Comms Dealer

UK IT retailers Carphone Warehouse and Dixons have agreed a £3.8bn merger to create an electricals retail giant with 3,000 stores and sales of almost £12bn.

The new company, called Carphone Dixons, will bring the household names Currys, PC World and Carphone Warehouse under one umbrella. Dixons and Carphone shareholders will each own 50% of the combined group under the deal.

The companies said the merger made sense because their two markets (phones and IT) were converging as consumers increasingly use multiple devices. Dixons, which has just reported good results, still has some businesses in Europe; both firms were boosted by the withdrawal of competitor Comet in the UK two years' ago.

CA Technologies has named software specialist Amit Chatterjee as executive vice president, Enterprise Solutions and Technology Group, effective immediately.

Chatterjee will have overall responsibility for strategy and execution across the full portfolio of Enterprise businesses, from development to commercialisation.

In addition, Chief Technology Officer John Michelsen will now report directly to Chief Executive Officer Mike Gregoire. Peter Griffiths, who served as executive vice president, Enterprise Solutions and Technology Group since 2011, will leave the company to pursue other interests.

Chatterjee brings a 20-year track record of success in technology and software at both high-growth start-ups and global multinationals. Fortune Magazine named him 'Top 40 Under 40' in 2010, and Ernst & Young named him as 'Entrepreneur of the Year - Venture Capital' in 2011. He will be based at CA's Silicon Valley Technology Center in Santa Clara, California

"Amit is a successful innovator, business builder and team leader, and I am excited to have attracted an executive with his unique experience and capabilities to our company," said Gregoire. "His proven ability to connect innovation to opportunity and develop differentiated solutions is exactly what we need to further strengthen our portfolio, serve our customers and drive our continued success."

Amit Chatterjee was the founder and CEO of Hara, a cloud-based, Software-as-a-Service company that provides enterprises with the data and information they need to manage energy consumption. He also held senior executive positions at SAP.

Researchers say over half of the service providers participating in a survey have sizeable M2M businesses (ie, providing at least one million M2M connections to customers) and that the automotive/transport/logistics and utility segments together account for nearly half of all M2M connections.

M2M is still predominately a 2G-based system, a study by Infonetics found: LTE remains nascent, making up only 1% of total devices; however, both 2G and LTE are expected to be the fastest-growing M2M access technologies in the near term. National coverage tops the list of M2M solution features rated very important by respondents, followed by web-based management tools and service-level agreements (SLAs).

For many service providers entering the M2M space, a service platform is key to jump-starting an M2M business: Those surveyed most often named Jasper Wireless and Ericsson as the top M2M platform providers

Market research firm Infonetics Research has done this research and released excerpts from its new M2M Strategies: Global Service Provider Survey, which provides insights into the machine-to-machine (M2M) market - also referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT) - through the eyes of service providers providing or planning to offer M2M services.

"Service provider focus and prioritization of the M2M segment has been a relatively recent phenomenon, but as our latest M2M service provider survey shows, M2M is now scaling to be a significant business for a good number of providers around the world," notes Godfrey Chua, directing analyst for M2M and The Internet of Things at Infonetics Research.

Continues Chua: "The leading tier of M2M players have committed meaningful resources to developing their M2M businesses and now have significant scale to show for it - between 2 million to just under 10 million M2M connections. They have strategies in place and have created standalone M2M business units comprised of overlay go-to-market and technical organizations. M2M is no longer just an extension of the enterprise business unit for these service providers."

Some 55% of respondents are using internally-developed M2M service platforms, it found.

TalkTalk Group's preliminary FY2013/14 financial results have revealed impressive growth for TalkTalk Business, the Group's B2B division, which reported a third successive quarter of year-on-year growth.

New customers added over the year include Iceland Group, Fullers, Selfridges and Hutchison 3G.

Overall Corporate revenues for the year grew 5.6 per cent year on year, a key driver of which was a 38 per cent increase in revenue from business data products.

TalkTalk Business' data products performed well over the year, reflected in a string of high profile customer wins in the direct business.

