Comms Dealer

ECI Partners has sold portfolio company XLN Business Services to XLN's management team in a secondary buyout (SBO) for a reported £140-150m backed by GSO Capital Partners.

XLN was the first investment from ECI's Fund 9 in September 2010 and this exit has yielded ECI a 3x return on its investment.

During ECI's period of investment XLN made two bolt-on acquisitions, acquiring Card Processing Solutions (to provide a credit and debit card processing service to its customer base) and Shine Telecom (a smaller provider of fixed line telecoms to small businesses).

Former CEO of Travis Perkins and of Brakes, Frank McKay has been appointed as the new Chairman of XLN, taking over from the out-going chairman John Donaldson who will remain on the board as a non-executive director.

Founded in 2002 by its current CEO, Christian Nellemann, XLN is a provider of fixed line, broadband, energy and bank card processing services to small businesses across the UK with a particular focus on micro SMEs with between one and 10 employees.

Nellemann is the UK's only serial entrepreneur to win the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year award twice.

Nellemann said: "The backing of GSO, a blue chip investor, is a strong endorsement of our entrepreneurial approach, our high quality management team and the opportunities for acquisitive and organic growth that we have.

"I look forward to widening our crusade to help more of Britain's Heroes of the Economy, the micro SMEs, get a better deal on business services and receive the world class customer service that they deserve."

Tom Wrenn, Partner and head of ECI's TMT team said: "Since 2010, the business has achieved a huge amount and this deal adds to our strong track record in backing high growth businesses serving the small business market."

Incoming Chairman Frank McKay said: "I am delighted to be joining such an exciting and fast moving company and supporting Christian and his team in taking XLN to the next level."

The acquisition vehicle was advised by Catalyst Corporate Finance.

Vaioni Wholesale has made a multi-million pound  investment in a new 100Gb super-network across its core with Juniper.

The upgrade boosts the current network and brings significant levels of capacity and capability to Vaioni Wholesale's Manchester Network and the northern region where the Ethernet connectivity and cloud services specialist is concentrating its efforts.

Vaioni Wholesale MD Sachin Vaish (pictured) commented: "Vaioni Wholesale continues to invest in its people, systems and now its network, ensuring our channel partners have a competitive edge and an enterprise solution that competes against the bigger operators.

"With the new super-network, it gives us the ability to provide more 1Gb and 10Gb services and greater support to complex cloud solutions."

The new Juniper network gives Vaioni a total 25Tbps of capacity, 100Gb+ bandwidth, 100% network uptime, with 'huge' capability across the network in London, Manchester, Leeds, Edinburgh and Dublin.

US-based provider of API gateway and cloud security technology, Forum Systems, now has a deal with ASM Technologies which becomes its preferred distributor partner for the UK.

Apart from the UK, Forum Systems has already had a network of channel partners in place across a number of European countries, with no more than two per country.

However, it sees more potential in boutique disties, such as ASM, and ‘consulting outfits' that have a "heavy touch-point" with end customers.

The plan for the European channel is to aggressively engage with consulting companies that possess local expertise and understand the Forum's solutions.

The company's flagship product is Forum Sentry, which has achieved a globally recognised security standard Network Device Protection Profile (NDPP) compliance certification, and it is the API gateway that does not relies on OpenSSL but provides instead its own location for SSl processing and private key management (cryptography), the company says.

In Europe, Forum also plans to target 'highly-trained' distributors and a large number of system integrators. However, since Europe is much different from the US it sees big differences in the way the business is conducted in each market, particularly in terms of sales and payments cycles.

According to Forum, there are the geographies which require some longer business cycles, but on the other hand countries such as the UK, Germany, Netherlands or Switzerland are quick adopters of new technologies.

Although Forum has been typically associated with the commercial, government and military sectors as its solutions are dedicated to protect sensitive and critical data, in Europe it intends to target telcos, public agencies, healthcare and manufacturing as it sees ‘the most dynamic set of factors' in which it has successful deployments, it says.

"Europe has continue down the path of integration, yet establish controls to ensure that its openness is not exploited. We see a desire for significant information exchange between government agencies and commercial sectors across EU nations, especially related to the movement of people and money.

"EU is at geopolitical inflection point where it has to continue the free movement of resources for economic vibrancy without compromising its security. Forum Systems believes that the European nations will accelerate their initiatives to collaborate and protect their citizenry," said President and CEO of Forum Systems, Mamoon Yunus.

Insight EMEA has created a new services division, pulling in a new VP from Cisco.

