Comms Dealer

Mitel has delivered a virtual contact centre solution to South Lakeland and Eden district councils in Cumbria, enabling home-based agents to integrate seamlessly into the contact centre and supervisors to manage and monitor operations from any location.

Implemented by Gateshead-based IT Professional Services, MiContact Centre for Lync from Mitel integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Lync to deliver advanced contact centre applications for the district councils' 25 customer service agents, all in a familiar, easy-to-use Microsoft Office interface.

Features including presence-aware telephony, conferencing and messaging have improved the contact centre experience for customers, as Caroline Metcalfe, Contact Centre Team Leader at South Lakeland's site in Kendal, explained: "The Mitel solution has had a positive impact on the quality of service and has been very well received by customers using our contact centre.

"We can provide much richer information to callers and the ease of transferring interactions and collaborating with knowledge workers throughout the council has increased first call resolution rates and reduced call times."

The virtual contact centre environment gives home-based agents complete access to all the voice and data capabilities of the contact centre and ensures customer service is not impacted if agents cannot reach the council sites.

The management capability has been extended to the home, enabling supervisors to spot problem areas, analyse trends, make decisions in real-time and also help to take calls at peak times.

Graham Bevington, VP International Markets, Mitel, said: "MiContact Centre for Lync is ideal for organisations that are invested in Microsoft Lync but need a more advanced and feature-rich contact centre solution, without added cost and complexity."

Networking solutions specialist Brocade has appointed Curt Beckmann, who was previously Principal Architect at Brocade, as its new Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the EMEA region.

He will be responsible for a delivery of a product roadmap across the region and lead the company's technology strategy. At the same time, he will continue as a leader in the Open Networking Foundation where he chairs Forwarding Working Group, the company says.

Beckmann joined Brocade in 2003 as a result of an acquisition of Rhapsody Networks where he was a member of the founding team. Prior to this, he worked at Bay Networks where his responsibilities included development of chipsets for Ethernet switching.

Beckmann will be based in Paris, France, and report directly to Brocade vice president for EMEA, Marcus Jewell.

"We're already seeing customers in EMEA laying the foundations for SDN deployment in their data centres, to enable business growth and innovation," said Jewell.

"Curt is an industry veteran with the vision to help customers and partners understand how they can transform their existing networks."

The TFM Networks sponsored Milton Keynes Rowing Club successfully completed the Milton Keynes Half Marathon in a time of just 2.5hrs.

The running team attracted media interest and coverage including a live interview on BBC Three Counties radio, local press and national rowing publications.

Following on from the success of the 2012 London Olympics the club has experienced a 50% increase in membership.

TFM CEO Stewart Yates said: "As a local employer, and with a keen rowing interest within TFM, I am extremely happy to support this local club in their quest to raise vital funds for the next generation of rowers and maybe even future Olympians."

Through the fundraising team and their sponsors the club has raised a total of over £10,000 so far this year.

For more information visit www.mkrowing.org

Imago Group has expanded its European network of subsidiaries with the acquisition of Vitec Distribution GmbH in Germany.

Vitec, based in Mainz, represents a number of audio visual and communications vendors including Polycom and is a specialist in video and data collaboration, digital signage and presentation solutions.

Vitec has built a sizeable business based on delivering value added services, including consulting, project management, installation support and training.

"Video communications is an international business and our customers and end users need support on an international basis," said Ian Vickerage, Managing Director, Imago Group.

With offices already in France, Belgium, Holland and Spain, the acquisition of Vitec will enable Imago to launch its fifth European subsidiary.

The acquisition is expected to complete by early July.

The growing popularity of Brocade's partner accreditation programme has greased the wheels of a rolling campaign convoy across EMEA that has seen partner accreditations rise by 69% in the first half of its financial year.

The Brocade Certified Ethernet Fabric Professional (BCEFP) level is proving especially popular with 1,500% growth in the last six months.

The Certified Network Eng-ineer accredited partner base has also seen significant growth with new accreditations up by more than 25% in EMEA.

