Comms Dealer

Voip.co.uk has extended its reach into Europe with the acquisition of Denmark-based UC firm Firstcom.

The company has acquired 85% ownership of Firstcom (for an undisclosed sum) which will retain its brand and continue to develop its UC suite with product launches planned for later this year.

Oxfordshire-based Voip.co.uk provides cloud-based services and is especially known for its SIP Encrypt product, which prevents phone hacking and is compliant with Payment Card Industry Data Security standards.

Adam Crisp, CTO, said: "The acquisition of Firstcom is a strategic alliance to extend our reach across Europe with the development of next generation unified communications technology.

"Scandinavia is well ahead of the UK in terms of unified comms which will allow us to offer British businesses access to superior technology."

The firm will soon be launching Firstcom's flagship mobile enabled unified communications platform, Universe, which, says the firm will provide new opportunities for Voip.co.uk's existing and new channel partners.

Bjarke Salomonsen, CEO of Firstcom, added: "We have been developing rapidly for three years. With the new ownership we will have more resources to develop our offering to the market and we have the opportunity to share technologies and experiences with our UK colleagues."

Voip.co.uk and Firstcom operate in similar vertical businesses enabling cross selling across the customer bases.

Voip.co.uk customers include Westgate Shopping Centre, Absolute Radio and Delta Taxis. Firstcom also works with high profile businesses such as Citroen, Sephora and Nutrica.

A new cloud-based collaboration platform using Microsoft Lync and Microsoft Exchange aims to meet growing demand from SMEs for scalability and flexibility.

The new service, launched by Node4 and called Unified Office, brings together email, instant messaging, voice and video facilities across all devices.

Natalie Stewart, Product Manager at Node4, said: "SMEs are increasingly ahead of the curve when it comes to how they approach their IT infrastructure.

"They are demanding technology that will fully support more flexible working practices and rapid business growth.

"By offering a cloud-based collaboration tool like Unified Office we are giving SMEs the scalability and flexibility they need to continue to grow and succeed."

Ethos is taking a new message to market under the banner 'Think Unified', a marketing strategy that the company hopes will encourage end users to think holistically about their comms needs rather than focus only on single point solutions.

Group MD Paul Norris said: "Customers increasingly want to deal with just one provider for all their voice, documents and data requirements. So we've unveiled a new proposition to our 3,000 plus customers that focuses on the key benefits of our Unified Communications solutions and services."

In what is shaping up to be a busy period of growth Ethos is also ramping up its event programme and plans to expand its team of 200 with a recruitment drive for positions in the Account Management, Service and Technical departments, while creating new graduate trainee positions.

The company's website has moved to a new domain and provides an information resource on the its voice, documents and data solutions, including case studies, brochures and a new company blog.

KCOM Group has hosted its tenth annual charity golf day, raising an impressive £36,000 for its charity partner Sparks.

Every day one in 30 babies are born in the UK with a condition which may affect them for life and each year less than £10 per child is spent on health research. Sparks raises money to fund pioneering children's medical research to get this to change.

Employees from KCOM Group came together with customers, partners, suppliers and celebrity sportsmen, including Ray Clemence, Iain Dowie and Mike Dean.

Forty teams battled it out on the golf course, winning prizes for the best individual round, best hole and best team, before an evening of fundraising activities including a silent auction and a raffle.

Madeleine Buckley, Corporate Partnerships Manager at Sparks said: "Throughout the day and evening it was great to see KCOM Group bring together customers and partners to raise money for Sparks. Everyone who attended played an important part in helping KCOM Group reach their fundraising total and we appreciate their generosity."

Paul Simpson, Chief Financial Officer at KCOM Group, said: "When we first held this event in 2005 just 13 teams took part. Now there are 40 teams with 160 players involved, including celebrity sportsmen from across the country.

"It's our biggest fundraising event in the calendar but we couldn't raise as much as we do without the support we get from the other businesses that attend."

KCOM Group will be taking on a number of testing challenges this summer in support of Sparks, including a dragon boat race and a 300 mile cycle across Italy. It has supported Sparks since 2012 raising £175,000 during that time to beat its original fundraising target by £75,000.

3CX, developer of the Windows VoIP PBX 3CX Phone System, has opened a new office in Modena, Italy.

The move follows new office opeinings in France and Poland last year.

Nick Galea, CEO of 3CX said: "At 3CX we felt that there was no better place to open our Italian office than in Modena, the heart of Italy's high tech engineering industry.

"Being firmly committed to innovation, 3CX is in great company at the home of Lamborghini, Ferrari and Maserati. We look forward to working with our 3CX Partners in Italy to take advantage of the boom in demand for VoIP solutions."

Loris Saretta, Channel Sales Manager of 3CX Italy said: "The opening of our new office in Modena is a great step. 3CX Italy significantly increases our presence within the Italian market, enabling us to better support our partner network and customers."

