Comms Dealer

Green Fields has recruited Matt Tate as Head of Professional Services. He boasts a strong background in IT, previously heading up the European IT sector within a US Defence (Exelis) company, taking responsibility for all technical design, strategy, policies and procedures.

Prior to this, he worked as a technical design authority for client engagements for an Education based Managed Service Provider.

Tate said: "We are planning to implement a few new processes to quicken our reactions to customer issues even further and to be a lot more pro- active in the way we deal with recurring issues.

"As part of our work on developing client infrastructures moving forwards, Technical Roadmaps will become a focus and we will be working closely with our partners to ensure Green Fields is the single pane of glass for every client's IT requirement."

A 12-strong team from Bury St Edmunds based lifecycle management company Network 2 Supplies (N2S) raised more £20,000 from a 310-mile memorial bike ride.

On March 3rd 1974, 18 members of the Bury St Edmunds Rugby Club in Suffolk were killed in one of the world's worst ever plane crashes. In total 346 people died in the disaster when the Turkish DC-10 came down in Ermenonville in France.

To mark the 40th Anniversary of the tragic event a total of 95 people cycled the 310-miles over four days from the crash site to the Bury St Edmunds Rugby Club.

Company director, Mike Fennings, said: "The ride was very challenging at times but it was a wonderful experience and to raise £20,000 for such a good cause is the icing on the cake.

"At N2S we always try to support local good causes whenever we can and we have Rugby in our DNA as one of our directors is Andrew Gomarsall, a former Rugby World Cup winner.

"We have strong links with the Bury St Edmunds Rugby Club and this disaster was obviously a very dark day in its history; a day that will never be forgotten. We feel privileged to have been involved in the memorial event."

Proceeds from the memorial ride will go to the St Nicholas Hospice, based in Bury St Edmunds and to the Bury St Edmunds Rugby Club to set up permanent lighting for its youth team pitches.

Zen Internet has launched an Unlimited Fibre Office package as an addition to its recently launched Fibre packages portfolio and comes with 'up to 76Mbps' download speeds and unlimited usage.

All Zen's Fibre packages are available on a 12 month contract.

For Business users, Zen sees Fibre Optic Broadband as the key enabling technology for a whole range of business internet services such as e-commerce, Cloud Computing, video-conferencing, VoIP and remote working.

"For businesses wanting guaranteed performance, Unlimited Fibre Office is the premium business grade service that allows them to fully realise the potential of superfast broadband, safe in the knowledge that there are no limits and no additional charges," said Richard Tang, Managing Director.

Phoenix' Managed Services division has been named BT's ICT Partner of the Year for 2014, recognising its work with BT Business Partner Sales.

Phoenix has produced its best ever performance in ICT business, growing total ICT sales by 170%.

BT Business Partner Sales operate a sales referral model where partners such as Phoenix find new business. In its role, Phoenix resell BT's connectivity as part of Phoenix's WAN services, including its CloudSure UK platform.

Tim Bodill, Sales Director of Managed Services at Phoenix, said: "Our communications team, under Nick Panton's guidance, has worked hard to drive growth and innovation in a competitive environment. This accolade from BT reinforces the strong relationship we already enjoy and the commitment to deliver further growth over the coming year."

Martin Clarke, BT General Manager, said: "Phoenix's performance has been driven by new business acquired from our competitors and they have more than tripled the value of New Business versus last year.

"This is a great stepping stone for Phoenix to continue this into the next year and achieve double digit growth."

VoIP hardware distributor ProVu Communications has staged the first of two vendor open days at its Huddersfield Office with delegates giving the vent a big thumbs-up.

The purpose of the open day was for resellers to see the latest equipment from its vendors Gigaset, Sangoma and 2N.

The event attended by 20 resellers was well received with Gigaset launching its new Maxwell tablet phone plus the new Hybird PBX phone system for small business.

Sangoma gave a market overview of SIP trunk deployment and explained how their range of SBCs fit into this market. 2N talked about its new Verso range of IP door entry intercoms.

