Comms Dealer

Computacenter's first half results show sustainable growth in the UK, continuing issues in Germany, and France recovering.

Group revenue for first half increased by 2% on an as reported basis and by 4% in constant currency as services revenue increased by 3% on an as reported basis and by 5% in constant currency.

UK revenue grew by 14% in first half of year and it says it is confident that 'momentum that we have in UK will continue for foreseeable future'.

German revenue fell by 10% in constant currency during first half while French revenue increased by 14% in constant currency in first half of year - overall this means that the business is up on the same period last year.

Microsoft is to axe 18,000 jobs over the next year in a restructure plan to align the recently acquired Nokia Devices and Services business with the company's overall strategy. The job cuts are the deepest Microsoft has made in its 39 year history.

Of the total, about 12,500 professional and factory positions will be eliminated through synergies and strategic alignment of the Nokia Devices and Services business acquired by Microsoft on April 25th.

The actions associated with the plan are expected to be substantially complete by the end of this year and fully completed by June 30th 2015.

The company expects to incur pre-tax charges of $1.1 billion to $1.6 billion over the next four quarters, including $750 million to $800 million for severance and related benefit costs, and $350 million to $800 million of asset-related charges.

The plans were outlined in an email from Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to Microsoft employees, and an email from Microsoft Executive Vice President Stephen Elop to Microsoft Devices Group employees.

The company employs 127,000 worldwider, including 3,500 workers based in the UK. 

Exertis Micro-P is aiming to put resellers in the frame for incremental revenue opportunities following a link-up with Cambridge-based video conferencing manufacturer BlinkPipe which enables voice and video over one Internet connection.

BlinkPipe merges the audio stream from an analogue or SIP conference phone with the HD video of their 720p, multi-element zoom lens face-tracking camera.

This way, the video travels over the customer's Internet connection and the conversation is not broken up by poor network performance.

The solution simplifies what has until now been a technical hurdle for most resellers, according to James Burns, UC Devices Business Unit Manager at Exertis Micro-P.

"The BlinkPipe solution eases the pain a reseller historically would have experienced with bringing this type of technology into their portfolio," he said.

"There is no need for a reseller to invest significant time and expense on vendor technical and sales accreditations or be restricted to USB devices that use an existing desktop conferencing service." 

Burns also noted that the solution is available in both an opex and capex sales model. And as part of BlinkPipe's accreditation programme resellers get a BlinkPipe Room System for their own demonstration use, sales and technical training plus marketing collateral and referrals.

"BlinkPipe makes video conferencing available to end users who did not have the budget for an integrated VC solution," added Burns.

"This product presents an incremental sales revenue opportunity for our channel partners to present to a well-established audio conferencing market in the UK."

In bold statement Dan Burgess, UC Devices Product Manager (pictured left), claimed: "BlinkPipe is a true game changer in the conferencing marketplace.

"It offers an opportunity for resellers to re-engage with their customer base with a product that offers 100% attachment rates to existing and incremental audio conferencing sales.  

"The clever bit is that the camera 'listens' to the conversation and lip syncs the video and audio so it appears they are both on one video stream."

Exertis Micro-P's launch plan for BlinkPipe includes a series of product webinars during week commencing 21st July.

BT has lifted the lid on One Phone, a new service that brings together a company's office phone system and mobile phone usage into a single service, hosted in the cloud and delivered on a mobile phone.

All of an individual's numbers are linked to their work mobile phone, so whether somebody calls their landline, extension or mobile number, all calls go to one phone.

The service works with a full range of mobile phones by inserting a BT One Phone SIM.

Graham Sutherland, CEO, BT Business, said: "With an increasingly mobile and demanding workforce, businesses need communications technology that is as flexible as they are. Missed calls mean missed business."

BT One Phone provides inclusive on-net internal calls between users within a business, a choice of company shared bundles or unlimited voice and text tiers, and access to billing data.

To install BT One Phone, in most cases BT will build a dedicated mobile network in a customer's premises. When an employee leaves the office there's a handover between their dedicated mobile network and the BT Mobile national network.

The organisers of this year's Managed Services & Hosting Summit have released more details about the speaker line-up and the content they will be covering. Staged by IT Europa and Angel Business Communications on 25th September in London, the event has also attracted more high profile sponsorships.

The new speakers will draw on new research to chart the fast developing nature of the managed services sector. The Managed Services & Hosting Summit 2014 is a management-level event designed to help channel organisations identify opportunities arising from the increasing demand for managed and hosted services and to develop and strengthen partnerships aimed at supporting sales.

At the summit, Phil Smith, AVG's New Business Development Manager, SMB, will highlight the changes needed in an era of industrial-scale IT automation, ensuring that there are secure devices, data and people. Drawing on the latest independent research conducted by AVG, delegates can expect valuable insights into the different user priorities in various geographies, as revealed by the research, and an in-depth understanding of the issues they face. The session will conclude with advice on how managed services can best deliver value for users looking to address their concerns of Risk, Complexity and Cost.

Dave Sobel, director of GFI Max's partner community, will look at how managed services is moving beyond the device. For example, how do service providers bill activity across desktops, multiple laptops, phones and tablets for each user? The more sophisticated part of the market is coming up with all sorts of ideas, and discussions with customers may be finally moving on from pricing, it seems. Dave will share information from new research on how service providers are changing to address customers in an increasingly mobile cloud-connected world.
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Rob Rae, VP of Business Development, Datto will discuss how business continuity can be added to the provision of managed services. 'sales' is not magic, he says. "Sales is a process through a series of questions and relationship building. In this session, we are going to share insights that we have gathered and analysed from hundreds of successful MSPs that have added business continuity to their offering."

