Comms Dealer

KCOM Group has renewed its charity partnership with Sparks for a third year.

Sparks is a leading medical research charity dedicated to funding pioneering research for a range of conditions affecting babies, children and pregnant mothers.

Each year in the UK more than 3,000 babies die before their first birthday and one in 30 are born with an illness or disability that may affect them for life.

KCOM Group has supported Sparks as its charity partner since 2012, raising £130,000 during that time to smash its original fundraising target by £30,000.

Madeleine Buckley, Corporate Partnerships Manager at Sparks, said: "We're delighted that KCOM Group have extended their support with us for another year. Their dedicated fundraising throughout the partnership has been fantastic.

"In the last two years they've come up with creative ways to fundraise like swimming the River Humber, skydiving and taking on the Three Peaks Challenge to name but a few. I have no doubt that they will reach their new fundraising target by 2015.

"The money the Group has already raised will help us fund research into a range of conditions such as cerebral palsy and childhood meningitis, as well as rare diseases such as Progeria, a devastating illness which causes children to age up to eight times faster than usual. Support from companies like KCOM Group will make the discovery of preventions, treatments and cures for these kinds of conditions possible."

Paul Simpson, Chief Financial Officer at KCOM Group, added: "Our two year partnership with Sparks has been incredibly successful, but this success would not have been possible without the backing of our employees from across the business. Extending our partnership with Sparks means we can continue making a difference and supporting the brilliant work they do.

"We've already had people signing up to some testing fundraising challenges this year including the London Marathon, cycling across Italy and our annual charity golf day. It's great to see people come together and dig deep to help this fantastic cause."

KCOM Group has a longstanding commitment to fundraising, having raised more than £368,000 during the last eight years since it introduced its Charity Partner programme. Charity partners are voted for by employees and supported for at least two years, with a goal of beating the previous fundraising target.

Demand for permanent IT and computing workers improved for the 55th month running in March according to the latest Report on Jobs published today by KPMG and the REC.

Moreover, the growth rate accelerated to the quickest since August 1998. Demand for permanent employees was also stronger than that for temporary/contract staff, as shown by the respective indices scoring 69.6 and 63.7.

Whereas March's reading for permanent IT workers registered above the respective index for all sectors (67.5), the index for temporary/contract IT professionals posted below the national average of 66.0.

Latest data indicated that demand for permanent IT & Computing workers came in third out of nine on the demand for staff 'league table'. The situation was less positive for temps, with the sector ranking seventh.

Heath Jackson, partner in the CIO Advisory practice at KPMG, said: "It's encouraging to note that the demand for permanent technology workers improved for the fifty-fifth month running, with more organisations offering contracts for permanent positions than temporary roles over the past month.

"The technology sector figure resonates with the national numbers, indicating employment is on the up. The next step will be for candidates to put themselves forward for the roles on offer to improve prospects - something they still seem unwilling to do.

"Time intervals are also a challenge. The lead time between roles becoming active and an employee becoming productive can be up to 12 months. The unanswered question is whether the workforce as a whole can feed the demand and meet employer requirements."

Billing software solution specialist Aurora Kendrick James (AKJ) has reformed its working relationship with former Modern Communications MD Adrian Barnard who has embarked on a new venture that operates under the Prime Networks banner.

AKJ supplied billing solutions to Modern Communications which was acquired by Elitetele.com in early February this year, and following the sale Prime Networks has commissioned AKJ's unified billing, provisioning and customer care platform as an outsourced bureau billing service.

AKJ's Head of Account Management, Sally Ainsley, said: "We are pleased to be working with Adrian again as he is a high profile figure in the communications industry, known for investing in fast moving, rapidly evolving businesses. Prime has already purchased additional capacity and services from AKJ."

Frost & Sullivan thought leaders will present their latest research on ICT: Helping Connected Industries Embrace Big Data Analytics at GIL 2014: Europe, that returns to London for its sixth consecutive year on Wednesday 14th May at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington.

Businesses and consumers are navigating within increasingly interconnected systems of machine - and human-generated intelligence. The ability to capture relevant information from streams of 'Big Data' is essential to commercial success in this new, dynamic environment of connected industries.

