Comms Dealer

Exertis Micro-P has unveiled a reseller promotional campaign that will see it give away £15,000 worth of prizes, with the opportunity to win a prize every day throughout April.

Under the scheme winners can scoop prize bundles or single high value prizes. And all entrants this month will automatically be entered into the month-end bonanza to win any prizes not claimed during April, plus £1,000 Capital Bond vouchers.

"Prizes on offer include the latest plasma screens, tablet PCs, digital cameras and blu-ray players," said Phil Brown, B2B Sales Director.

"In addition to the latest products from brands like Lenovo, Samsung, Asus and Toshiba, entrants also stand the chance to win gift experiences including British Pullman 'Golden Age Travel Trip' for two, half-day Jonathan Palmer racing experiences, hotel break and theatre experiences and Lamborghini driving experiences. High value vouchers are also up for grabs and can be redeemed at Centre Parcs, John Lewis and Champney's Spa."

To participate in the promotion resellers need to buy any product from Exertis Micro-P, record their invoice number and the following day go onto the online Exertis Micro-P Prize Portal to see if they are a winner.

Channel resellers are advised to seek out meaningful partnerships with Cloud Services Providers (CSPs) in order to address and tackle the challenges they face when transitioning to the cloud market, claims Piers Linney, Co-CEO of Outsourcery.

With over 69 per cent of organisations formally adopting at least one cloud-based service in the last year, according to findings from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), cloud computing has achieved mainstream deployment in the UK.

It is therefore vital that resellers embrace the benefits of the cloud - but in doing so they must also ensure they address the potential ensuing challenges they may have with their cloud sales strategy.

These challenges include not having a full understanding of the various cloud solutions available, not having enough knowledge of the development of the cloud market, and not having sufficient background knowledge of how cloud can apply in different end-user scenarios; something which would come with experience.

Linney said: "IT as a service is a very different beast to IT as an asset and the move can be difficult for many channel organisations to make.

"Resellers have the potential to miss out if they don't educate themselves about the transition and it is therefore crucial that they seek out partnerships with CSPs to help overcome existing weaknesses or knowledge gaps.

"Resellers are used to working with traditional IT models so the skill-set of current employees would mean that a move to the cloud might not be playing to the business's strengths. Cooperation between resellers and CSPs who are willing to help is key to bridging this education gap.

"There are countless examples of IT companies that have failed to adjust at the right time and have struggled as a result. Now is the time for businesses to develop the necessary skills in order to effectively adapt to the cloud, and partnering with a CSP can make the difference between failure and success.

"As there is still a market for traditional IT, the cost and benefit of transitioning is not always wholly apparent - this is why collaboration between resellers and CSPs is crucial in improving education of the long-term benefits of adopting cloud services.

"With hybrid IT solutions becoming more apparent and widespread, it is a way for organisations in the channel to work together with CSPs, to enhance synergies and improve the cloud and IT services available in the market."

Investment in IT equipment by European SMEs set to increase by almost a fifth to €73bn, driven by the the UK (€21.5bn investment in total, up 56%), followed by France (€18.6bn, up 56%). Upgrading IT equipment to enhance efficiency is a top priority for Western European SMEs over the next 12 months, according to GE Capital International's Q1 2014 European SME Capex Barometer. This represents a 15% increase on spending intentions versus the same time last year.

The research, conducted among over 2,250 SME business leaders across seven European markets during Q1 2014, shows that across the big four European economies IT is the only asset type to see a significant increase in intended investment, while spend on other types of assets is set to remain stable or drop.

In Central & Eastern European markets (Czech Republic, Hungary & Poland) IT investment levels are expected to remain broadly comparable with 2013, as manufacturing equipment assets remains a focus for capex.

Christian Bernhard (pictured above), Equipment Finance leader at GE Capital International, said: "After several years of prioritising spending on manufacturing equipment assets, SMEs now look to be increasing IT and office equipment capex, potentially in order to update their infrastructure and back office systems to match modernisation efforts at the front end.