"With many legacy networks now beginning to show their age, businesses are increasingly looking for technology partners to help them deliver next generation innovation, applications and services," said John Mitchell, Head of Channels, EMEA, Brocade.

"We have designed our accreditations to help partners seize this opportunity, working with them to build the technical and sales expertise they need to meet the growing demand for emerging technologies such as Software Defined Networking, Ethernet fabrics and cloud.

"We have also had success with our Partner Academy series which has been rolled out across the EMEA region."

European software vendors have generally enjoyed a relatively good year and have responded well to recessionary pressures. In 2013, the last full year for which accounts are available, revenues for the top 500 European ISVs increased by 13.04% to €104.9 billion ($137.8billion).

Overall publicly listed ISVs outperformed the major groups and their subsidiaries with growth of 14.73% (compared with 5.84% for parent companies and 11.01% for subsidiaries).

Independents also fared well, growing by 10.46% over the same period. These are among the findings from 'ISVs in Europe - The Top 500', the latest database report from IT Europa which is published today.

The database report provides further evidence that is applications rather than hardware that is driving IT sales in Europe.

Despite the challenging economic climate in many parts of Europe, ISV revenues showed increases in all 33 countries covered by the report.

The Danish market exhibited the most dramatic increase in revenues (up by 30.9%) followed by Hungary (23.9%) and Turkey (19.6%) and Russia (18.6%). The UK returned one of the lower growth rates at 3.0%.

IT Europa research manager Auri Aittokallio said: "Generally, ISVs are proving resilient in the face of both market and economic pressures. There are signs that this stems largely from adjusting their business models with services last year accounting for 44.2% of total revenues - up from 36.9% in our previous report."

Outsourced IT services firm Comms-care has acquired UK channel-based professional services firm Platform Consultancy Services for an undisclosed fee.

The acquisition enables Comms-care to penetrate deeper into the professional services market as it looks to expand its customer propositions around Microsoft, VMware, Citrix and NetApp technologies.

Ben Davies, Managing Director at Comms-care, said: "Platform is a perfect fit for Comms-care because it already delivers high end professional services in technology areas that our customers have immediate requirements for.

"We invest substantial time forging close relationships with our customers to ensure our services proposition is aligned with the needs of their business, and the addition of Platform will bolster those relationships further by demonstrating our commitment to both them and the channel as a whole."

Platform was established in 2002 and delivers a range of professional services to many of the UK's top VARs.

Simon Day, Partner Director at Platform, added: "Many of our partners are Comms-care's partners too so it makes sense to join forces and provide all partners with an enriched collaborative services model."

Comms-care currently supports in excess of 700 channel partners, some of which already use Platform's professional services. The acquisition will consolidate those partner relationships by delivering a much richer customer experience through enhanced partner services and increased operational capabilities.

Davies added: "We have seen a huge increase in requests from our partner base to provide more professional services around emerging Microsoft technologies such as Office 365, Lync, Hyper-V, System Centre, as well as Citrix and VMware virtualisation solutions.

"The business combination with Platform enables us to meet that demand while still providing the levels of service our partners have come to expect."

As part of the business combination Platform's original board members of Sean Armstrong, Andrew Mansfield and Nigel Roberts will all remain within the business and continue to drive forward their relevant technology streams.

Platform's Partner Director, Simon Day will take a seat on the Comms-care Board as Professional Services Director and will be responsible for all Platform related business.

Comms-care is in advanced stages of identifying other opportunities that will add further capability to its expanding services portfolio.

Ingram Micro has revamped its brand identity in a move to better show its outlook on technology and supply chain services.

"This is more than a logo change. We view this brand refresh as an investment in our future," said Alain Monié, CEO at Ingram Micro.

"Ingram Micro has made bold new moves with recent acquisitions, establishing global business units and developing a more global and customer-centric mindset with an agile, insightful and dependable culture.

