company also provides an auto switching service to guarantee 99.99% broadband availability in the event of a wider network failure to meet the essential business continuity planning requirements of organisations that rely on 'always on' internet access.

The acquisition of Talkativo provides resellers with an entry into the growing hosted voice market, enabling them to offer cloud-based telephony solutions while retaining margins of over 50%. 

This monthly cost does not require upfront capital expenditure and includes a comprehensive range of services including call recording and ACD along with all call charges.

"These solutions enable resellers to contract directly with end user customers, instead of acting as agents for the networks, and protect against the threats posed to their business operations by the changing strategies of network providers," added Harris. 

"Also, as technologies continue to converge, we will be in pole position to meet the growing demand for smartphones that carry both mobile and fixed numbers as well as enabling calls to be made using IP and Wi-Fi."

The Network Selector also offers a price and service comparison tool which enables resellers to analyse existing bills and recommend alternative solutions. 

This enables customers to see for themselves the savings they could achieve which are likely to be in the region of 20-30% annually, claimed the firm.

Pizza delivery company Domino's Pizza has renewed its partnership with national communications provider Kcom to help continue its growth online in the UK and Europe.

Before its partnership with Kcom began Domino's received and processed most of its orders over the phone. Three years on and with Kcom's wide area network (WAN) solution, Domino's now processes around 62% of its orders online with some stores receiving over 90% of their business online.

Colin Rees, CIO at Domino's, said: "We're a fast moving business and our single focus is the home delivery of pizza, freshly made to order with high quality ingredients. Being able to order online is a win for both our customers and us.

"Online is where people are and where they like to buy. Now that our customers have the whole menu in front of them, they can take their time ordering and the accuracy of the order is higher.

"Our main ICT challenge was dealing with how rapidly we were opening new stores and making sure the new stores were able to receive online orders. Now we're online we're seeing our customers ordering more than they used to and coming back more frequently, which is fuelling our growth."

In the last year Domino's has increased the number of UK and European stores from 805 to 858. This level of growth means the technology infrastructure required to get each store up and running needs to be deployed quickly and be flexible enough to cope with large demand so online customers can be served straight away.

Rob Wells, Head of Digital Customer Engagement at Kcom, added: "Since we began working with Domino's our partnership has developed as our understanding of how we can support their expanding business has increased.

"As an advanced multichannel retailer Domino's has achieved outstanding growth, and knows it can rely on us to deliver the best IT infrastructure. What this means is that the pressure shifts from the IT team over to the store teams who must keep up with demand for making and delivering great pizza."

Westcon Group has completed a series of roadshows throughout the North of England and Scotland, introducing new and existing resellers to its value added services and products and solutions.

New product launches included the One Box 365 from Audiocodes that enables Lync for SMBs and proof of concept, and Oracle launched a new Session Border Controller (SBC) aimed at the SMB market and branch office deployments.

Murray Grubb, National Sales Manager, Annodata, commented: "The roadshow was a fantastic opportunity to meet up with the wider Westcon team and some of the key vendors. With our industry moving and changing at such a fast pace, it was invaluable to receive a complex update on what is coming next."

Microsoft discussed how Lync is moving beyond IM and Presence, and how resellers were effectively leaving money on the table and by not taking advantage of the Office 365 opportunity.

Guy Koster, Director Product Management & Marketing EMEA, Westcon Group, added:"Office 365 is now Microsoft's fastest growing business with over $1.5bn of revenue and 60% growth YoY, plus 18 consecutive quarters of triple digit growth since launching in 2009, so the market opportunity is colossal.

"Microsoft is now focusing on driving the utilisation of the multi-party conferencing and voice workloads across the 3 million seats of the under utilised E3 & E4 O365 subscriptions.

"This is a fantastic opportunity for the channel to broaden their solutions offerings to include devices, infrastructure and services."

Business comms provider Gamma has confirmed a successful IPO on AIM, with 50% of shares being sold to institutions at a sensibly-priced 187p per share, for a £165.2m market capitalisation. A combination of an attractive dividend yield and current organic growth rates way above the peer group average should ensure a solid start to Gamma's life as a public company, says Philip Carse, Principal Analyst, Megabuyte.

