Comms Dealer

When partner companies IT@Spectrum and The One Point took their strategic partnership to a new level in January they did not expect the high number of businesses that would take them up on their joint invitation to 'come and see' how technology can drive growth. More than 500 people have visited in response to the invitation.

The sister businesses created a state-of-the-art working environment at their £2.75m headquarters at the Bridgehead business park in East Yorkshire, where their teams work together to offer a package of IT managed services to a combined client base of more than 1,200 organisations.

The new offices, called The View, have also been purpose-designed to enable formal and informal meetings with customers and prospective customers, enabling them to see the latest technology being used to deliver efficiency and productivity.

IT@Spectrum has more than 30 years experience providing solutions to enable businesses to print more efficiently, manage their data and information electronically and automate processes.

Business IT and telecoms provider The One Point collected the 02 Direct Partner of the Year award in 2016 and is in the top 5% of Microsoft Partners in the UK.

IT@Spectrum MD Ken Sturdy said: "We've opened our doors and welcomed in lots of people. We're showing the latest technology in action and we're practising what we preach.
It's been a revolving door, every single day people are coming in to visit us and make use of the facilities in a variety of ways.

"We always say this place is open to our customers, potential customers, suppliers and friends. Our messages is ‘come and see, you're very welcome and you might well learn something'."

The events calendar features quarterly Tech Talks focused on helping businesses to use technology to drive growth. The first of the Tech Talks series will take place at The View during Humber Business Week and will help companies to organise and utilise profitably the vast amount of data generated within their businesses.

The One Point MD Martin Lauer said: "We've developed these engagements into a calendar of one-off, monthly and quarterly events. The View has effectively become a business destination with some of the region's most influential organisations routinely making use of our offices."

Sarah Downing, Head of Marketing at the Bondholders which used The View for its latest Board meeting, said: "It's a positive move by IT@Spectrum and The One Point to make their offices available to so many visitors and reflects the forward-thinking approach they take to developing links with businesses across the region."

Pictured: Martin Lauer (left) with Ken Sturdy

TheCloud has appointed Daniel Crespi (pictured) as MD as the channel-only business prepares to raise its brand profile in the partner community.

Crespi brings 26 years industry experience working in Australia and the UK, 17 of which were senior positions in wholesale and channel, most recently as Director and shareholder of Telcoinabox.

TheCloud launched in 2012 as a provider of cloud solutions via its Revolution Cloud platform which is in its fourth iteration (released in January 2017) following a £2m-plus investment.

RevolutionCloud is an end-to-end platform owned and operated by a single party from the ISP layer through to applications and storage and hosted across four London data centres and an off-grid remote DR centre.

Founder and Director Allan Packer said: "Daniel is a significant addition to the TheCloud team and his experience will prove invaluable as we launch a suite of Revolution Cloud products. His skills perfectly match our channel-only model."

Crespi added: "If a telecoms reseller, indeed any reseller, isn't seriously considering cloud services in their offering they won't be around as convergence gathers momentum. To join the TheCloud at this time simply makes sense."

Analyst house IDC says Western European revenues for cognitive and artificial intelligence (AI) systems will reach $1.5bn in 2017, an increase of 40% over 2016.

IDC says Western European spending on cognitive and AI solutions will continue to see significant investment over the next several years too, achieving a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 42.5% through to 2020, when revenues will be more than $4.3bn.

"IDC is seeing huge interest in cognitive applications and AI across Europe from different industry sectors, healthcare and government," said Philip Carnelley, research director for enterprise software at IDC Europe and leader of IDC's European AI Practice.

"Although only a minority of European organisations have deployed AI solutions today, a large majority are either planning to deploy or evaluating its potential.

"They are looking at use cases with clear ROI, such as predictive maintenance, fraud prevention, customer service and sales recommendation."

The three largest Western European industries to invest in cognitive and artificial intelligence systems are banking, retail and discrete manufacturing, although cross-industry applications have the largest share across all industries.

By 2020, these industries - including cross-industry applications - will account for almost half of all IT spending on cognitive and artificial intelligence systems.

The total finance sector (banking, insurance and securities) will account for 22% of cognitive spending in 2020. However, the fastest growing sectors to 2020 will be distribution and services (professional services, retail and transportation) with a CAGR of 60.8% to 2020, the public sector (education, government and healthcare providers) with a CAGR of 60.8%, and infrastructure (telecommunications and utilities) with a CAGR of 60.1%.

From a technology perspective, said IDC, the largest area of spending in Western Europe in 2017 will be cognitive applications ($516m), which includes cognitively-enabled process and industry applications that automatically learn, discover and make recommendations or predictions.

The cognitive/AI use cases that will see the greatest levels of investment in Western Europe this year are: sales process recommendation and automation systems, fraud analysis and investigation, quality management investigation and recommendation systems, automated threat intelligence and prevention, and IT automation systems.

Huawei's Western Europe enterprise business group is promising to help deliver an average 35% jump in Huawei sales among its partners this year.

This target follows an average 25% increase in sales for its partners last year when compared to 2015, said the Chinese vendor.

News of the promised sales bonanza came at this week's Huawei Western Europe partner summit in Paris, where hundreds of delegates heard how the company is continuing to morph into a cloud services operation to support partner business in markets such as big data and analytics, the Internet of Things (IoT), digital transformation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, software-defined networking and storage and other business areas.

Leon He, Huawei president of the enterprise business group for Western Europe, told delegates: "In 2016, 90% of our sales came through our partners and there was 55% revenue growth in the Western Europe enterprise group as we approach new ICT and digital transformation opportunities.

"The numbers of our partners are increasing but more importantly the quality of our partners is improving."