Darren Garland, MD at ProVu Communications, said: "It is always good to have our customers visiting us at ProVu, and it's great for the team and the vendors to further cement relationships and for us to understand more the challenges our resellers face.

"The vendors were well received and there was great interest in the products being showcased."

Ian Godfrey Sales Director at ProVu, added: "The event has been a great success and we are very much looking forward to taking the event on the road to London on the June 10th."

Node4, the cloud and data centre specialist, has appointed Brian Conheady as Channel Business Development Manager.

He will be responsible for driving Node4's presence in the South of England and will create a strategic partner development programme that will target IT and comms resellers in London and the surrounding area.

A channel veteran, Brian brings nearly 20 years of sales leadership experience to Node4 with previous positions including Channel Director at Fastnet International and Channel and Partner Services Manager at Mistral Internet and Kingston Communications.

His experience of working with partners of all sizes will be invaluable as Node4 invests in its channel strategy to accelerate growth in Southern England.

"Node4 has seen significant growth in its channel business in the past few years and my role is to build on this success and to strategically develop our partner programme in the South," commented Conheady.

"As the bottom continues to fall out of the hardware market, more and more IT and comms resellers are looking for alternative solutions that can create recurring revenue streams.

"Reselling Node4's data storage, cloud and communication solutions can generate this and at the same time give end users access to the most up to date IT solutions."

Paul Bryce, Business Development Director of Node4 added: "Brian's knowledge and expertise of the UK IT channel market will be invaluable as we continue to expand the organisation as part of our ambitious growth plans.

"Brian understands the importance that Node4 places on having strategic partnerships with all our resellers. He will be working closely with new and existing partners to deliver success for both parties."

Exertis Micro-P staff are to take part in a 24 hour football match in support of a local football club, Hyndburn Youth FC, and Blackburn Youth Zone.

Staff from the warehouse and sales teams based in the UC, IT and Mobile distributors Altham office will join over 100 children and adults from the local community to compete in the 24 hour non-stop game, kicking off at 10am on 7th June at Blackburn Youth Zone.

Hyndburn Youth was established in 2010 by Paul Hammerton, Goods Inwards Supervisor at Exertis Micro-P, with other parents who believed children should play football for fun and all children, regardless of ability, should be treated as equals.

Hammerton said: "The team name, badge and kit colours were all designed and chosen by the original players and parents and the club is now a well established Charter Standard Club, supporting the local community.  

"The team partnered with Blackburn Youth Zone for this event as they share the same ethos as Hyndburn Youth FC where every individual, no matter what age, deserves the chance to have fun.

"In addition the youth zone provide continued support for children and young adults from the local area to provide opportunities for the young to show what they can do and that everyone matters."

The 'goal' of this event is to provide funding to allow continued running of the Youth Zone & HYFC and to facilitate the purchase of new equipment for both organisations.

Exertis Micro-P are a sponsor of the Youth Zone and also sponsor the Hyndburn FC Adults team.

For anyone wishing to donate, please click here

Cloud-based customer contact centre and self-services supplier Enghouse Interactive has rolled out a new pan-European Partner Programme with a select group of distributors and VARs, including technology resellers and application service providers.

Customers that have already joined include BT, Virgin Media Business, Telefónica UK, Unify Communications and 4Net Technologies.

Members of Enghouse Interactive's EMEA Partner Programme are sub-divided into distributors and value added resellers. The latter category consists of technology resellers, application service providers, OEM providers that rebrand products as their own, and partners focused on supporting delivery to end customers, often as part of a broader solution.

The programme also features tiered platinum, gold, silver and authorised membership, depending on the partner's level of market reach, skills and expertise, revenue generation capability and ability to take on multiple products.

Tony Davies, International Partner Director, Enghouse Interactive, said: "We are looking to recruit partners that want to develop specialist expertise in our solutions and can commit to growing an ongoing and scalable business with us while investing in the development of their teams through training.

