Comms Dealer

Custom Connect, a global managed service provider of carrier neutral and microwave connectivity services, has announced the appointment of Anthony Kingsnorth as Group Chief Operating Officer.

Kingsnorth will lead Custom Connect's global operations across its entire service portfolio, which includes fibre and microwave access solutions, ultra-low latency networking for trading and financial services, connectivity for media and e-commerce organisations, cloud and data centre services, and any emerging opportunities in new markets.

He will also be involved in the definition of the Group's overall business strategy as well as the development of its existing product and managed services offering. Anthony will sit on the Group Executive Committee and will be based in the company's London office.

"We are delighted to have Anthony join Custom Connect," said Jan Willem Meijer, CEO and Co-Owner of Custom Connect. "Anthony has a phenomenal pedigree combined with industry-wide respect and we have no doubt that his expertise in technology and managed services within financial services will be of tremendous value to Custom Connect, our customers and our partners globally."

Kingsnorth worked for a number of investment banks before moving to Fixnetix, a global provider of front office outsourcing solutions, where he served as Chief Operating Officer for Fixnetix and built the company's managed services proposition. Prior to that he worked at ING Barings, JPMorgan Chase and Lehman Brothers, where he led the EMEA Production Services team.

Kingsnorth added: "Joining Custom Connect is tremendously exciting, especially at a time of such phenomenal growth. Having worked with Custom Connect directly, I have experienced first hand the professionalism, level of focus and clear strategy centred around its market leading solutions and customer service. I intend to take this core belief to help develop the company and to implement this mentality across new service offerings as we continue to expand globally."

Hats off to Manchester-based ICT provider Calyx which raised over £2,200 in aid of Francis House.

As well as supporting Key103's Cash for Kids Day in aid of the children's hospice, it also held a charity auction and made a world record attempt.

Francis House is Calyx's chosen charity and the company has raised and donated over £4,000 to date. "Our staff voted on which charity to support and Francis House was a firm favourite - and since then we've all become passionate supporters," said Steve Clark, Calyx CEO (pictured wearing the pink pants).

In a world record attempt Calyx employees joined with customers, suppliers and co-workers to create what they hope was the largest ever 'Oops upside your head' dance. Details are currently with Guinness for verification.

Content Guru's sister company Bracknell-based Redwood Technologies welcomed His Royal Highness The Earl of Wessex to its UK headquarters.

The Earl, youngest son of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and best known as Prince Edward, visited Radius Court as part of his 50th birthday tour of the historical Saxon Kingdom of Wessex.

Organisations from business, academia and the voluntary sector, representing the finest attributes of the Wessex region, were put forward by Local Government, with Redwood being nominated by Bracknell Forest Borough, in which the company has been based since its foundation in 1993. Radius Court, purchased in 2013, is Redwood's fifth home in the Borough.

The Royal Visit witnessed a double coming-of-age, with Redwood celebrating its 21st anniversary within days of The Earl marking his own half-century. The occasion also provided an opportunity to celebrate the success of Content Guru, as a fast-growing pioneer of cloud communications.

The Earl was accompanied by the Lord Lieutenant for Berkshire, the Honourable Mrs Bayliss JP, and civic dignitaries including the Mayor and Lady Mayoress of Bracknell.

The Earl was welcomed by Redwood founders Sean Taylor and Martin Taylor. After meeting with the company's senior team, The Earl was escorted to Radius Court's Customer Experience Centre for an insight into Redwood's Big Communications technology. From there the party moved to the Network Operations Centre, where live services were inspected on the centre's newly-installed wall screen.

The Earl then toured Redwood's offices, meeting with departments ranging from project management and applications engineering, through research & development and technical writing, to sales & marketing, finance and administration.

The Royal Visit concluded with the ceremonial cutting of two specially-commissioned commemorative cakes to mark the double milestone.

Redwood Director, Martin Taylor, commented: "We are thrilled to have been selected to welcome His Royal Highness to the heart of Europe's tech industry in the Thames Valley. The Earl showed his keen interest in high technology and communications, and the whole team were delighted to give him an understanding of their work."

Redwood Managing Director, Sean Taylor, added: "I am delighted His Royal Highness made an important milestone for Redwood even more memorable. It was lovely to link historical Wessex with the modern heart of Tech Valley and a real honour for our business."

Unify is to provide the Royal Free London NHS Hospital Trust with a unified communications platform that will serve over 6,000 clinical and support personnel.

As part of a five-year deal worth £2 million, the project will offer hospital employees mobile and flexible work options and wider inter-departmental collaboration. The pilot will be fully deployed by the end of 2014.

Unify will provide a complete OpenScape suite of Voice, UC and Wireless Mobility products as well as 6,300 extensions for IP-based SIP telephones for clinical and administrative staff across the site.