In addition to its direct business, the provider's partner channel also continued to grow throughout FY13/14.

A five-year contract with Fujitsu, for example, led to the migration of 103,000 Post Office customers onto the TalkTalk network in Q3.

"Three quarters of successive growth is a wonderful achievement and demand for data shows no sign of letting up", said Charles Bligh, managing director of TalkTalk Business.

"As we continue to grow, our strategy is clear. We will continue to provide our customers and partners with simple, value for money products that leverage the scale and capability of the TalkTalk network, while simultaneously developing new and innovative products that deliver both value for money for our customers and long-term growth for the business."

BroadSoft has announced the commercial availability of BroadCloud in Europe, enabling service providers to offer cloud-based hosted PBX, SIP Trunking and Unified Communications (UC) services to their enterprise customers throughout the region.

These Unified Communications services are integrated with an end-to-end platform that supports the full life-cycle of the business customer, from initial quote to service activation to support.

As a hosted, cloud-based infrastructure, BroadCloud now arms service providers throughout Europe with the flexibility and scalability to market a suite of Unified Communications, including Hosted PBX, SIP Trunking, instant messaging & presence, audio conferencing and video calling.

With BroadCloud, service providers can more quickly deliver these Unified Communications services to their enterprise customers without the associated capital, lease, or maintenance costs of a premises-based telephony system, said the firm.

"Our European customers have witnessed the accelerated time-to-market experienced by our US-based BroadCloud customers, and they have expressed great interest in our managed service offer. We are excited to now bring BroadCloud to the European market," said Michael Tessler, president and chief executive officer, BroadSoft.

"We believe BroadCloud will enable our customers to offer a unified communications solution, quickly and cost-effectively, enabling them to capitalise on the rapid transition by enterprises to cloud-delivered communication services."

A finance solution that enables users to pay friends and family direct into their bank accounts using just their mobile number has proved popular according to Piran Consulting.

The service, called Paym, went live on 29th April 2014 and is forecast to transform the way money changes hands and the way personal payments are undertaken.

Early usage is being tracked and mobile technology specialist Piran Consulting which is encouraging consumers to share their #paymfirsts in order to chart initial uptake of the service.

The Piran team is interested to understand the social impact and is inviting consumers to share their Paym firsts, gauging the uptake during its first month, and also claim a place in the #paymfirsts hall of fame.

Adrian Burholt, Director at Piran Consulting said: "Paym is set to change the shape of UK payments. The proposition is intuitive and is easily understood by the consumer.

"This type of inter-bank mobile payment services has an immediate customer benefit, is easy to take to the mass market and we are keen to see how the technology is used in the first few weeks of launch.

"Loose change and IOUs are to be confined to the annals of history and the words 'can I pay you back when I've got some cash?' never to be heard again."

The Twin Town Challenge, a four-day Top Gear type Anglo-French charity driving extravaganza linking Witney and Le Touquet, and led by Brendon Cross, MD of Witney-based STL Communications, is revving up for the big green light on 23rd May.

The event aims to raise funds for Oxfordshire charity SpecialEffect which helps people with disabilities benefit from the fun and inclusion of video games. Comms industry representatives include M12, Link Connect, Gamma and Oak.

The teams will provide and drive their own car, costing no more than £500, from Witney in Oxfordshire to Le Touquet in France. They'll take on the iconic race circuits of Brands Hatch, Le Mans and Croix En Ternois en route, and enjoy a VIP send-off from Cornbury Park in Charlbury, a civic reception in Le Touquet and an unforgettable finish line celebration event in Witney.

Cross said: "We could not have organised this event without the tremendous support of our sponsors, supporters and the people of Le Touquet. The weekend will be a lot of fun as the cars travel through England and France undertaking a number of points based challenges on the way."

The 50 cars in the Twin Town Challenge will visit Brands Hatch en route to Le Touquet before they arrive at the Eurotunnel and then on the Saturday the teams will drive to the Le Mans 24 Hours Circuit.

