Comms Dealer

Fibre network operator Venus Business Communications has expanded its network as the government grant scheme Superconnected Cities gathers pace.

The network now provides 30 per cent more network coverage than before giving businesses in Euston, Camden, Whitehall and Westminster direct access to the Venus Dark Fibre Network.

The Venus Dark Fibre network delivers speeds of 10 gigabits per second and an uncontended service meaning that businesses experience no drop in speed during busy periods.

It also provides a symmetrical service, so businesses can upload and download data at the same fast speeds.

"There is growing demand from businesses across London for our network as they begin to realise that it provides a true fibre to premises service and can deliver very high bandwidth with access to a range of data centres," said Brian Iddon, Venus Business Communications' Director.

"We already have 14 points of presence across London that allows us to connect businesses directly to our network.

"This latest expansion increases this to 18 points of presence and the potential for thousands more businesses to connect to the Venus Dark Fibre network. Now our network passes hundreds of thousands of London postcode locations."

The new expanded network not only brings Venus Dark Fibre to more businesses across London it also brings the potential for future higher speeds of up to 40 gigabits per second.

"The government recognises that businesses require fast connectivity to compete in today's IT dependent market," added Iddon.

"With faster connectivity comes operational efficiencies and increased competitiveness. The government's Superconnected Cities schemes are stimulating businesses to get better connectivity and our network expansion provides our resellers and partners with the opportunity to exploit this scheme to its full potential in London."

Venus also announced the appointment of Sean Brown-Coleman as Account Manager. He joins from Virgin where he was the region's top sales person and ranked one of the top ten in the country.

"I'm very excited to be joining Venus as they are a young vibrant company that has been growing rapidly over the last 12 months and have innovative products and services to offer businesses," he said.

"I'm looking forward to contributing to the further rapid growth of the business particularly in the financial and multimedia markets."

The European Union's Atlas of ICT hotspots has identified 34 regions in 12 countries across the continent with the highest activity and potential in ICT.

The study has taken a closer look at both big metros and smaller cities, however the top three spots belong to Munich, London and Paris.

The report is based on the three core elements that have been carefully analysed in order to identify the best-performing ICT regions across Europe. The components of analysis include the region's business activity, innovation as well as its research and development opportunities.

Additionally, this has been supported by factors such as the intensity, measured in business turnover, growth and headcount, the level of internationalisation and the region's networking ability.

Other key criteria include the access to top universities and capital along with funding opportunities, the study says.

The EU also emphasises that in order to fulfil the aforementioned criteria the regions do not need to be big which is exemplified by a German city with 150,000 inhabitants Darmstadt which ranks high in the report together with Leuven in Belgium or Cambridge in the UK.

The report also finds that the UK ranks first in terms of the number of the ICT graduates providing 8 out of the 10 top regions while Germany ranks first in research and patenting activity. The employment growth is the fastest in Lisbon, in Portugal, and in the south-west region of Poland (Rzeszow). All three top cities Munich, Paris and London also win in the category of the venture capital acquisition.

EU's atlas also says that there is a number of factors that each of the ICT winning regions do share. Most of the regions are the established industrial, educational and historical centres which play a leading role in its respective countries and have a long-term policy on R&D in place. Additionally, they tend to create the clusters and are located in a close proximity to each other.

"This is proof that digital success comes through a willingness to invest, an open mindset for innovation and planning. Europe needs to build these values today to be a global leader in technology," says European Commission Vice-President Neelie Kroes.

The second-tier regions include: Karlruhe and Darmstadt in Germany, Cambridgeshire in the UK, Stockholm and Uusimma in Sweden, Noord Brabant and Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Leuven in Belgium.

IBM shares fell 4% as it reported its lowest quarterly revenue in five years, hit by falling demand for its storage and server products.

Total revenue fell 4% to $22.5bn in the first quarter, below analysts' average estimate of $22.91bn. Revenue from the hardware business, which includes servers and systems storage, fell 23% to $2.4 billion.

IBM has been changing its business structure, cutting jobs and selling its x86 server business to Lenovo. It has a lot of hopes pinned on the cloud and its analytics side. Russia had been another growth area, but sales here fell by 11%. EMEA as a whole was up 4%.

Software was the only major business to show some growth, with revenue rising 1.6% to $5.66 billion, but the growth rate was slower than the fourth quarter's 2.8%. Even the Global technology services side was down -3%, although it fell -4% last time.

By Clive Jefferys, JMA Network: We've all been waiting for a few months for this to hit the headlines. Unemployment has fallen below seven per cent and even more importantly, wage rises have started to outstrip inflation.

So the Big Question is how this is all going to affect to the recovery and for many companies that don't get with the plan, the answer is... badly.

Of course you will say I have a vested interest in wages rising, but let us not forget that for five years all of us business owners have benefited from staff costs staying below the curve. So now the active jobseeker is entitled to see the benefit from his or her next job move.