Unify won the project after a competitive tender process through the Public Services Network (PSN) Framework and was awarded Lot 1 Voice. The PSN defines common standards for equipment, software and service operation for public and third sector communications infrastructure programmes.

Will Smart, Director of Information Management and Technology at the Royal Free London NHS Hospital Trust, said: "We're committed to maintaining the best possible patient outcomes and Unify's OpenScape portfolio will help us to ensure that we can deliver responsive, location-independent care for our patients.

"The OpenScape platform, used in a virtualised environment, will enable our doctors and support teams to better respond to patients' needs and make decisions faster."

Trevor Connell Managing Director West Region EMEA at Unify added: "The OpenScape UC platform will provide simpler and more convenient access to key Trust staff across different sites. The system will be fully scalable to the Trust's changing needs, whether heavily-used services like A&E or new hospital facilities. It will greatly reduce the Trust's fixed and variable costs as well as system maintenance needs.

"This contract further demonstrates Unify's ability to win and manage campus-wide UC programmes in healthcare that demand very high system performance and complete scalability across different virtual, managed or on-premise ICT environments."

Mitel has posted its Q1 2014 financial results, highlighting recurring cloud seat growth of 73% and synergy targets expanded to $75m. Meanwhile, a strong cash position enables a $25m repayment against its credit facility.

Mitel completed the acquisition of Aastra Technologies on January 31, 2014. The results include three months of Mitel and two months of the Aastra business.

Total revenue increased 69% to $241.5 million from first quarter 2013, primarily as a result of the Aastra acquisition which contributed $89.3 million of revenue.

Gross margins were 53.6%, down from 56.5% in the prior year, reflecting the acquisition of Aastra which was a lower gross margin business.

Net loss was $13.6 million compared to a net loss of $1.7 million in the prior year, driven principally by debt retirement costs.

Adjusted EBITDA was $35.6 million compared to $23.0 million in the year ago period, due to a combination of EBITDA growth from the legacy Mitel business and EBITDA resulting from the acquisition of Aastra.

Operating cash flow for the March 2014 quarter was $26.8 million compared to $9.7 million in the March 2013 quarter.

Cash and cash equivalents as of March 31, 2014 were $136.0 million.

Richard McBee, Chief Executive Officer, Mitel, said: "I am extremely pleased with the progress Mitel made in the first quarter, particularly the solid overall revenue performance.

"Our first quarter results reflect the traction we are gaining in our cloud business, with over 21,000 recurring cloud revenue seats being added in the quarter, representing 73% growth year-over-year, bringing our cloud recurring seats total to 142,600. These are both strong indicators that our employees, customers and channel partners see value and strength from the combination with Aastra.

"Since acquiring Aastra at the end of January, we have moved decisively to integrate the two organisations and to quickly identify and capitalise on synergy opportunities. As a result, we have identified significant additional supply chain efficiencies allowing us to revise our synergy target to $75 million, up from $50 million, for the integration period spanning the next two and half years."

Alcatel-Lucent grew revenues marginally to €2.963bn, growing 0.3% year-on-year at constant exchange rates and comparable business areas (Enterprise was a discontinued operation in Q1 2014). Revenues for the Group excluding Managed Services were up 3.9% year-on-year.

Core Networking revenues grew by 6.9% in Q1 2014 compared to Q1 2013, largely driven by 16% growth in IP Routing and, to a lesser extent, by IP Transport. This is excluding Managed Services, which decreased by half reflecting a strategy to terminate or restructure loss-making contracts, the Access segment grew 2.1% year-over-year.

Gross margin reached 32.3% of revenues in the quarter, improving by 410 basis points year-on-year. This improvement was driven essentially by favourable product mix and improved profitability in most business divisions.

Fixed costs savings reached €143m in Q1, bringing the total to date to €478m, when combined with €335m in 2013 (which exclude €28m attributable to Enterprise). In particular, SG&A expenses decreased by 20.8% compared to Q1 2013 and by 9.9% compared to Q4 2013.

As reported, the Group showed a net loss of €73m in Q1 2014, an improvement of €280m compared to Q1 2013, driven by the higher level of operating income, lower restructuring charges and a significant reduction in net financial losses.

As previously announced, it received in February 2014 a binding offer from China Huaxin for the acquisition of 85% of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. The proposed transaction has been submitted to the workers council of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise for the required information and consultation procedure which is now completed. Closing of this transaction is subject to certain other conditions, including the approval of certain regulatory authorities, and is targeted to take place in the third quarter of 2014.

Commenting on the first quarter results, Michel Combes, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent, said: "We began 2014 as we ended 2013 - totally focused on driving implementation of The Shift Plan. Having put the Group in the right financial direction last year we are encouraged by the continued progress shown in the first quarter of 2014. This confirms the industrial logic of the strategic choices we have made and provides a good start on which to build during the rest of 2014 as we work towards our objective of bringing the Group as a whole back to positive free cash flow by 2015."