"Given the productivity gains, cost efficiencies and competitive advantage associated with up-to-date technologies, SMEs that increase investment in upgrading IT equipment will be strongly positioned for future growth."

For SMEs across the big four economies, upgrading existing equipment to enhance efficiency and productivity is the main reason for investment in both hardware and software, with over a third of respondents citing this as a driver. This indicates a clear response from businesses to increasing missed income or loss of new business opportunities as a result of dated or inefficient equipment.

One in four SMEs (26%) in Western Europe said they had lost out on new income or new business opportunities in the past 12 months, taking the total loss in income to approximately €59bn, an increase of 12% compared to previous year.

IT investment is set to be driven by the UK (€21.5bn in total, up 56%), followed by France (€18.6bn, up 56%).

In contrast, there will be a 9% decline in investment year on year in Germany, to €20.8bn, albeit still at a very high level. German SMEs cite the single biggest obstacle to overall capital expenditure as 'having already invested' (22%), suggesting prior spend may be impacting future investment intentions. IT spending is expected to be lowest in Italy, at €11.7bn, a 20% drop from 2013 levels.

Hardware accounts for the greatest proportion of intended capital expenditure in IT equipment, with a total of €42bn earmarked for upgrading company laptops, servers and other hardware in the next 12 months.

This is driven by investments from SMEs in Germany (€12.7bn), and the UK (€12.1bn). Total spend on software is expected lower at €31bn, with UK SMEs contributing the largest proportion (€9.4bn).

SMEs in the utilities and transport sector are likely to invest more in IT equipment than in any other sectors. They plan to invest 30% of overall capex for Western Europe in IT hardware and 29% in IT software, despite only accounting for 20% of the total SMEs surveyed.

London-based venture capital investor Balderton Capital has completed its fifth European fund and raised $305m (€222.6m), bringing its total funds to $2.2bn (€1.6bn), to invest in European technology start-ups.

The new fund was backed by both existing limited partners and new investor, the European Investment Fund.

Under the new fund, Balderton plans to earmark funds for the new market opportunities across the European technology sectors and the ambition is to build the investment team in Europe which would help the organisation expand internationally, it says.

Balderton has also strong links to the US and a number of co-investments with Google Ventures, Benchmark, Accel and others, it says.

Bernard Liautaud, General Partner at Balderton and founder of Business Objects, said: "Over the last few years, we have refined our investment focus to double down on European early stage start-ups.

"Some of our earlier funds have been a mixture of series A and later stage investment.

"As with our last fund, this one is focused on Series A, where we currently see the greatest opportunities in Europe. Our goal is to be the first venture fund with an international outlook to invest in a company.

"The team's strong operational experience gives us the expertise to back founders early and help build companies, which is why we are willing to take the risks and work with entrepreneurs at this earlier stage."

The company first established its market presence in 2000 as Benchmark Capital Europe and was rebranded in 2007. Previous investee include Betfair, MySQL (acquired by Sun Microsystems), NaturalMotion and Yoox, among the others.

The total value of the companies backed by Balderton is worth over $10bn (€7.3bn), as it says.

Nimans and Samsung have joined forces to provide resellers with a hat-trick of SIP-based offers until the end of June.

Resellers will receive two SIP trunk licences, two MGI licences and four WE VoIP licences when purchasing either a Samsung OS7030 or OS7100 system with at least one other system licence.

They can also benefit from free SIP trunk rental for 90 days as part of an exclusive promotion - if they order the SIP trunks through Nimans as part of the special offer.

A WE VoIP licence is also included with every IP handset licence ordered with a Samsung OS7200S, OS7200 or OS7400 system.

Paul Burn, Head of Category Sales at Nimans, says SIP is becoming a viable challenger to ISDN connectivity.

"These offers allow resellers to encourage their customers to give SIP a try so they can experience many benefits such as flexibility with phone numbers, reduced call costs, greater resilience and on demand deployment."

Ovum and Informa Telecoms and Media (ITM) Research, both divisions of Informa, are to combine under the Ovum brand.

The new company will offer customers analysis across the converging IT, media and telecoms industries and including a suite of new research, market data and consulting capabilities.