He said 'Cloud 1.0' was all about the likes of Amazon, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce and the services they provide, but that 'Cloud 2.0' would see Huawei play a leading role in delivering cloud-based digital transformation involving the likes of IoT, big data, artificial intelligence and machine learning as part of the trend towards a BDII (business-driven ICT infrastructure).

Huawei is looking to widen its existing relationships with companies including Orange, Telefonica and T-Systems to support the delivery of these services in the cloud.

Leon He added that $300m was being put aside to support business pipeline development with Huawei partners, covering the likes of marketing and technology development.

Jaco Pesschier, Huawei channel sales manager for the Western Europe enterprise group, told delegates that the business now had 1,068 partners in the region, which represented 4% growth on the previous year.

"We want to keep these partner numbers stable and don't want too many more, as we won't be able to focus and deliver the optimal support needed as we enter new markets," stated Pesschier.

Pesschier also said the company was now committed to a 'two plus one' distribution model where each country would have no more than two national distributors and perhaps an additional international distribution player where appropriate, but no more than three distributors in each country. 

The priorities for the company, he said, were to protect margins for partners, widen channel skills and certification, and drive forward partnership in digital transformation business.    

Arden Group's acquisition of Birmingham-based Computerworld Business Solutions (CBS) for an undisclosed sum bolsters the comms provider's managed service offering with IT support and services, and builds on its previous acquisitions of Page IT and Unitycomm, two IT technology companies. CBS is a Sophos Gold and Synchronised Security partner and its 20-strong team will be merged within Arden Group.

Arden Group MD Nigel Walker commented: "The acquisition of CBS represents an important milestone in our growth strategy. It gives us the chance to deliver a fully converged IT and telecoms solution.

"We are confident that this partnership will enable us to play a more defining role in the growth of our shared customer base."

Bowmark Capital backed Node4 has set off on the next phase of its growth journey having opened a new office and Security Operations Centre (SOC) in Nottingham.

The move follows three years of growth that saw staff numbers treble to 185.

Bowmark backed the business in a secondary buyout last year and LDC, Node4's original investment partner, has provided more funding to support the growth plan which has a mid-market focus.

A series of acquisitions together with organic growth and a broader managed service portfolio have helped to grow the customer base to over 900 organisations in 2017.

The Nottingham office will provide a base for up to 50 employees enabling Node4 to expand its geographic presence in the midlands and tap into a city that offers a strong base of potential customers and employees.

Node4's managed security service launched in 2016 and is targeted at the SME and mid-market sector.

CEO Andrew Gilbert commented: "Our end-to-end service offering has helped us win some high value managed services contracts in the last 12 months.

"We are attracting fast-growing companies who want to outsource their IT infrastructure to a strategic partner."

The growing popularity of dog ownership among Invosys workers prompted the Manchester-based firm to adopt animal organisation the PDSA as its charity for 2017.

The charity treats the pets of those experiencing economic and social hardship at 50-plus pet hospitals and over 380 practices.

Dan Fish, HR Director for Invosys and co-ordinator of the charity efforts, said: "It's a key part of our ethos to give something back to the wider community, so we pledge to support a charity each year with staff dedicating their own time to raise funds. PDSA seemed fitting for 2017 with many of the team being big animal lovers.

"The PDSA is a fantastic charity which helps people and pets stay together, even when they are facing financial difficulties."

Pictured: Invosys staffers Ellie Hazelwood with Hugo the dog and Dan Fish with Harley

Vodafone's virtualised security capabilities have been boosted following the formation of a global relationship with Fortinet that enables the operator to launch security services as a network feature without the need for additional hardware, software or licensing.

Vodafone Secure Network Gateway includes network-based firewalling along with intrusion protection and detection.

The second service, Secure Remote User Access, enables remote workers to connect to the corporate network securely.

Both services are delivered from within the Vodafone Global IP-VPN network and are purchased as part of the connectivity tariff.

Vodafone Enterprise Security Services Chief Executive Simon Church said: "Businesses are becoming more and more cloud-based, and the virtualisation of security capabilities such as these is going to be the foundation of a new generation of managed security services."

Dublin-based IT services firm EMIT has acquired the manage services business and customer base of local rival Softech for an undisclosed sum.

This acquisition boosts EMIT's customer base to over 3,500 end users across enterprise, SMB and public sector organisations.

The deal is expected to add a further €2m in revenue over the next three years.

EMIT founder and MD Eamon Moore said: "We have been looking closely at several acquisition opportunities for some time and believe that Softech is the perfect fit, particularly with its pedigree in delivering IT services and solutions.

"EMIT has very ambitious business development goals and will actively seek further growth, both organically and through further acquisitions."

EMIT is a Dell and Microsoft partner and last year won Microsoft's Global Small and Mid-market Cloud Solutions Partner of the Year award, as well as Microsoft Ireland SMB Cloud Partner of the Year.

The company began its commercial life in 2003 and provides customers with IT solutions and managed IT as a Service in four main business areas - cloud computing, business productivity, IT security and infrastructure.

Softech has been operating in Dublin since 1978 and provides, in the main, IT products and services to Irish business and educational organisations. The company also diversified into managed services, document management and the development of business process applications.

Distributor Nimans has witnessed a 15% spike in demand for Bluetooth enabled devices since tougher mobile phones laws while driving came into force in March, hitting offenders with six penalty points and a £200 fine.

Headset Business Manager, Jason Welsh, said: "Many of today's Bluetooth headsets offer much more than just standard voice functionality as they are an inherent part of the overall UC mix.

"For example, they can provide presence capabilities via Skype for Business thanks to inbuilt sensors. So a colleague in the office knows instantly if the wearer is available to take a call. It's about being safe and working productively and intuitively."