Comms Dealer

Logicalis has raised £25,600 for Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity (GOSHCC) at its annual charity golf event held at Wentworth Golf Club in Surrey. Logicalis UK has now raised a total of over £50,000 for GOSHCC over the last 12 months through its fundraising events.

Mark Starkey, Managing Director of Logicalis UK, presented a cheque for £25,600 at a ceremony held at the Hospital on the 31st July.

He said: "We're constantly amazed and inspired by what Great Ormond Street Hospital does on a daily basis. It is critical service and industry do all they can to enable GOSH to maintain its first-rate reputation as a world leader in the care of young patients and their families."

Logicalis has also hosted a series of other fundraising events over the course of the last 12 months, including a successful Christmas event, which raised over £30,000 for the charity.

Catherine Sheard, Fundraising Executive at Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity, added, "We rely heavily on fundraisers to help us buy essential equipment, rebuild and refurbish our hospital sites and fund vital research."

Pictured (l-r): Mark Starkey, MD, Logicalis UK; Beth Morton, senior management team support, Logicalis UK; Pete Morgan, service delivery manager (and Logicalis Charity Committee), Logicalis UK; Catherine Sheard, fundraising executive, Community Fundraising Team, Great Ormond Street Hospital Children's Charity; David Turner, project manager (and Logicalis Charity Committee), Logicalis UK.

Daisy Wholesale has doubled its number of Hosted Voice Exchange (HVX) training courses in response to the channel's escalating demand for education.

Daisy Wholesale will be running eight courses focusing on its HVX solution from now until the end of the year, double the original number intended.

Graham Harris, Product Director for Cloud at Daisy Wholesale, said: "It's our responsibility to instil our partners with the upmost confidence in the products that they are selling. When it comes down to it, knowledge brings profit, and skills produce satisfied customers.

"By increasing our educational efforts we are making it as easy as possible for our resellers to grasp our hosted voice solution, arming them with all the tools they need to successfully deploy it to their customer base."

Excell Group has been awarded Toshiba Platinum Partner status following a strong performance in Q1 FY2014.

While recent growth has focused on driving new and repeat business with Toshiba in the education sector through TTG - an Excell Group company - the reseller's promotion was also driven by a significant repeat business contract with popular self storage firm Big Yellow.

As a Platinum Partner, Excell Group now benefits from a greater level of tailored support from Toshiba in its key market sectors.

The reseller can also take advantage of exclusive benefits to help drive its business such as referrals from Toshiba's website, a fast track for supply of products and early roadmap visibility.

Excell Group most recently worked with Toshiba to build on Big Yellow's existing Toshiba phone system. Big Yellow installed 36 new Strata CIX670s to upgrade the remaining estate that was not already at this model level.

Daniel Fuller-Smith, Sales Manager for Toshiba's Unified Communications & Solutions Division, said: "Excell Group's new Platinum Partnership will ensure it is even better equipped to target organisations in specific industries and sectors, offering tailored expertise, as well as a wide product set and bespoke unified communications solutions."

Westcon Group has expanded its Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) Solutions Practice portfolio by signing a new EMEA distribution agreement with Spectralink.

Spectralink DECT and Wi-Fi wireless devices are qualified for deployment in combination with the UCC solutions from Microsoft, Avaya and Cisco.

Guy Koster, Director of Product Management and Product Marketing for EMEA at Westcon Group, said: "As the deployment of next-generation UCC solutions gathers momentum, customers require an increasingly complex, multi-vendor experience.

"It's now more critical than ever for channel partners to specify, design, deploy and support solutions backed by best-of-breed products. Spectralink clearly falls into this category."

Wilfried Schon, Channel Director EMEA & APAC at Spectralink, added: "Increasingly, projects are for larger multi-national customers and more complex in scope requiring expertise from Global Systems Integrators and VARs to design, deploy and support them.

"We anticipate Westcon's expertise and worldwide distribution capabilities from design to delivery to deliver significant benefit for Spectralink and our channel partners."

Demand for fax machines in specific sectors is increasing according to distributor Nimans.

The company works with various manufacturers and is keen to alert resellers to the continued sales potential, despite its perception as 'yesterday's technology'.