Special report by Philip Carse: As expected, Gamma has placed 50% of its shares in public hands, with most existing shareholders selling down. The company itself is not raising new money given a healthy balance sheet and good cash generation; the main aim of the IPO is to raise its profile. The company will have a market capitalisation of £165.2m at the offer price of 187p, or an enterprise value of approximately £145-150m given December 2013 net cash of £14.6m and subsequent cash generation.

The valuation equates to about 8.7x 2013 EBITDA. Current year multiples will be somewhat lower given that, as we reported recently, Gamma enjoyed very strong trading in the first half: revenues up 16% to £83.6m, EBITDA up 42% to £10.9m and post tax profits up 32% to £5.8m. A similar rate of growth for the full year would equate to about 6.2x 2014 EBITDA, at a PE of about 14.2x.

Gamma has also announced the intention to pay a progressive dividend. An indicative £1.75m dividend for the first half, had Gamma been listed then, equates to about £5.25m for a full year, or a prospective yield of 3.2% at the IPO price and a broad 50% profits payout. The company will pay two-thirds of a full year dividend for 2014, despite being only listed for less than three months.

First thoughts
Having tried to IPO in the tail end of 2011, but being deterred by market conditions, we are pleased to see Gamma succeeding this time round. The company marks a quality addition to AIM, with a long track record, good industry positioning and reputation, and starts life with a very decent level of liquidity with a 50% free float.

The IPO has also been sensibly priced; whilst an estimated 6.2x current year EBITDA is below the 7-12x range for peers such as Alternative Networks, Daisy, Maintel, Talk Talk and Redcentric, the PE of 14.2x and prospective dividend yield of about 3.2% are around their average. A combination of an attractive dividend yield and current organic growth rates way above the peer group average should ensure a solid start to Gamma's life as a public company.

Fidelity MD Alan Shraga commented: "This announcement is great news for the channel. Gamma and its partners have worked tirelessly over the last few years and to grow from £60m to £160m is an amazing achievement for our industry."

Video solutions company Imago Group has now been acquired by ScanSource following a Letter of Intent to acquire the company at the end of August. Imago Group will now be known as Imago ScanSource.

Imago will continue to provide the same broad range of services and will use its increased footprint to benefit its channel of value-added resellers.

Much of this will be focused on supporting them to assist customers with international requirements across Europe, the United States and into other territories.

ScanSource completed its purchase of Imago Group in September and as a result has incorporated Imago's operations in the UK, France and its recently acquired operation in Germany.

Ian Vickerage, Managing Director of Imago ScanSource, said: "It is an exciting time for ourselves, our partners and our customers because this acquisition gives us global reach and leverage which we will be using to assist our partners to win big international business."

Mike Ferney, President, Worldwide Communications and Services, ScanSource, said: "The Imago team, along with our ScanSource Communications team in Europe led by Rudy De Meirsman, will now total nearly 200 people, delivering video, voice and data solutions from the leading brands. As these two teams begin to work together, there will be cross-selling opportunities for resellers and vendors."

Jabra has unveiled its latest product series, Jabra Evolve designed to support knowledge workers.

A significant 69 per cent state od this group state that disturbances in the open office have a negative impact on their performance, but through advanced noise-cancellation technologies Jabra Evolve aims to enhance productivity by offering a personal 'concentration zone'.

The series consists of five headsets that are all purpose-built for shutting out office noise, including features that signal when the user doesn't want to be disturbed.

"The Jabra Evolve headset range create a complete personal concentration zone that boosts focus and work satisfaction for employees in increasingly open, loud and distracting workspaces," said Nigel Dunn, Managing Director, Jabra UK & Ireland.

"We have designed the Jabra Evolve series with both the employer and user in mind, delivering a solution to improve return on investment through increased workplace productivity and accelerated user adoption."

Unify aims to almost double channel revenues within two years following the launch of a new Partner Program and a single global channel strategy.

Unify intends to drive 45% of revenues through the channel within two years, up from 25%. "Our goal is to continue building a strong partner network with our existing partners, but also grow through new partners with a strong knowledge of software and hardware offerings," stated Thomas Veit, Senior VP of Channels for Unify EMEAR.