"Refreshing and repositioning the Ingram Micro brand is a natural next step in our company's growth and success. Our new brand identity and strategy is a reflection of a bold new Ingram Micro.

"With our new brand, we want to present an identity that is simple, modern and represents who we are. We have the capabilities, insight and experience to help our partners - and their customers - understand, acquire and use technology to be more competitive."

Commenting on the recent launch of Policy Exchange's Technology Manifesto, Co-CEO of Outsourcery Piers Linney says the report makes important references on the need to use data more effectively to improve public services.

"The public sector contains a huge number of organisations with many different purposes and as a result has come in for a lot of criticism for being too siloed in how it operates," he said.

Encouraging government organisations to collaborate more and share services has been a central thrust of Cabinet Office strategy for some time, and the ability to do this rests on how data is stored, used and shared between public sector bodies.

There are a number of projects currently taking place within the industry in order to enable this collaboration. UK-based Cloud Services Provider Outsourcery, for example, is currently in the final stages of development for a cloud platform, in partnership with Microsoft and Dell, that will be accredited to carry secure and classified government documentation.

At a local level, work to increase collaboration is leading to the development of smart cities projects - where significant quantities of data are being shared and analysed to develop more effective services across municipal areas.

Outsourcery aims to drive this through every aspect of the business, from basing its headquarters in Manchester, to hosting industry functions in the region like the 'Digitally Enabled Smarter City' event, in order to promote discussion around how to achieve greater collaboration for public services.

Linney added: "I am supporting Manchester, where my company Outsourcery is based, to develop a 'smart' city approach so we can replicate the achievements seen in other cities where data has been used to build and develop more effective public services.

"While the success of shared services initiatives must be driven at the local level, to reflect local priorities, recommendations like those in Policy Exchange's report should be considered by central government to foster innovation and speed up thinking in this vital area."

Outsourcery was recently accepted to CloudStore, the Government's G-Cloud 5 framework, to offer its cloud-based services to the public sector.

Linney added: "While the power of technology to improve our lives is incredibly exciting, it is also important that we remember that much of the data held by the public sector is directly linked to an individual citizen.

"Understanding and respecting data privacy in the context of delivering public services is therefore an important step to achieving greater collaboration.

"Points raised in the recent manifesto recommend new ways to involve the public in how their data is used. Getting the balance right on privacy is as important as establishing the technology that would enable this to happen".

So the latest TUC survey shows that whether you can feel the benefit of the economic recovery is dependent on where you live in the UK. No surprises there. London powers ahead followed closely by Manchester and Birmingham, but for most people, in most places, all they know is that life is still tough, writes Clive Jefferys, JMA Network.

The report concludes that most of the population is 'hanging on grimly to the same job' and not willing to risk change, unless there are substantially improved rewards on offer.

While this may well be true across employment as a whole, within the mix many types of qualified professional are already on the move and certainly within telecoms this is true. Deloitte's yearly analysis reveals that recruitment advertising has increased by a whopping 25% and 85% of companies want to continue to expand their headcount.

At JMA, our new salary offers are up by 11%, but of 102 vacancies on our books a month ago, 83 are still open. Apart from the positions that we filled, it seems that most companies are not having much luck.

The UK workforce continues to peak at an all-time high due to a risk averse, static candidate market, yet in just three months unemployment fell by an incredible 375,000 driven by seasonal and temporary hires.

Here's a good example of this conundrum. One of my friends has just got the go ahead to run a £50m property redevelopment in Central London. Yet despite all this economic positivity, he will have to prefabricate as much as he can, because he cannot recruit enough skilled workers to do it onsite.

So who are the winners in our battle to attract new staff?
Well, this year's round of telecoms awards reveal an awful lot... we had 11 Finalists and 7 Winning Companies from our client list.

How did we come to work with those organisations? Simply because they offer great jobs, great pay, give greater worth to well matched candidates, and value what we do to make it happen too.

They are companies that are fast moving and decisive in word and deed, and that's what our candidates want to buy into. Perhaps if more companies followed this example, next year they could be winners too?