Comms Dealer

Mathew Kirk has joined Southern Communications as Commercial Director and shareholder of the business.

Kirk has been the Corporate Development Director of TalkTalk Telecom Group since 2009 and prior to that was Mergers & Acquisitions Director for The Carphone Warehouse Group from 2004.

While at TalkTalk he was involved with the demerger from Carphone, led the acquisitions of OneTel, Tele2, AOL and Tiscali as well as over 20 transactions on behalf of the B2B division.

Over the past three years Mathew has been a Board Member of TalkTalk Business, a £425m revenue division of TalkTalk, a member of the Group's Innovation Committee and has led a number of key outsourcing projects.

At Carphone he was also accountable for European corporate development activity including acquisitions in the UK, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, Belgium and divestments in Germany, France, Ireland and Switzerland.

Kirk also played a key role in the mobile retail joint venture in the US with Best Buy which was bought out for circa £800m in 2012.

Paul Bradford, CEO, said: "Myself and the other directors of the business are excited to have secured Mathew's expertise and feel his appointment is a real statement of intent around the continued growth of Southern Communications, both organically and through acquisition."

Southern Communications is a national supplier of voice, data and cloud solutions and has seen rapid growth over the last 10 years with a turnover this year of £18 million achieved through organic growth and acquisitions.

Kirk said: "This is a great opportunity. I have been aware of the progress Southern Communications have been making in the market. There is a lot of passion, professionalism and drive, backed by a good solid team. I know this is a company that is going places and look forward to joining them and helping drive the future growth."

OnePhone Holding and BT are to collaborate on developing mobile services for UK SMBs.

The new venture will aim to make OnePhone(R) technology, which has already been successfully launched and rolled out in Sweden and Germany, available to BT's SMB customers.

Exertis Micro-P and Samsung have launched a quarter long promotion to provide resellers with FOC system licences and a chance to win daily prizes.
 
Resellers will receive two MGI licences, two SIP trunk licences and four WE VoIP FMC licences with every Samsung OS7030 and OS7100 systems when purchased with any other licence key.

Large system deployments benefit from a free of charge WE VoIP FMC licence with every IP extension licence on OS7200s, OS7200 and OS7400 systems.
 
John Bird, Head of Systems and Support Services at Exertis Micro-P, commented: "This promotion supports the trend Exertis Micro-P has seen over the last 12 months with record numbers of systems being installed onto SIP trunks.

"SIP is more than just a viable replacement for ISDN trunks - it offers much more from number portability, to flexible call routing and inherent disaster recovery functionality.

"SIP based solutions have never been easier to deploy and provide tangible return on investment for the end user. This promotion will help resellers continue to drive the growth of IP based solutions over the next quarter.
 
"This April we're giving back to customers by giving away over £15,000 worth of prizes to customers who are placing orders with us daily. Any order over £500 qualifies for our April prize giveaway and all a reseller needs to do is enter their invoice number into our online prize portal to see if they have won."

The annual report from Audit Analytics shows that US corporations are continuing to amass large sums which they are unwilling to import to the US for tax reasons.

This gives them a war-chest with which to buy European businesses. The total sum for the largest 1,000 companies of all types is over $2 trillion. In its top ten with earnings held overseas IT figures strongly, with IBM, Cisco, Microsoft and Apple all included. The total is up by 12%.

Although the firms, especially Cisco, have lobbied the US government about this money, which they would prefer to use for US investment and dividends, there appears to be no movement.

Over the last few years these foreign earnings of companies, especially those retained overseas as indefinitely reinvested earnings (IRE), have been increasingly in the news.

Last year Apple caused a stir by choosing to raise $17bn through a sale of bonds instead of repatriating earnings held offshore, which had the US Congress asking questions. Before that, decisions by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard were scrutinised for similar reasons.

Many companies will soon have most of their assets held outside the US, at this rate of growth. Microsoft is already there, with some 53% held in this IRE. Cisco is just under at 47%, IBM has 41%.

Synaxton has appointed Mike Barron as Channel Manager, joining from Entatech where he served for over six years holding both channel and business development roles. Prior to that he worked at Stone Computers.

Derek Jones, Managing Director of Synaxon UK, said: "Synaxon UK has momentum in the UK now. We have seen significant growth in the first three months of this year and want make sure we to capitalise on that.

"As well as working more closely with our members we want to broaden and deepen our engagement with distributors and vendors.

"Mike is an exceptional individual with great experience in the channel and I am certain that he will make a real difference to our business by helping us to develop and grow our business partnerships."

Hats off to Dawn Williams-Urch, Operations Team Leader at Yorkshire-based Lily Comms, who collected the top accolade at Bradford's Inspirational Women Awards (BIWA) staged at the city's Hilton Hotel.

Williams-Urch was selected by voters for her work for non-profit organisations and charities including organisations that support the armed forces.

She said: "I was shocked and surprised at being nominated for what I consider to be day-to-day things aside from my job. There are many inspirational women in Bradford and I am proud to be recognised as one of them."