The move follows recognition from Microsoft as its Cloud Partner of the Year at Microsoft's Worldwide Partner Conference. Insight now employs 5,200 globally and has sales of over $5.1bn.

The new Services business units, under Rolf Adam as VP of Services and a new Partner Service Alliance Programme, as part of the new Services Unit, will support alliances with 'country' best-in-class service providers as well as Pan-EMEA partners such as Colt, the Hosting & Service Provider, with 'In country' Datacentre Cloud & Services offerings.

"Many decision makers today, particularly those in the corporate client segment, are seeking partners who can provide strategic advice on future IT investments as well as delivering and managing this.

"This is why we're establishing a new Services business unit, having attracted a senior leader with sound expertise in services and establishing strategic alliances with vendors and partners across EMEA," said Wolfgang Ebermann, EMEA President at Insight.

With the nature and expected growth of managed services one of the key discussion points at last week's managed services and hosting summit, many think 2014 is the transition year, particularly for IT channels.

Keynote present Gartner and Distinguished Analyst Tiffani Bova spelled out the views of many experienced IT hands when she said: "We have had recurring revenue in the channel for decades, it is not a new model. How the customer is using the technology is how it is changing."

What is new is connectivity and the changes it enables: "We have been looking at how to encapsulate the changes, so we have started to talk about the two speeds of IT. Speed one is renovating the core - technology that refreshes the data centre, virtualisation and moving off-premises - a long term project, becoming more competitive and that is where the channel is most comfortable, particularly the sales people and engineers."

Speed two builds on the Gartner Nexus of forces - mobile, big data, social cloud. This is now running through the marketplace and is about exploiting the new growth initiatives - "see it try it , use it" much more quickly. It needs different skills and sellers, even different buyers, she says.

For Mark Hart, Channel and Strategic Alliance Director of Navisite Europe, these challenges for the partner channel were how a hybrid strategy works; cloud and managed services are increasingly in a game of scale; size is needed for stability.

And the public/private split is where the opportunity lies for him. Cloud services still deliver on costs, but there are concerns over control - private cloud offers this, but may not have the cost model and flexibility. Traditional solutions in non-virtual environments still make up most of the IT spend. "It is rarely one size fits all. Public cloud is still dwarfed by private and on-premise data centres who have over 90% of the total business. But the growth is in the public area, and is expected to hit 25%, while the private model is just 4%," he says.

How does the channel fit into this - when 80% want to sell cloud, but it is still a small part of the their businesses. It is a problem in certain categories - skills, business model, billing models and provider selection, Mark Hart says.

So the strategy is also hybrid, he says. "Blending of the two models is where we see the real opportunity. A survey of customers' spending in the next 12 months shows that 65% expect private cloud to have the priority." Clients still want this on-premise technology. The role of the partner has changed, but is complex; while most deploy on -premise; integrators are supporting legacy applications as well, so they are not about to port to cloud.

Service Providers have to add a layer to address the vertical markets such as healthcare. Dave Sobel of GFI MAX agrees on the history and what has changed. "Everyone talks about cloud, IT services, SaaS - it has been called all sorts - the only difference is that customers 'get' the marketing phrase. That doesn't mean any of the earlier ones were different.

"Connectivity is exploding and mobile is delivering, this is why it is resonating. I'm not fixated on verticals. The great Service Providers are the one with best practices who measure their success on the business outcomes of the customers."

Interoute Communications has acquired Vtesse group in a move that will bring Interoute's cloud service, Interoute VDC, and its Enterprise Unified ICT portfolio of Computing, Connectivity and Unified Communications solutions to businesses across the UK.
 
Gareth Williams, Interoute CEO commented: "When you look at the options for European businesses wanting to take advantage of flexible, scalable cloud infrastructure, they are often limited to the public cloud providers who think Europe can be served by one European data centre location connected by the public Internet.

"With this acquisition Interoute is adding its 12th Data Centre in Europe and over 7000km of UK network to its 60,000km pan-European global Cloud services platform. This provides a highly resilient, secure low latency Cloud platform that businesses everywhere can benefit from."
 
The Vtesse network connects 55 Data Centres and 48 major towns and cities in England, Scotland and Wales. The company provides metropolitan and Wide Area Network (WAN) solutions to some of the largest companies in the world both directly and via leading global system integrators, such as IBM, ARUP, Redstone and Logicalis. Its enterprise customers including Lloyds TSB, Poundland, Friends Provident, Invesco, DEFRA and the AA, will now have access to Interoute's advanced Unified ICT portfolio of services.
 