Frost & Sullivan VP & ICT Director Ajay Sule explains: "The phrase 'Big Data Analytics' is often used together with, 'Internet of Things (IoT)' to encapsulate opportunities to commercialise new sources of business intelligence.

"Sectors such as financial services, retail and ICT are taking the lead in the use of tools, cloud and mobile technologies to improve productivity and customer satisfaction."

Nevertheless much more can be done. Companies in many sectors are working to understand the potential impact on their internal processes and competitive environments. The natural impulse of ICT is to emphasise technology, but it is equally important to help businesses identify the benefits in their respective markets.

"The future of big data analytics and its application in IoT, or connected industries in our language, is only limited by our collective imagination," said Sule.

"As Pablo Picasso once said, 'computers are useless they can only give you answers'. The ability to craft the right questions will determine the benefits from big data analytics."

The deal will see Openreach providing additional fibre capacity and diverse routing to meet growing demand from Next Generation Data's business and government customers.

NGD customers will have access to more than 200 communications providers selling Openreach Ethernet and Optical services to the end user business markets - including options from 10Mbps up to multiple 10Gbps services.

Tim Barclay, MD, sales, marketing and customer engagement at Openreach said: "This announcement continues our major push into the UK data centre market. By bringing our open access model to the NGD data centre in Wales, we're enabling them to offer their customers a wide choice of high speed Ethernet services. We're also speeding up the provisioning of our Ethernet services by building fibre links direct to major data centres across the UK well ahead of any customer orders."

Nick Razey, CEO, Next Generation Data, said "This agreement underscores Next Generation Data's long established and highly successful relationship with BT both as a point of presence (POP) and as a strategic data centre services provider.

"We are delighted that BT is increasing its high speed fibre capacity at our world-class carrier neutral NGD Europe facility which will further extend the wide choice of high bandwidth, low latency communications available to our customers."

The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has signed a formal Partnership Agreement with the Data Centre Alliance (DCA), the not-for-profit industry association comprising of experts from across the data centre sector.

Under the terms of the agreement both organisations will establish a reciprocal, non-exclusive alliance partnership to encourage best practice within the Cloud Service Provider sector, as well as educating end user organisations on all cloud computing issues.

The DCA is an industry association comprising of a number of key experts in the data centre industry, be that as an individual or a commercial organisation. The DCA itself represents the industry to the business community, the media, government and the general public.

Simon Campbell-Whyte, Executive Director, DCA, said: "The widespread adoption of cloud computing has highlighted the need for a common standard that ensures transparency, capability and accountability amongst both cloud service providers and data centres - secure and efficient cloud infrastructures depend on an approach that addresses every layer.

"We believe that our collaboration with CIF and its Code of Practice will really bring these into play and will contribute heavily to the development of a credible and thriving IT industry."

Alex Hilton, CEO of CIF, added: "The DCA is a well established industry association not only here in the UK but increasingly across all member states of the EU, and in recent years has played an integral role in evolving the data centre industry to where it is today.

"Its members work together across a variety of product and service sectors to develop and improve the data centre sector's adoption of best practices and standards that are needed to underpin the future of cloud computing.

"In partnership, we will strive to expand the Code of Practice's market reach and continue to educate and champion the cloud to drive transparency across the industry."

Professor Dennis F Kehoe, CEO AIMES Grid Services and DCA Board Member, added: "The data centre is increasingly being seen as a critical component in the cloud "stack" in terms of resiliency, security, governance and cost base.

"This important new partnership between the Cloud Industry Forum and the Data Centre Alliance reflects the convergence towards XaaS (everything-as-a-service) and represents a significant step forward in the evolution of the digital infrastructure industry."

The partnership will see a number of initiatives between the two organisations including collaboration in the key areas of lobbying and market education, the development and sharing of joint research findings and the promotion of mutual membership.

The retirement of Microsoft's Exchange 2003 Server, the popular software that provides email, calendar, and contacts to businesses, creates a dilemma for its users, according to Giacom, the company behind MessageStream.

"This discontinuation brings the issue of migrating to the cloud or not to the fore," stated Giacom MD Nick Marshall.