"The Program is designed for partners of all sizes. It offers a low cost of entry, easy on-boarding and fast ramp-up to bring quick results.

"We have to trust partners to be successful, and they have to trust us to not compete against them via direct sales."

The Unify Partner Program expands access to the vendor's UC solutions and rewards partners for expertise and specialisation. It also offers profit predictability and incentives.

Unify is also making more of its UC portfolio available to the channel, including the OpenScape Voice and OpenScape 4000 for enterprises, and OpenScape Business for commercial which has been scaled to accommodate more than 1,000 users.

"In order for Unify to help our customers transform themselves to successfully be positioned for the future, we must first transform ourselves," commented Veit.

"Our offerings need to be compelling, and we need to be ridiculously easy to do business with."

Virtual1 has completed a significant phase of network investment having ploughed millions into its core network with Juniper, boosting the scalability, capacity and resilience of its primary asset.

The upgraded network sees a big increase in scalability using multiplex devices with the capability for software defined networking. The devices improve system capacity with the ability to light dark fibre to multiples of 10Gig. The total number of 10Gig ports across the Virtual1 network now exceed 450.

The phase also sees a significant increase in network capacity with the deployment of additional Juniper routers with total capacity of 15Tbps. Dual routing engines on core routes were installed to improve resilience, resulting in impact-less upgrades using two routing engines.

Virtual1, CTO, James Hickman, commented: "This project has been a huge phase in our network development. The work undertaken by our architects has resulted in one of the most robust networks in our space. As well increasing the scalability, capacity and resiliency of our network, the work has seen our London network footprint doubled."

The phase was expected to take over 18 months to complete with over 3000 customer migrations taking place, but the migration and upgrade was completed in just three months.

Tom O'Hagan, MD, added: "The network underpins the core services our partners deliver to their customers. Strengthening our network by investing in large-scale upgrades is paramount to strengthening our relationship with our partners. I commend the work undertaken by our network architects in ensuring the large scale work was completed so swiftly and seamlessly."

As the end of a recruitment year draws near, employers always start to fret about who will be in their sales line up for January. So they should, as for every target year drawing to a close there are always sales people considering whether commissions worked out as promised, writes Clive Jefferys, JMA Network.

Shortfalls are easily explained by missed targets, but this is also the time when 'Yeah, but...' starts to presage conversations about bonuses earned, but not paid. This conversation is cropping up among our new candidates, very closely linked to their reason for looking for a new job.

Recruiters rarely need to persuade anyone to move job for its own sake, we can rely on dissatisfaction or change of circumstance to bring candidates to our door.

So the big question for 2015 is: How to shape up for New Business?

The telecoms industry is accelerating towards a services contract sale with monthly revenue collection, and selling tin for a big fat GP payment is becoming harder and harder.

Consequently it's getting tough to win real new customers when incumbent suppliers already have multiple, overlapping contracts in place. If needs be, they slash their price to beat your new bid.

In today's world the best sales people are defined by charisma, flair and personality.

Every successful team has them. They sniff out opportunities and win their sales cleverly, enigmatically and unusually.

Yet other chaps plod through dry ITT's, and bemoan that a hundred pages of technical detail is not good enough to win a deal anymore.

Meanwhile, your charismatic salesperson is having dinner with the best prospects and selling the benefits, not the features, of their solution.

So where do the bumblebees come into it?

Well they are the sales people in the middle. They flit from flower to flower and never remember which ones yield the best nectar. They pick up heaps of leads and have a go at this, and at that, but never hang around long enough to get truly good at delivering what is needed.

Like any profession, it takes time and determination to get really good at anything, and you just have to stick at it.

Ironically, this counts the same for hirers too. They should stop looking for a quick fix and work harder at strengthening recruitment relationships with their jobsites, agencies and HR advisors.

Successful recruitment of key staff is a long-term process - you must always be looking for new talent! Look at every suitable candidate that comes your way, whether you have an official vacancy or not. If you see someone you like, construct a justified reason to hire - and win over your bosses to hire your next Charismatic Salesperson!