Aidan Paul Chairman and Founder, Vtesse added: "Over the past years Vtesse has provided enterprises, system integrators, carriers and cloud and data centre operators with a range of solutions from our data centre and extensive UK network. Becoming part of Interoute will give these customers access to the extended portfolio of solutions and international reach of Interoute, opening new opportunities and new markets."

8x8 has simplified customer engagement process with new out-of-the-box enhancements to its cloud contact centre offering.

The release of Virtual Contact Centre (VCC) 8.1, the latest version of its cloud-based contact centre solution, offers three key out-of-the-box components - Proactive Web Engagement, Customer Connection Scripting, and Direct Agent Connect - providing contact centres with an easy to implement framework for building customer satisfaction and generating increased revenue for their companies.

"Designing a consistent experience across multiple channels is key to building profitable relationships with customers, old and new," said Sheila McGee Smith, Principal Analyst at McGee Smith Analytics.

"An important success factor is having the tools and processes in place to painlessly create these experiences. Virtual Contact Centre 8.1 brings sophisticated contact centre functionality - such as a comprehensive multi-channel routing design environment and proactive web chat - to an easy to implement cloud-based solution, significantly increasing the business value and ROI for new and existing 8x8 customers."

8x8 Sr. Vice President of Product & Strategy Darren Hakeman added: "In a world where consumers control how and when they engage with the companies they do business with, having an effective, multichannel customer engagement strategy is an imperative businesses can't ignore.

"Virtual Contact Centre 8.1 brings together all of the capabilities and tools businesses need to ensure successful customer interactions packaged in a fast to deploy solution."

The City Council for Derby has signed a £1.2m deal with Virgin Media Business to provide Internet connectivity for SMEs.

The initiative forms part of Connect Derby, a £14.2m scheme, which sees Derby City Council's primary managed workspaces come together under one banner in a project to create jobs for local people.

Local businesses can access super-fast Internet at a speed of 2Gbps at a fraction of the usual cost, thanks to services provided by Virgin Media Business.

Tenants can also benefit from unified communications, HD video conferencing, multi-device instant messaging and full-time IT support services from on-hand experts, giving them more time to focus on growing their businesses.

The scheme will provide micro businesses, entrepreneurs and SMEs with the high specification working environment, IT infrastructure and business support they need to improve business survival rates and act as a catalyst for expansion and growth. It is also hoped the project will create further jobs by increasing inward investment to the city.

The Council is looking to attract more innovative and hi-tech SMEs from across the Midlands, including Nottingham, Sheffield and Leicester. Derby already has a strong reputation in this area, with over 12% of its workforce employed in hi-tech roles - four times the national average.

Andy Fisk, director of public sector at Virgin Media Business, said: "In the heart of Derby, this is about giving local businesses access to the very best technology at a cost they can afford, helping them achieve their ambitions faster.

"SMEs are the lifeblood of our economy, so it's critical that we give them the digital capabilities they need to grow and succeed. Getting these tools and infrastructure in place will play a critical part in maintaining the UK's digital advantage and supporting our economic recovery."

Virgin Media Business has been working with Derby City Council since 2013, providing wide and local area networking and WiFi to local businesses and residents.

Plantronics has launched a new family of contact centre headset solutions - the EncorePro 500 headset series.

The company also announced its next generation USB audio processors for Plantronics headsets that allows for a more complete audio experience by providing contextual information that contact centre managers can leverage to improve their customer interactions operations.

"With the rise of social media, smartphones and self-service, customer interactions are now in the public domain. Engaged and prepared customer interactions are vital to making every call matter and end in a positive resolution," said Philip Vanhoutte, Senior Vice President and Managing Director E&A, Plantronics.

"With our new portfolio, organisations will immediately see the value of equipment and intelligence that enables operations to be more effective, not to mention creating a positive experience for both the customer interactions associate and the customer."

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise has been sold to China Huaxin for 202 million euros.

Following the divestment, Alcatel-Lucent will maintain a minority stake in a newly-formed holding company, incorporated in France.

Michel Emelianoff, Chief Executive Officer, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, said: "With such a dedicated investor, we now have the ability to execute on our ambition to become an essential player in the enterprise communications market."

Yuan Xin, President, China Huaxin, added: "Our long-term investment approach will help Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise deliver on its ambition while enabling us to strengthen our strategic position in the enterprise communications arena."