Nimans has reported high growth levels of NEC equipment as year-on-year demand iuncreased by 136%.

The sales hike is expected to continue throughout 2014 with an established client base, strong NEC brand presence and a more positive general economic outlook all contributor factors, said the distributor.

Sales of NEC's SL1100 and SV8100 comms platforms were two of the biggest factors behind a sales boom, noted Paul Burn, Head of Category Sales.

"The SL1100 and SV8100 remain popular which more and more resellers are embracing and using to drive their own sales performance further forward," he said. "A three-pronged assault between ourselves, NEC and most importantly resellers has delivered an exceptional set of sales results. With more upward momentum in the general economy we are confident a strong platform has been laid for further sales success."

Avaya has lifted the lid on new models and enhanced functionality for the Avaya Collaboration Pods, a portfolio of turnkey communications and collaboration solutions for both enterprises and Cloud Service Providers.

Avaya is introducing two new Collaboration Pod models specifically for Cloud Service Providers, enabling them to offer Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) and Contact Centre-as-a-Service (CCaaS) to end customers. Cloud Service Providers Connex and ROI Networks will be powering their new UCaaS offers for their customers using the Avaya Collaboration Pod.

For enterprises, Avaya has added advanced Customer Experience Management functionality to the Collaboration Pod, which now provides support for multichannel interactions through Avaya Elite Multichannel, self-service with Experience Portal and management through Avaya Call Management System, in addition to full Unified Communications capabilities.

All Collaboration Pod models have also been enhanced with Avaya Fabric Connect networking. Fabric Connect, a standards-based network virtualisation technology, improves the network performance of real-time applications and provides simplified virtual machine mobility, greater agility and faster time to service via end point provisioning.

Based on solutions from Avaya, EMC and VMware, the Avaya Collaboration Pods deliver virtualised applications, computing, storage, and networking with all administrative and provisioning functions consolidated in a single orchestration system. Avaya provides integrated support for all Collaboration Pod components, simplifying software upgrades and eliminating the need for support coverage from multiple vendors. Fully-integrated, tested and ready-to-deploy, Avaya Collaboration Pods can reduce the time to deploy virtualised real-time applications from months to weeks.

Avaya Collaboration Pods are customised and pre-configured to the requirements of each customer and can be expanded as needs change. For Cloud Service Providers, the Collaboration Pods support multi-tenancy and multi-instance deployments. Avaya Collaboration Pods can offer a reduced Total Cost of Ownership over a five year period versus comparable do-it-yourself (DIY) and appliance-based approaches.

The new Avaya Collaboration Pods will be generally available in the third calendar quarter.

Genius Networks, a provider of global network services, has unveiled a new online Portal designed to give its resellers immediate access to a suite of services designed to increase competitive advantage.

Linked to best-of-breed carriers that support the Genius routing infrastructure, the Portal allows resellers to price and provision network connectivity from a single platform, enabling those at the smaller end of the market to work and compete at the speed and efficiency enjoyed by larger players.

The provisioning capability ensures simplicity in the process of delivering a network solution. Transparent access to all major carriers and all the Genius products ensures the most appropriate and cost effective solution can be put together. Other features include access to network monitoring, help desk support and marketing materials.

The Portal is provided as a white label service, allowing resellers to brand the user interface with their own styling, giving clients of managed service providers the confidence that comes with a consistent corporate identity.

Mike Walsh, Abzorb Director, has adopted the Portal using the Abzorb branding: "The Genius Portal offers full, transparent, online pricing and ordering. Working with Genius means we can offer the whole package from best-of-breed carrier connectivity to cloud services. Ordering through the Portal is slick, quick and simple."

James Arnold-Roberts, Genius Director, says: "Resellers are crying out for connectivity services that remove the complexity of provisioning and enhance speed of deployment both nationally and internationally. Genius has developed the Portal with the reseller in mind and we believe it provides them with everything they need to gain a competitive edge."

NEC's key distributors and business partners from over 40 countries across EMEA converged on the vendor's EMEA Partner Conference 2014 held in Cape Town (23-26 April).

The three day conference was themed 'Now! Next! NEC!' and saw Paul Kievit, President at NEC Enterprise Solutions, express his appreciation for the strong commitment the business partners have shown and congratulated them with their significant achievements.

"Our growing market penetration and expanding partner community is reflected in the increased number of participants, this year comprising more than 250 participants from different partner organisations across the region", said Kievit.

Awards presented during the Gala Dinner included those for top distributors, resellers, system integrators and selected areas of excellent performance.

"It is immensely inspiring to experience the enthusiasm of our business partners for our brand, our strategy and our portfolio. The awards we are presenting are recognition of our mutual commitment and business success. We look forward to a fruitful continuation of the way we are serving EMEA Enterprise IT & Communications markets together," said Ronald Schapendonk, Marketing Director at NEC Enterprise Solutions.