3CX Italy will provide technical and marketing support for 3CX partners and distributors. The new office will provide a training centre and locally-based support services. It sees sales growing as businesses switch from proprietary phone systems.

Square 1 Products has added AV vendor Draper Group to its portfolio of AV solutions.

Draper, a maker of projector screens, mountings and accessories, was introduced to Square 1 Products by the distributor's AV specialist Matt Farrer who has maintained a close relationship with Draper during his career.

"Our vendor relationships are born from product quality and functionality ensuring new portfolio additions can easily integrate with existing product lines to strengthen our solutions offering, and enable our resellers to further develop new business," he said.

Contact: www.square1products.com

Motivated by their links to friends and family affected by cancer a team from Bury-based Pennine Telecom have completed the Race For Life staged at Manchester's Heaton Park.

The seven strong team, called the Pennine Panthers, included Marketing Manager Belinda McGee who said: "We had a great laugh training, sharing each other’s woes and, while we got a bit out of puff, had fantastic fun on the run. I lost my father and grandma to cancer and my aunty has just received a diagnosis, so Cancer Research is a charity close to my heart."

York-based IT distributor Varlink has completed the integration of its EPoS sales division, EPoS Distributor.

Retail system resellers can now access the full product portfolio including EPOS terminals, receipt printers, touchscreens, cash drawers and other EPOS peripherals, alongside Varlink's mobile computing and data capture product set.

Mike Pullon, Varlink CEO, said: "When the EPoS Distribution division was established there was a clear separation between the products purchased by EPoS specialists and those taken by our established Varlink customer base.

"Over time, while there remains some fundamental differences, there are many product sets that are of interest to both segments of our customer base.

"We have therefore moved from two websites to a single Varlink branded site which carries all mobile computing, label printing, data capture, networking and EPoS brands.

"While we are retiring the EPoS Distributor brand, our three EPoS sales team members will continue to work, exclusively, with our retail focused customers."

Fujitsu is working with Intel on the use of Silicon Photonics to develop next-generation technology for the data centre, which increase the throughput of system data by a 50-fold factor and reduce system latency.

Today, typical server configurations tend to over provision functionality and under utilise resources, it says. Fujitsu Silicon Photonics-based systems - expected to be commercially available within the next 12 months - will offer a new way to build and operate data centres.

Such a performance increase opens up new horizons and opportunities in using large scale data sets. It will also radically change data centre design in favour of dynamic resource pools, where users are able to access the computing, processing, network and storage capabilities in line with their exact application needs. Individual components will be disaggregated, since Silicon Photonics can transfer data over distances up to 300 meters without any perceptible impact on performance.

The ability to remove system performance bottlenecks that hamper today's data centres is especially compelling when handling large-scale volumes of data, running into Petabytes. By replacing traditional connections between data centre components with light (photonics)-based interconnects, data can be moved through running systems up to 50x faster than today's state-of-the-art 16GB Fiber Channel technology. Resource pools can be optimised independently to achieve the optimum combination of performance, density, energy efficiency and cost.

The provision of this almost limitless bandwidth enables the optimised use of server resources in combination with direct access to Storage Class Memory connected to different server nodes via Silicon Photonics interconnects. This will provide huge performance benefits in all data intensive environments, such as cluster solutions and in-memory databases. Our vision is to have no dedicated storage, just large, redundant and highly available SCM pools which can be addressed by CPU loads with Store Operations.

Jens-Peter Seick, Senior Vice President, Product Development Group, Fujitsu: "Quite simply, the introduction of Silicon Photonics-based technology means that businesses can be confident that their ICT departments will be able to service bigger, better, faster and more needs than ever before.

"As a result, Fujitsu envisages that the data centre of the future will become much more of a technology enabler for business velocity. The introduction of disruptive technology such as Silicon Photonics-based systems creates new opportunities for environments where the ability to process large volumes of data has, until now, been a major bottleneck."

IT lifecycle management company Network 2 Supplies (N2S) has secured a brace of contract wins with the combined potential to generate an additional £1m per year.

The firm has renewed a contract with a global banking organisation to carry out the secure disposal of end-of-life IT systems containing sensitive and confidential information. N2S will also install and support a telecoms and IT infrastructure for the company.

N2S first won this contract in 2012 and one year later scooped an award for its green IT initiative. The programme saw 163 tonnes of equipment collected and only 0.1% go landfill compared to a 29% original estimate.

The second deal win is a six year contract with a global engineering and technology services company.

The work will involve N2S taking responsibility for the company's IT lifecycle management at sites across the UK and Europe.

Jack Gomarsall, N2S MD (pictured above), said: "In recent years we have become an international player by moving into global markets, and these two new contract wins will help us cement our reputation on a worldwide scale.

"The fact organisations of this magnitude are putting their trust in us is a huge endorsement to the professionalism of our work."

N2S has sites in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and London, and its client list includes the Home Office, the HM Prison Service, military departments, government departments, UK universities, large NHS organisations and a number of industry bodies.