"Many people think the days of the fax machine are long gone and to a certain degree that's true but fax machines are by no means completely dead," says Purchasing Director, Andy Winfield.

"In various business sectors demand remains very strong. Insurance, banks and the shipping industry are some to name a few."

Nimans is currently running a series of special offers on fax machines, laser printers and label printers, with savings of up to 36%.

Winfield says security is one of the biggest factors where fax machines have the edge over more modern communication methods.

"Despite the digital age where email is king, there are lots of niche industries where the fax machine remains an inherent part of a comms operation," he added.

"We tend to see demand rise during the close season as that's when football clubs conduct all their transfer dealings and signed contracts are always sent over by fax.

"Emails can easily be forwarded and altered and then you lose control. It's far easier to sneak documents out of a building on a USB stick rather than a paper document. There's a psychological side to it as well as the older generation prefer to deal with paper in their hand when viewing and handling important documents.

"It may come as a surprise but there's still healthy demand for fax machines so resellers shouldn't ignore them altogether. They need to target key sectors to find customers who are very loyal to fax transmissions and use them on a daily basis."

BT and Avaya have entered into a five-year agreement which will see BT Wholesale deliver Avaya's Unified Communications and Contact Centre applications as a cloud service to mid-market and enterprise customers via the indirect channel.

Called Avaya Cloud Solutions, the service will give businesses and public sector organisations with 250+ employees access to the full suite of Avaya Aura contact centre and UC products delivered over BT Wholesale's managed Ethernet network.

The service will be available only from Avaya accredited channel partners through BT Wholesale.

The joint initiative also offers existing Avaya customers a hybrid model with managed migration to help them evolve from on-site to cloud-based services.

The pay-as-you-grow business model will enable businesses to respond quickly and flexibly to their customer demands and improve the customer experience and revenue generation.

James Hennah, director, Fixed Telecoms, BT Wholesale said: "Hosted Communications Services are at the heart of our plans to offer more to our indirect channel business. By working with us, channel partners can offer their business customers a complete and future-proofed communications service."

Joe Manuele, vice president of Global SP-SI, Alliances and Cloud, Avaya added: "New and existing customers can now access Unified Communications and Contact Centre Applications as a Service with BT Wholesale through our channel partners in a more affordable and manageable way."

tIPicall, the UK-based Channel-Only SIP and hosted carrier, has witnessed a significant rise in demand for mobile applications on its Hosted PBX service, One PBX.

"Just a year ago, around 10% of hosted license sales were mobile," said tIPicall Managing Director Guy Miller. "Now 40% of licenses sold by our resellers are either converged or solely mobile applications."

The report coincides with tIPicall launching its latest upgrade to OnePBX which includes improvements to converged licenses and introduces Call Monitor where supervisors can listen in to their employee's calls as a standard included feature.

"There were two important upgrades to be done to reflect the changing market," added Miller. "Originally, hosted telephony was a replacement service for onsite PBXs however increasingly companies are turning to hosted for its additional feature set, in particular mobility and call centre functionality.

"We therefore took the decision to focus on upgrading the mobile applications and introducing call monitor for all users without additional charge."

This shift to mobile apps is not without its challenges, continued Miller: "You can make the perfect app with a great interface but we are still heavily reliant on the mobile providers having stable data services over 3G and 4G and not blocking VoIP traffic, something that not all mobile carrier are meeting their promises on. We still have to build in features such as seamless transfer to GSM because the signal is not always good enough, even in the centre of cities."

Miller sees this trend is only going one way, adding: "We expect this to continue and be 50% by the end of the year, the cost savings and flexibility achieved by mobile voice apps is too compelling an argument for customers to ignore."

Brocade and Arrow Electronics have announced a distribution agreement that will enable the UK arm of the global distributor to offer the full Brocade IP networking solution portfolio.

Arrow's resellers focused on the Data Centre, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Cloud Service Provider (CSP) segments gain access to offerings including Brocade Ethernet fabrics and Software-Defined-Networking (SDN) solutions, along with Arrow services to support the sales and after sales process.