"It also brings into focus an easier way to stay up-to-date with the latest server technology, and reminds us yet again that businesses are moving to the cloud for Exchange and that they're doing it quickly."

Marshall cited figures from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) that point to a 27% increase in the number of first-time cloud computing user over the last 18 months. CIF also estimates that over 75% of UK businesses are using at least one cloud service formally and that 80% of current cloud users have increased their spending in this area.

"With this in mind, now is the perfect time for IT support companies to be selling cloud services such as Hosted Exchange 2013 to businesses as a successor to on-site Exchange 2003 or Microsoft's Small Business Server," urged Marshall.

"It's been amazing to see the change in the IT infrastructure for businesses since we entered the market more than 15 years ago.

"Now more than ever, businesses are recognising the need to move to the cloud. By doing so, they're making their business much more efficient while cost-effectively revolutionising their communications."

MessageStream delivers cloud-based IT solutions to over 2,000 IT support companies in the UK and Europe.

French integrator Sopra and European developer Steria have agreed on a merger which will create a major player with a combined revenue of €3.1bn and operations in 24 countries, employing 35,000 in Europe and Asia.

In terms of business activities and geographic segments, the fit between the two entities gives it a large organisation in France from Sopra with experience in banking, human resources and real estate products and its effective application management  model.

For its part, Steria brings its international reach (Europe and Asia) with a position in the United Kingdom, a pertinent offering in Business Process Services and its expertise in IT infrastructure management.

Industrial-scale production capacity would be significantly reinforced with an array of offshore and nearshore service centres representing a workforce of approximately 8,000 people, including over 6,000 in India.

Reinforcing competitive positioning and the complementary fit of offerings and geographic locations could lead to faster revenue growth, it says.

For example, Sopra would be able to benefit from the European positions of Steria to accelerate the commercialisation and rollout of its software solutions; for its part, Steria would be able to leverage Sopra's offshore capacity in India for its French clients.

The proposed tie-up should also generate annual operational cost synergies of €62m commencing in 2017. The transaction is expected to have a neutral effect on basic earnings per share in 2015 and be strongly earnings enhancing as of 2016.

The ambition is to form a group that is capable of generating strong organic growth with the objective of achieving revenue of over €4bn and progressively improve the operating margin on business activity to approach the 10% mark.

Nimans has become the official distributor of a docking solution that turns an iPhone into a desktop business handset.

The iFusion solution features Bluetooth technology and integrates with all SIP voice applications such as Cisco, Skype and Avaya.

Group Sales and Business Development Manager, Richard Carter, says the high performance device features charging and syncing functionality.

"Research from iFusion indicates 70% of iPhones are used for business, regardless of who owns the device - and iFusion instantly transforms an iPhone into a desktop business phone - adding a new dimension to mobile and office-based communications."

A new report from Juniper Research has found that the value of global payments via mobile devices will reach around $507 billion this year, a rise of nearly 40% year-on-year.

The report - Mobile Payment Strategies: Remote, Contactless & Money Transfer 2014-2018 - found that growth would continue to be driven by purchases of physical goods via mobile devices. Average transaction sizes over tablets are already exceeding those via desktop PCs in many markets.

It also observed that while spend via smartphones was increasing sharply, their primary function in retail was as search and discovery devices with the final purchase being made on the tablet.

Meanwhile, it argued that the scale of digital transactions was receiving a significant boost through the adoption of mobile ticketing applications, with metro and transit authorities in Europe and North America, that have already deployed services, experiencing high levels of adoption.

However, the report observed that progress in contactless mobile payments had been slow, with few commercial launches. Nevertheless, it argued that the prognosis for the medium term was brighter, following the emergence of cloud-based SE (Secure Element) solutions which offer the opportunity for reduced time-to-market for NFC (Near Field Communications) solutions.

According to report author Dr Windsor Holden: "The prevalent business models for NFC have been unattractive to banks and left them dependent on multiple network operators, each of which may have its own approach to mobile wallet management. HCE (Host Card Emulation) solutions have the potential to revitalise a market which has struggled to gain traction."