A multi-million pound investment programme will see all complementary product portfolios merged delivering 23 new or improved services across IT, media and telecoms.

IT and media research will also be bolstered through the introduction of new channels covering telco IT, customer engagement, enterprise mobility, telco enterprise services, digital media and music. A new state-of-the-art online delivery platform to house all research will also be launched.

The merged business, which will be fully integrated by the end of May, will be led by Steve Hotham, current MD of Ovum, who will become its CEO.

Spread across 23 offices in six continents Ovum will employ 275 staff, including 180 analysts providing a combination of global and local insight.

Steve Hotham believes this move will meet the growing need for actionable market insight by vendors, service providers and enterprises in the converging technology and media markets better than any other research firm.

Hotham said: "We are experiencing a time of tremendous change in the telecoms, IT and media sectors, with convergence reshaping markets and creating major new business opportunities and challenges.

"By combining Ovum and ITM Research we are assembling a team of readily accessible analysts, offering a portfolio of research, data products and consulting services across telecoms, media and IT."

According to IDC's EMEA Quarterly Server Virtualisation Tracker, 33.0% of all new servers shipped in EMEA in the fourth quarter of 2013 were virtualized, a moderate increase from 30.0% in 4Q12. Physical server shipments were flat this quarter, showing only a 0.3% decline year-over-year, totalling 606,400 units.

At the same time 200,300 server units were virtualised at the point of initial shipment in 4Q13, which is an annual increase of 9.6%. Virtualisation licenses distributed this quarter grew year-over-year by 12.0% to 282,300, while EMEA virtualisation software revenue increased even more significantly by 14.2% to $456.3 million.

The EMEA server virtualisation market continues its gradual but slow shift towards the use of paid hypervisors, with paid virtualisation software now running on 83.0% of all new server hardware shipments virtualised in 4Q13 compared to 82.4% recorded in 4Q12.

For the full 2013, 2.2 million physical servers were shipped in EMEA, representing an annual decline of 2.7%. 717,000 virtualised servers and 1.0 million virtualisation software licenses were shipped, showing moderate to strong annual growth of 9.6% and 13.5%, respectively. Virtualisation software revenue reached $1.6 billion, which means an increase of 14.6% on the previous year.

"Although the server hardware market is stagnating, virtualisation efforts are continuing across our region," said Andreas Olah, research analyst, Enterprise Server Group, IDC EMEA. "Many smaller businesses have already embraced these technologies, and the virtualisation topic is maturing. This is evident from the fact that discussions in European organisations have moved on from initial approaches that focused mainly on hypervisor choice towards management and automation tools that let virtual machines move seamlessly between servers, and even between clouds in a hybrid model.

"The leading virtualisation vendors are aggressively pushing holistic stack approaches that include various tools and links to their own cloud offerings, such as VMware with its software-defined data centre model with vCloud Hybrid Service, and Microsoft's extensive Cloud OS framework. Although clients were initially overwhelmed by the complexity of these approaches, their value proposition is becoming better understood, which drives wider adoption of these types of holistic solutions."

Western Europe continues to lead the way in terms of wider adoption of server virtualisation technology, with 33.8% of new servers shipped in 4Q13 virtualised compared to 31.1% a year ago, though emerging regions are catching up rapidly.

Despite the overall uptrend, a slowdown in virtualisation growth is becoming apparent in Western Europe which is down to technology maturity and the disruptive nature of replacing or virtualising outdated legacy machines. Moreover, growth on the server hardware side is increasingly shifting toward datacenter expansion by the largest tier 1 cloud service providers that tend to run on non-virtualised gear. This is most apparent in the Nordics, Benelux, and Ireland, where virtualisation rates are below other mature markets in the region as a result.

Despite the 3.3% contraction in server shipments in 4Q13 compared with 4Q12, the emerging markets of Central and Eastern Europe, Middle East and Africa witnessed double-digit growth of 10.3% in virtual server unit shipments, year over year. This reflects growing maturity in virtualisation adoption, with the aim to consolidate the infrastructure by using fewer servers to deploy more virtual machines (VMs), and exploit existing hardware capacities to a greater extent.