Recent research revealed that 92 per cent of senior IT Decision Makers (ITDMs) feel that their infrastructure is not agile enough to deliver robust and scalable services to stakeholders or support next generation applications.

The next generation data centre must be able to support the deployment of Cloud environments and handle the demands of the Internet of Everything. As such, it will rely on virtualised and automated systems to operate effectively and efficiently, representing a significant market opportunity for channel organisations.

Arrow will also enable data centre solutions to be financed through the Brocade Network Subscription offering, which gives resellers an advantage in negotiations by offering subscription based financing that allows customers to pay for their technology investments through OpEx rather than CapEx funding.

David Ellis, director of strategy at Arrow ECS UK and Ireland said, "Our commitment to developing data centre solutions that don't just fix the issues of today, but also address customer challenges five years out, means Brocade IP solutions such as fabrics and SDN are a perfect fit for us and our customers."

Chris Lamborn, head of distribution EMEA at Brocade added: "With the fast moving shift towards the Internet of Everything, Big Data, IaaS and the Cloud there is a significant opportunity for resellers to help their customers adopt the right solutions now for the data centre environment they'll need in the not so distant future.

"However, these can be complex projects involving multiple vendors and Arrow's expertise and partnerships in this area reflect our commitment to supporting the UK channel in grasping that opportunity to the fullest."

The quarterly survey of mobility security by Good Technology shows growth for Android, coming growth for Windows and further work needed on getting applications to work together.

The total number of enterprise app activations continues to see double digit growth, increasing 20% qtr/qtr.

Phil Barnett, VP and general manager for EMEA at Good Technology said that it was enterprises and the public sector pushing ahead with all types of applications on mobile.

"After a lot of discussions about securing users, first on phones, then on tablets, and moving to any type of device, there will be a period of expansion. In-house developers have got the core 5-6 apps covered, and seen the productivity gains.

"We had a customer who worked on getting the main 40+ apps secure, but who then warned us he might need 42 new ones added each week."

There has been particular growth in financial services and banks. Customers generally think they are at the start of a ten year run with mobility strategies to enable users gain access to everything they need to replace the desktop, he says.

The move to mobile will then extend to the Internet of Things, with users expecting data on their car dashboards etc. Traditional integrators with their own applications and management are also having to make this switch.

The gap seen in previous quarters in the number of tablet and phone apps activations closed in Q2, with 58% tablet and 42% phones, with government accounting for an increase in 5% in iPad activations.

The Windows position is interesting: It still accounts for less than 1% of activations, and Android claimed 12%, growing 5% this quarter, driven by strong usage inAsiaPac. Windows is starting to show up in plans, particularly in the public sector says Phil Barnett.

"Logically there are three big players in mobile: Apple, Samsung and Microsoft. In the public sector where there is no BYOD, Microsoft has an advantage, but has some catching up to do."

Because Europe was an early starter in mobile, its standards and people are still highly engaged. "Particularly in New York, where a lot of the financial players are working, we find a lot of Europeans, Brits especially. Europe is cutting edge, and this is important to the ISVs working in this area."

The next wave of mobile technology development will be about offering applications that combine available data and systems for customers, so there is still a lot of work to be done, increasing business processes and ensuring compliance and efficiency, he says.

NEC sales have hit an all time high at Nimans which has witnessed a 15% hike in annual sales.

Orders of NEC's SV8100 comms platform are particularly strong, said Paul Burn, Head of Category Sales at the distributor.

"Sales have been growing month on month for well over 12 months and it's encouraging that demand has reached record levels this summer," he said.

Nimans was named Top SV8100 distributor for EMEA 2013/14 at the manufacturer's annual Partner Conference in Cape Town, South Africa earlier this year.

"NEC is a strong player in the market and our own client base is maturing and becoming more established which in turn is seeing sales on the rise.

"A three-pronged assault between ourselves, NEC and most importantly resellers has delivered an exceptional set of sales results. With more upward momentum in the general economy we are confident a strong platform has been laid for even more sales success."

Earlier this year Nimans was named Top SV8100 distributor for EMEA 2013/14 at the manufacturer's annual Partner Conference in Cape Town, South Africa.