The strong line-up of speakers for the Managed Services & Hosting Summit 2014 is headed by Tiffani Bova, VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner Research, who will provide the opening keynote. Tiffani's presentation will examine how both technology changes (cloud, consumption and managed services) and new customer demands are forcing technology providers and the broader channel ecosystem to re-examine their sales models.

Other presentation subjects will include: Trends in service delivery and changing customer demands, Hybrid IT, the impact of new technologies and evolving business models, Creating Value with Managed Services and the Future of Managed Services and Hosting and the changing role of MSPs and other channels.

These conference sessions will be augmented by boardroom sessions presented by leading vendors and service providers which will provide further insight into the opportunities for channel organisations looking to expand their managed services portfolios. Throughout the day there will be many opportunities for both sponsors and delegates to meet fellow participants within the Summit exhibition and networking area.

The new sponsors announced - Datto, NaviSite, Avnet, Claranet, Modern Office, QLogic, Virtual Instruments, Webroot and Aurora Kendrik James - join a strong line-up that also includes AppRiver, AVG, Autotask, Dot Hill, Dropbox, GFI Max and EG Innovation, with further major names expected to be announced over the coming weeks.

Driver demand for connected cars is intensifying as consumers call for better safety, smarter navigation and lower-cost insurance, according to Telefónica's second Connected Car Industry report.

The study found that consumer awareness of Connected Car products and services around the globe is high and is now influencing purchasing decisions; 80% of consumers expect the Connected Car of the future to provide the same connected experience they are used to at home, at work and on the move via their mobile phone; while increased safety, early warning systems, smarter navigation and usage-based insurance are cited as the most popular benefits of connectivity in cars.

Pavan Mathew, Global Head of Connected Car at Telefónica, commented: "Through looking at the connected car from a driver's perspective, it's clear that the demand for connected services in cars is unquestionable. Even though we're just moving off of the starting line, people are ready for it and know what they want. But challenges to widespread roll-out remain.

"Many consumers currently think of connected car services in terms infotainment and WiFi, but this changes when they are made aware of the variety of options that the technology can offer. Safety and diagnostics appear to be the most attractive features to drivers, illustrating just how important factors such as road safety and vehicle maintenance are in consumer purchasing decisions.

"We can expect to see a gradual creep of connectivity into vehicles over the next few years but there won't be an explosion over the next 12 months," said Mathew. "The reason for this lies in the complexity of the challenges that connectivity is trying to address.

"While OEMs still have a way to go before they break out of their traditional role as a manufacturer and become a full, connected service provider, they certainly have a strong, trusted base to build from."

The Phone Co-op has posted a 4.2% increase in sales for the first six months of the year. The consumer co-operative saw sales reaching the £4.5 million mark for the period 1st September 2013 to 28th February 2014.

Mobile services experienced the highest growth with sales going 37% up at £247,000. The other factor contributing to these good results was teleconferencing after The Phone Co-op's takeover of Community Network last summer, which added £118k to the business.

The Phone Co-op's Vivian Woodell said: "We're delighted to report such strong growth, especially considering prices and sales continued to fall in our industry. Mobile sales growth has been particularly strong and in the first six months of the year have nearly equalled those of the whole 2011-12. This start of the year has laid solid foundations for two important developments - the launch of the new Pay As You Go service in the spring and the acquisition of Namesco's broadband services in May."

The Phone Co-op also built up its reserves passing £1 million for the first time and reported growth in members' share capital by 15% to a new record of £4.65 million.

C4L has signed a partnership agreement with cloud company Virtustream, enabling C4L to add a set of cloud offers and expand its portfolio.

In turn the deal enables Virtustream to provide customers improved access to its Data Centres and Cloud platform using C4L's CoreTX MPLS network.

In addition, C4L can now leverage Virtustream's Data Centres, Service Provider partners and xStream Cloud platform, both in the UK & internationally, fuelling their international growth plans.

Pete Hill, Business Development Director at C4L, said: "Virtustream has provided C4L with colocation space in its Slough Data Centre (UKDC1) for the last court years, this being one of the Points of Presence (PoPs) C4L has access to in its UK footprint of DCs.

"Virtustream's core strength and expertise lies in providing cloud computing solutions to enterprise and government clients. We plan to leverage this expertise to gain new exposure to enterprise market verticals as well as expand our overseas customer base."

Mobile airtime distributor Daisy Distribution has refreshed its Vodafone and O2 commercial models.

Historically, the distributor's bonus commercial framework has focused solely on rewarding primary connections and new business. However, the Ipswich-based business has now expanded its model to take into account additional products such as Microsoft 365, fixed line and Vodafone One Net Business.

Julien Parven, Marketing Director of Daisy Distribution, commented: "As a business, we have evolved from being just a mobile distributor into a provider who is more entwined with our network partners and our resellers, and we want our commercial models to reflect that.

"We want to be able to reward our partners for their delivery of secondary products and in turn satisfy the network partners' focus in these areas. Making these additional revenue streams accessible to our partners and new products available to their customers, both become inherently more sticky. This in turn can allow partners to retain relationships more successfully and minimise churn.

"These secondary product sets, such as Microsoft Office 365, fixed line and Vodafone One Net Business, are a variation on existing products within our partners' portfolios, so we would like to encourage all partners to engage with us to secure that extra training and support they may need to take advantage of this new commercial framework."

Timico has launched a new referral programme to reward partnering IT organisations, consultants, and business professionals with cash incentives for recommending Timico services to their customers.

Timico clients and partners can earn up to 15% of the new deal value if a sale is completed.

Neil Armstrong, Director of Business Services at Timico, said: "By looking after our existing customers and offering financial incentives, we hope that our customer base will happily spread the word about our services, while also earning themselves some additional revenue."