On Sunday the cars will enjoy a circuit around Croix en Ternois, before returning to Le Touquet for the 007 street party and auction. The finale is a prize giving and farewell at Witney Lakes Resort on Monday 26th May, after the cars have been donated to Witney Motor Auctions for sale in aid of SpecialEffect.

Organisers hope the Twin Town Challenge will raise over £100,000.

www.specialeffect.org.uk/twin-town

8x8, parent company of UK-based 8x8 Solutions, has been ranked number one on Infonetics Research Sixth Annual North American Business VoIP Service Leadership Scorecard.

According to the report, Infonetics Research named 8x8 the leader of this year's VoIP leadership scorecard due to its solid financial position (10 out of 10 ranking) and the continued strong growth of its installed base. The report cited 8x8's publicly traded company status and its ability to post net profits with positive cash flow.

"8x8 has been one of the dominant players in the business VoIP and cloud-based unified communications industry for several years, and emerged as the decisive leader this year due to its solid financial position, continued strong growth of its installed base, service enhancements and geographic expansion," said Diane Myers, principal analyst for VoIP, UC and IMS at Infonetics Research.

"In addition, 8x8 has made significant inroads moving upmarket to serve larger, distributed enterprise customers. Many of these larger deals are with organisations that are highly distributed, where the benefits of cloud across many locations is readily apparent. This is an important trend we've seen emerging and one we believe will impact the competitive landscape."

8x8 CEO Vik Verma added: "Since we began offering our cloud-based business communications services in 2004, 8x8 has been committed to technological innovation, service quality, reliability and security, customer service and consistent, profitable growth. We are proud of what we have accomplished under these guiding principles and look forward to helping many more thousands of businesses optimise their business performance and growth with our cloud communications solutions."

Xirrus International, provider of wireless networks solutions, has named Don Scott as its new International Channel Director.

He boasts over 25 years of experience in IT sales and consultancy and will be responsible for expanding the firm's partner programme outside the US.

Scott's prior experience includes work at Aruba Networks' EMEA channel, Nortel Networks and Avaya's Global Accounts divisions.

"Don joining the team is a great coup for us as he brings breadth and depth of experience in growing businesses of all sizes, and successfully leading sales, marketing and channel teams," said Shane Buckley, CEO of Xirrus. "He will play a key role in the next stage of our growth."

By Clive Jefferys, JMA Network: We can all sense the recovery: The news trumpets growth figures to be proud of and order books are strengthening across all business sectors. However, the challenge of hiring new staff seems to grow with every day.

The latest KPMG employment survey highlights that new candidate registrations on jobsites are at a ten year low, with little sight of improvement. On the other side the CIPD has declared that SME companies are embarking on a hiring spree.

Trouble is, no-one can easily find the candidates to put in these new jobs. It's going to take a long, long time before employees are as relaxed about swapping jobs as they were in 2004!

Certainly as an agency we are doing very well this far into 2014. However, this has mostly come about through an increase in the net worth of each placement. The actual number of transactions has remained stubbornly level. So we finish our sales meetings every week with the catchphrase 'Just one more!' to encourage our consultants to find that extra sale every month. Sound familiar?

Fortunately, we are so well established that we can find the right people, in the right place, by mining our ten year old database of candidates for leads, and the key word here is 'referrals'. 

I think we reached a turning point at the end of last year when our referral commissions exceeded our conventional advertising spend for the first time ever. Every month since has been the same and I've come to the conclusion that the search for passive candidates is the only way forward, whether you are an agent or employer.

So if you are hirer and you need to fill key positions, you need to increase the volume of your voice in this seller's market. That's a tough proposition when so many people are shouting so loudly, so the best thing you can do is to go where everyone else goes.

It's the old adage about why shoe shops are always next to other shoe shops, and it's no less true in recruitment. So if you need to hire people, the only place to go is where vacancies and candidates congregate.

Maybe it's a bit like going to the doctor about the little problem you've had for a while, but just won't go away. Once you've made the decision to ask for advice, you'll feel so much better when you let the professionals sort it out for you instead.