Lily Comms MD Chris Morrisey added: "This is a fitting reward to a dedicated mother, great employee and thoughtful individual. Dawn is a highly valued member of the team, almost the company mum. She is always there to help wherever she can from first aid to raising money and organising anything that needs organising."

The BIWA was founded by Bradford's Fatima Patel, Editor of the Asian Sunday.

Pictured: Dawn William-Urch (second from right) with fellow award winners.

Masergy Communications has bolstered its cyber security credentials following the acquisition of Global DataGuard.
 
Masergy's CEO Chris MacFarland said: "In today's rapidly evolving threat landscape, discrete signature or rule-based security solutions alone are not adequate from a risk management perspective.

"And as seen in recent news, even when businesses invest in advanced security solutions, the lack of systematic sharing and correlation of subsystem data and vigilant 24/7 monitoring leaves them exposed to advanced threats.

"Cyber attacks are only going to become more intense and sophisticated - it's a new battlefield. The acquisition of Global DataGuard positions Masergy to deliver solutions engineered to address these advanced persistent threats."
 
Masergy's Security as a Service suite now includes enterprise security solutions with UnifiedEnterprise Security and Professional Services.
 

The Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC) has launched its own anti-bribery and anti-corruption (ABAC) due diligence platform.

The platform, developed in conjunction with Hiperos and Thomson Reuters, will be delivered as a managed network to both GTDC members and other non-member technology firms.

The GTDC Anti-Bribery/Anti-Corruption Platform combines processes and best practices developed by GTDC members with Hiperos' third-party management software as a service solution and Thomson Reuters highly regarded screening risk assessment and due diligence services.

It follows the appointment of chief Ethics and Complinace Office Jean-Paul Durand at GTDC member Tech Data in February this year, after a probe into its business methods in some countries in Europe for which it had to set aside several million dollars.

The GTDC Anti-Bribery/Anti-Corruption Platform is designed to address the massive scale, as well as the current costs, complexity and redundancy of performing due diligence across tens of thousands of third parties.

In addition to eliminating redundant processes and costs, participating companies expect to create a consistent, best-in-class solution that will become the standard for the technology industry.

This is achieved by implementing processes and by eliminating the need to vet and monitor the same third party multiple times, while securely sharing the results with each participating firm.

"The vast majority of ABAC investigations involve illegal payments made by third parties on behalf of an organisation. This is particularly challenging for companies in the technology distribution industry whose business depends on third parties," said Tim Curran, CEO of the GTDC.

"During our research process, it became clear that traditional approaches to third-party due diligence for ABAC were inadequate and unable to address our members' needs. We are pleased to have joined forces with Hiperos and Thomson Reuters to create an innovative approach to due diligence that addresses the requirements of the technology industry."

The GTDC Anti-Bribery/Anti-Corruption Platform has been developed with the knowledge that every company participating in the GTDC platform has unique business requirements, opportunities, challenges and objectives.

As such, the platform allows each member to decide individually how they want to score risk and if and how they want to proceed with the third party while, at the same time, removing the burden of initial and ongoing due diligence and monitoring.

As Microsoft unveils a version of its Office 365 software suite for iPads, mobile airtime provider Daisy Distribution has made the service available to its O2 partners and has been holding a series of partner training days to promote its benefits.

Within the sessions, which have already seen more than 45 partners taking part, partners have been able to learn in detail about the software's advantages, how it works, how it integrates with their O2 customers and how it can help these organisations work smarter.

The meetings sit within a wider campaign from the Ipswich-based firm to enhance its partners' knowledge of the Office 365 package, and have therefore been accessible to the whole channel.

Alongside the launch of Office 365 through O2 devices, Daisy Distribution has also offered partners that take an O2 Nokia Lumia variant device a free year's subscription voucher for Microsoft Lync, to offer to an end customer.

The offer, which began on 1st April, has been created to enable businesses to realise the various collaborative and communication tools Lync possesses, including HD video conferencing and instant messaging features, and pass these on to their end customers.

Julien Parven, Marketing Director of Daisy Distribution, said: "As the Office 365 suite becomes more readily available on even more devices, we believe that the cloud facilities it brings are only going to increase in popularity.

"Now that we are also able to offer the package through O2, we have been running a series of training days designed to enable partners to effectively sell the benefits of Office 365 into their end customers.

"The bundled Lync offer will allow partners to see for themselves, first hand, how beneficial the service can be. We envisage that having exposure to the software will encourage them to come back at some point in the near future and take out the full Microsoft Office 365 package."

US-listed RingCentral is to offer its RingCentral Office cloud-based business phone solution to channel partners in the UK via Ingram Micro and the Ingram Micro Cloud Marketplace.

Ingram Micro began offering RingCentral to its resellers in North America in April 2013, and will now offer RingCentral Office to its base of cloud-focused channel partners across the UK.

RingCentral Office is a cloud business phone solution that includes voice, fax and conferencing capabilities and provides a mobile-centric, alternative to on-premise legacy phone systems.