"Through our new programme we will concentrate on delivering the capability to enable partners to break out of their product silos, work with us to develop a breadth of solutions and become a single point of contact for their own customers."

Lance Grogan, Alliance Director at Telefónica UK, added: "We are focused on providing customers with hosted voice and enterprise capability around Microsoft Lync. The Enghouse Interactive contact centre offering is suited to this market and now forms a key element of our offering. We are seeing our business pipeline growing and expect the same from our relationship with Enghouse Interactive over time."

Resellers not in the programme can now purchase through the company's family of distributors such as Westcon, 5i Ltd and NEC.

Data centre capacity continues to rise confirms a new study. Digital Realty's 2014 survey of trends across Europe canvassed data centre decision makers in the UK, Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Ireland. When asked about future plans for data centre capacity planning, almost all respondents (92%) indicated they are planning some form of expansion within the next four years.

More than one-third (38%) of respondents expected their existing data centre budget to grow between 5-10% in the next 12 months, with an additional 7% of respondents expecting to increase their data centre budget by more than 10% in the next 12 months.

When making decisions about new data centre facility investments, the most important considerations for respondents were the data centre's network connectivity options (81%), including carrier availability and carrier density. The next most important considerations were the resiliency level and availability of the data centre facility (79%), the cost of energy at the data centre location (77%), and the level of control over the data centre facility (76%).

Storage growth, business growth, and the virtualisation of critical applications are seen to be the greatest drivers for data centre capacity growth for European companies participating in a commissioned survey conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Digital Realty Trust, provider of data centre and colocation solutions.

The combined survey results for the five countries revealed that the top expected drivers of data centre capacity growth were storage growth (56%), business growth (48%), and virtualisation (42%). The next tier of drivers included big data (36%), business continuity (26%), and data centre consolidation (23%).

Commenting on the survey findings, Bernard Geoghegan, Managing Director, EMEA, for Digital Realty said, "This information further enhances our understanding of current and prospective client requirements. In a notable shift from last year, the top three drivers of data centre capacity growth were storage growth, business growth, and virtualisation, versus security, disaster recovery, and the supply/reliability of power in the 2013 survey. This is consistent with the shifting view of the data centre from a cost centre to a revenue centre, and a critical component of underlying business growth."

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan Analysis of the European hosted IP Telephony and UCC services market finds that the market earned revenues of $2.46 billion in 2013 and estimates this to rocket up to $9.53 billion in 2019.

"Most installed legacy on-premises systems have reached the end of their useful life and businesses are looking for upgrade alternatives," said Frost & Sullivan Programme Director Elka Popova. "Rising confidence in the maturity and capabilities of voice over IP (VoIP) and IP telephony coupled with a better understanding of the benefits of cloud technologies is driving enterprise migration to next-generation communications solutions and services."

While large distributed organisations with a growing number of remote and mobile workers are expected to deploy hosted solutions, penetration will remain higher among small and medium-sized businesses. Moreover, as long as the installed base of on-premises systems still meets the basic communications needs of most businesses, they may not see the need to switch to hosted IP telephony and UCC services. Businesses with specific customisation, integration or security requirements also prefer premises-based solutions over hosted services.

The fear of losing control over their communications as well as concerns over VoIP quality and reliability further prevent many businesses from outsourcing IP telephony and UCC solutions. Improving service standards and performance consistency will be crucial to enhance customer satisfaction and therefore limit customer churn back to premises-based systems.

"The development of new types of solutions (multi-instance platforms based on virtualised private branch exchange technology) and new business models (UC-as-a-service and cloud UCC) will boost penetration in different customer segments as well as in companies with stringent customisation and security requirements," observed Popova. "Additionally, gaining access to a channel network with significant IP telephony and UCC expertise will help service providers succeed in the European market."

As the market matures, geographic reach and financial stability will become important factors for market expansion in this region. Mergers and acquisitions will pave the way for solution providers to establish a strong foothold.