The big problem is, of course, that there aren't many new candidates available for your channel, field sales, provisioning or billings team. Every employer and recruitment agent is saying they can't find the staff, yet placements continue and to be honest, are accelerating!

So where are these new hires coming from?

The answer is threefold: Niche focus recruiters, headhunts between rival companies and highly proactive job hunters finding their own job.

So here's my prescription to speed your recovery.

Pill Number One: Raise your salary offers. Our best clients have stopped worrying about throwing in a few extra thousand on basic salaries. They recognise that a job unfilled is already costing them £5k or £10k a month in lost sales or service failures.

Pill Number Two: Invest in training. Don't hold your breath for someone with perfect skills to walk in the door. If they are that good, their current employer has already given them a pay rise and is hugging them like mad. Instead you need to recruit from a level below. Look for the good honest, hardworking people that are frustrated by lack of promotion opportunities, bring them on board and train them.

Pill Number Three: Accept that sales ability takes years to develop and is far more important than current technical awareness. If you meet someone that has that sales ability, enthusiasm and sparkle honed through years on the phone or in front of clients, go for it! If he or she isn't up to speed about FTTC, Roaming or Union Street, don't worry about it. You can train those skills in weeks. They are black and white, people either pass exams or resit them until they do.

Pill Number Four: Add a new KPI to your business plan. Include recruitment as a key factor in your growth and link headcount to departmental performance. This will uncover the managers that deliberately keep their teams understaffed, and reward those who really do have the company's best interests at heart.

We are on the verge of substantial economic growth. Whether you need to recruit for front or back office, the most important skills you need now are selling and customer service. Hire people with those magical qualities and the rest will follow.

Openreach has boosted its high bandwidth optical capability with a UK-wide 40Gbps and 100Gbps service that is capable of delivering ten times more traffic capacity than existing solutions.

The new services are supported by Ciena's 6500 Packet-Optical Platform and enable comms providers to connect multiple sites more efficiently by cost-effectively transporting larger amounts of data over longer distances.

Comms providers using the service can offer flexible, high bandwidth, multi-site connectivity and cloud-based services to their enterprise and data centre customers.

The optical services will also give enterprises and storage providers the tools to offer a broader range of services and applications, including the ultra-low latency facilities required by particular industries such as high frequency trading in the financial sector or synchronous data backup.

They will also enable businesses to locate in the most strategic locations, with the assurance of having access to high bandwidth, high quality connectivity.

Jon Hurry, MD, Strategy, Commercial, Portfolio & Policy, Openreach, said: "As more and more businesses move to high bandwidth cloud-based services and applications our CP customers are looking to support them with a much broader range of high quality connectivity options.

"These new optical services from Openreach are future proof, and they take advantage of BT's investment in fibre infrastructure across the UK. They also come with the backing of our combined professional service teams, giving customers access to expertise and support from both Openreach and Ciena."

Nigel Williams, VP Global Channels and Strategic Alliances, Ciena, added: "Demand for high bandwidth services and business critical applications is increasing at an exponential rate.

"Expanding our relationship with Openreach ensures that providers get the flexibility and scalability they need to build a competitive advantage in the marketplace, offer a broader portfolio of next-generation services, and the applications critical to the success of their enterprise clients."

The product, to be unveiled on April 29th, took just nine months to develop from concept to launch. "With the market growing at pace, and requirements for 100G solutions already evident, we wanted to offer a solution fast," explained Darren Wallington, Head of Optical Solutions.

"We already had a proven capability for best practice use of third parties to carry out installation on our behalf, so deepening our long standing supplier relationship with Ciena to bring the 6500 to market in this way was a no-brainer. Importantly, the approach does not change any of the planning, order or repair touch points for customers. It simply means that all installation and repair functions are carried out by Ciena."

The close collaboration between Openreach and Cienna helps to align best practice design choices with specific sector requirements. "We are also working together on continued lifecycle improvements such as fault finding and diagnostics," added Wallington. "We now have the potential to bring additional 6500 capabilities to market just as fast in the future."

The spirit of collaboration also played a role in shaping the look of new services having taken account of the customers' perspectives. "We received a full wish list from one customer at the oust," added Wallington. "We reviewed this with all customers and provided a view on the items we could deliver. The period of development collaboration with customers that followed earned feedback via the OTA (telecoms adjudicator) as an example on how Openreach should engage and develop products."

The overall Optical market is forecast to grow by a significant 135% over the coming years, representing a big opportunity for comms providers. The size of the opportunity and speed of monetisation is illustrated by the big advances made by Openreach following its previous major Optical product launch - the ADVA FSP 3000 launched in January 2012 - which now has over a thousand installations. Furthermore, at the close of 2013, Openreach's customers were collectively supplying industry with 20TB/s of access and backhaul data capacity via its Optical portfolio alone.

Distributor ScanSource has expanded its sales team and launched a new reseller programme.