AV specialist Videonations, part of the Nycomm Group (which includes Nimans) has teamed-up with StarLeaf, a cloud video conferencing service provider to offer hardware and software video solutions that, claims the firm, are as easy to use as a smartphone with no requirement for end user training.

The partnership offers video conferencing services (scheduled and ad hoc) and a range of endpoints (hardware and software) managed via the cloud.

"StarLeaf consolidates our own value proposition and places us in a position to offer customers cloud-based solutions ideally suited to the mid-market sector," said Videonations MD Ian Carter.

"It delivers scheduled conferencing and a true on-demand, anyone-to-anyone solution that is as far reaching as the telephone and as easy to use as a smartphone.

"StarLeaf approached the video conferencing and collaboration market by starting with the user experience and a belief that if you can make a phone call then you should be able to make a video call."

StarLeaf works with Cisco, Polycom, Lifesize, Microsoft Lync and all H.323 and SIP devices.

The channel is at risk of missing out on SIP reselling opportunities because of a lack of understanding from IT managers.

A new survey by Timico, the business internet, hosting and communications service provider, showed that 68% of those surveyed are unaware of the benefits of SIP. A further 43% were unaware of whether they would be able to run SIP on their current system, with 34% unsure if their company planned to adopt SIP at all.

Darren Hilton, Director of Timico Partners, said: "The benefits of SIP are clear - reduced cost, greater resiliency and additional functionality. But if the channel is finding itself pushing a product the market doesn't understand, it is going to pose a significant challenge.

"Good partners will be educating their resellers on the benefits of SIP, underlining both the cost savings and the additional reliability in ways which both the channel and the end user will understand. It's not just the SIP channel technology that partners should recognise, but the end to end solution and the importance of having enough robust capacity with their connectivity."

As well as offering greater resilience, flexibility and cost savings, SIP models can now incorporate the use of business smartphones, by rerouting personal extension numbers directly to mobile devices, for example. The cost savings of SIP are substantial too.

Hilton added: "It is partly our responsibility to educate the market and remain as diverse and relevant to customer need as possible, which is why we're running educational seminars for our partners around SIP and how to create the most reliable and cost effective solutions for those prospective clients. SIP is a remarkable opportunity for the channel, but a lack of understanding from both parties would be a foolish reason to miss out."

To increase the number of public sector bodies procuring services from the G-Cloud there needs to be more knowledge shared in the wider industry, claims Cloud Services Provider (CSP) Outsourcery.

In a speech at the THINK Cloud for Government expo, Home Office Chief Technology Officer and former G-Cloud Head, Denise McDonagh, stated that she would like to see more education from the Cabinet Office to people who need to architect and buy solutions from the G-Cloud.

This comment was made after G-Cloud's current Head, Tony Singleton, said that approximately 90 per cent of local authorities in the UK have yet to procure a service from the G-Cloud.
 
"While take up figures may be low, there is real potential for the numbers to increase. Furthermore, there should be a focus on education across the entire cloud computing industry in order to grow the success of the initiative", commented Piers Linney, Co-CEO of Outsourcery.
 
"Cloud education should be a priority not just for the Cabinet Office, but for all in the cloud industry if we are to see an increase in public sector companies making the leap to the cloud.

"Just as central government should make it a priority to educate local government, CSPs like ourselves, along with resellers, should focus on teaching end-users not just about the benefits of the solutions, but importantly the intricacies of the offerings and how they fit with existing infrastructures.
 
"Whether this means being more transparent about product and service offerings or taking the time to encourage end-users to ask more questions, the more widespread knowledge about cloud computing becomes, the more potential there is for public sector departments to make a well-informed, confident step towards the cloud.

"At Outsourcery, we're taking our own steps to encourage confidence in cloud computing within the public sector. We're currently working to design and deploy a high security IL3-compliant cloud platform for the UK government and we hope that knowledge of projects like this will increase confidence among public sector organisations, making G-Cloud the first port of call when public sector bodies consider IT changes or upgrades."