The company has recruited new sales and pre-sales staff and promoted former account managers Mike Greenwood and Adam Parker to Sales Manager roles reporting to UK Sales Director Kim Jennings.

In tandem with the management restructure ScanSource has rolled out its new FastPath partner enablement programme, giving resellers access to tools and schemes from a variety of manufacturer partners, including FastPath to iConnect for Avaya.

ScanSource specialists will also guide resellers through a vendor's authorisation and certification processes.

"As we look to help our reseller partners grow their business, we are also committed to delivering the programmes and support they need to be successful," said Rudy De Meirsman, MD, ScanSource Communications, Europe. "This means investing in our people to deliver enhanced pre- and post-sale support."

Nimans has expanded its product range from long range wireless technology firm EnGenius with a wireless networking portfolio including indoor and outdoor long range Wi-Fi access points.

These include a smoke detector style ceiling mounted device that expands the overall user capacity of a network especially when transferring bandwidth intensive files.

Another innovation is a long range 2.4 GHz wireless outdoor access point that provides Internet connectivity for restaurants, educational and corporate sites.

"It's been another year of great collaboration between Nimans and EnGenius Europe," said Andy Winfield, Purchasing Director at Nimans.

"The latest network devices represent an exciting new chapter in our ever-closer partnership."

Six Degrees Group (6DG) has expanded its Datahop Network with the addition of a London PoP at Volta Data Centres, the provider of data centres to the financial, media and content industries.

The 6DG core network of data centre locations, virtualised servers and network operators offers a fully integrated range of cloud hosting, managed data services, data centre, connectivity and voice services.

The addition of a PoP at Volta's facility will provide 6DG customers with further choice when building their business architecture.

Volta's Great Sutton Street Data Centre is Central London's first new data centre for more than a decade, catering to the requirements of latency-sensitive users in the financial services industry, TechCity-based technology firms and the media industry.

The combination of Volta's 33kV diverse power supply and range of Tier 1 carriers bringing their own diverse fibre connectivity to the building makes Volta the most resilient facility in central London, claims the firm.

Campbell Williams, Group Strategy & Marketing Director, 6DG, said: "Our partnership with Volta marks a significant step in managed services. Our network infrastructure will enable Volta to offer the capacity, bandwidth resilience and reach of the 6DG network to its customers, and will be a welcome addition to our PoPs network in London."

Matthew Dent, CEO of Volta commented: "Our partnership benefits the interconnected and ever more digital world we live in and improves both the physical and cloud based infrastructure for doing business in central London."

Colt has joined the METRO2C Alliance, a collaboration of European connectivity providers, data centre operators and Internet exchanges.

Colt's membership adds a 22 country-wide European network to the alliance, delivering customers direct fibre connections to 19,800 buildings and Colt's 20 carrier neutral data centres.

Diane Hodnett, CEO of METRO2C's founder Sea Fibre Networks, said: "Collaborating with Colt gives customers access to a portfolio of business communication services including application, cloud and content delivery to 41 major European cities.

"Colt's membership underscores the METRO2C Alliance's strategy of working with connectivity providers and data centre operators to support the growing data demands of enterprises and consumers."

Ken Sherry, Country Manager, Ireland, at Colt said: "Through the METRO2C Alliance, Colt continues to expand access to its integrated network and IT services portfolio.

"Members and enterprises will benefit from access to Colt's information delivery platform, combining network and IT infrastructure with expertise in IT managed services, networking and communication solutions to help grow revenues."

As businesses turn to the Internet of Things for growth, M2M WAN connections are set to triple by 2018, says market research firm Infonetics Research.

"M2M continues to gather momentum as enterprises, in the never-ending pursuit of competitive advantage, seek to find new ways of using connected technologies to improve business agility and lower operational costs," said Godfrey Chua, directing analyst for M2M and The Internet of Things at Infonetics Research.

C"For service providers, there are significant and fast growing opportunities ahead. Specifically, cellular technologies are playing an increasingly important role in enabling M2M services, comprising the vast majority of WAN wireless M2M connections today, over 220 million, and nearly tripling to just over 630 million connections by 2018.

"Among the cellular generations, 2G and 3G are the majority currently, but it's LTE that will grow the fastest, starting from a small base and then expanding rapidly, supported by efforts like AT&T/GM/OnStar and other connected car initiatives, as well as China Mobile's massive LTE TDD network rollout."

The global market for M2M services reached just over $16 billion in 2013, and there were nearly 1.7 billion M2M connections worldwide, the report says, with a growing list of global tier 1 players supporting more than 10 million M2M connections each

M2M access services-where operators' broadband services function as M2M access solutions-make up over 16% of M2M service revenue, around $3bn.

Global revenue from M2M services is forecast by Infonetics to grow at an 18% CAGR from 2013 to 2018.

For technology vendors, it is increasingly important to build networking solutions that take into consideration the architectural requirements of the various M2M use cases that are proliferating, as well as the portfolio of emerging connection technologies, stated the report authors.