Comms Dealer

Just weeks into the job incoming Group Operations Director for Maintel Kevin Stevens has outlined the firm's future strategy and he is cock-a-hoop about the company's prospects as it enters a new phase of development.

He enthused: "I'm delighted to have been elevated to the main board and to be part of a strong team that works well together and shares similar ideas on strategy, organic growth and acquisition.

"Maintel is a profitable business and its ability to transform the business quickly moving forward provides exciting opportunities.

"A recent example of this has been the way in which Maintel has gone from being a fairly small reseller for Avaya to now being one of its most valued partners."

Maintel began 2014 by winning the Technical Excellence Award 2014 at the Avaya National Partner Conference.

In December, Maintel announced that it had achieved Avaya Platinum Business Partner status having recently become the only Avaya partner in the UK to gain all five Expert accreditations: Networking, SME, Contact Centre, Unified Communications, and Unified Messaging.

Stevens noted that part of Maintel's future strategy will be determined by the recent £3.5m acquisition of Datapoint. The purchase is a key component of Maintel's strategy to diversify its revenue base and significantly increase its presence in new markets.

The acquisition brings into the Maintel portfolio enhanced consulting and professional expertise in Unified Communications, with a particular strength in the Contact Centre sector. Other services include managed services and equipment sales.

Stevens added: "The Datapoint acquisition gives us the ability to execute in the Contact Centre arena and with an exciting product strategy and forge relationships with the right vendors at the right level.

"Skills picked up from the acquisition will also allow for a broader operations structure, strengthening our product portfolio, bringing IT and high end contact centre skills, across design, deployment and support, as well as an expanded foot print across our business.

"A key part of our overall strategy is of course cloud and other emerging technologies, though we must always bear in mind that some businesses will always want in-premise solutions or private cloud - it's about offering the right services to the right businesses.

"We also need to evolve our strategy in regards to Microsoft and indeed Google, both representing really intriguing challenges."

Advanced Mobile Communications has won a multi million pound contract to provide EE 4G mobile airtime to 4,000 Care UK employees.

Based on its delivery and support platform the five year contract is Advanced Mobile's largest mobile contract win to date.

Care UK is a leading independent provider of health and social care services. The organisation works with health commissioners to deliver care and support for older people and those living with learning disabilities or mental health conditions, in addition to a range of healthcare services for NHS patients including primary, secondary and urgent care.

Chris Griffin, Director, Advanced Mobile Communications, said: "We understand workforce mobilisation and we are a natural partner for a forward thinking organisations such as Care UK."

James Greenman, Group IT Director at Care UK, added: "Advanced's team understands the commercial characteristics of the health and social care sector and we are pleased to be working with them to deliver improved mobile access to our colleagues."

Advanced has worked with Care UK since 2006 and provides software solutions which are used across urgent care, residential homes and mental health services.

Solutions include Caresys to manage financials, time and attendance and care planning and Adastra, a clinical patient management system for urgent and unscheduled care.

Established in 2011, Advanced Mobile Communications is an Advanced Computer Software Group plc company.

Sinclair Voicenet has launched QM Plus, a new contact centre application from NICE Systems. This analytics-enabled quality management solution will enable contact centres to improve performance, enhance the customer experience and meet organisational business objectives.

According to Peter Gough, a Director of Sinclair Voicenet: "QM Plus allows contact centres to automate the time-consuming and inefficient manual review processes currently required to monitor all calls and identify interactions that require immediate attention. It will improve contact centre performance and increase the effectiveness of managers by empowering managers to focus their attention and support on agents that need it the most."

QM Plus brings automatic performance management capabilities to the quality management process and automatically alerts managers to calls which cause breaches in quality KPIs, with insights that are both targeted and actionable.

Problems are identified in real-time using advanced speech analytics that categorises calls by content and characteristics then associates them with pre-defined business KPIs.

To enhance the call analysis process, agent interactions can be separated from customer interactions in a mono recording environment. This allows a more detailed view of agent and customer talk time including emotion detection. It also allows categorisation and root cause analysis to be carried out to identify key words and phrases spoken by customers or agents during interactions.

QM Plus also has a central, easy to use dashboard that enables contact centres to manage their quality programmes and processes, providing a real-time view of how well agents, groups or departments are meeting their goals. This ensures complete, continuous and central management of the quality process.

Video solutions company Imago Group has reported a near 18% rise in Polycom sales between the end of January 2013 and the beginning of February 2014, across its UK and French operations.

Ian Vickerage, MD at Imago Group, said: "What we offer as a distributor is sales expertise, marketing knowledge, training and technical support. This gives our channel additional expertise and this is leading to higher sales."

This news comes as both Imago UK and Imago France celebrate being named Partner of the Year in their respective countries at TEAM Polycom 2014, the company's annual partner conference, held in Vancouver, British Columbia, last week.

Imago achieved its 'double' award in the category dedicated to Polycom's Country Award Honorees EMEA.

Vickerage added: "While we are always delighted to be recognised by Polycom following a long-term and successful relationship, it is particularly gratifying to pick up awards in both the UK and France, where we continue to achieve sales growth year after year.

"We have expanded our channel of specialist resellers which has led to opportunities with new customers and additional sales to at existing customer bases."

Imago has distributed Polycom products for 14 years.

Westcon Group has bolstered its Microsoft Lync proposition following a distribution agreement (initially in the UK) with Enghouse Interactive, the specialist in contact centre and call recording solutions.

The agreement provides Westcon resellers in the UK with access to the recently launched Enghouse Interactive Communications Center (EICC) solution, consisting of contact centre, call recording and operator console solutions compatible with Lync.

"Enghouse's contact centre and call recording portfolio reduces the risk associated with Lync deployments. Its solutions are vendor agnostic and seamlessly migrate with existing PBXs so end users can protect their existing assets and don't have to 'rip and replace'," stated David Grant, Senior Vice President Westcon Convergence, EMEA.

"Another advantage is that end users can add-on products when they choose to do so with its flexible modular system."

Iain McKenzie, Group Managing Director, EMEA at Enghouse Interactive, added: "Demand for Lync solutions is escalating across our customer base. We are working with Westcon to further drive development of the Lync market."

Security specialist Bloxx has appointed Mark Gibson as its new sales director.

He joins from Capita where he was in charge of SAS's public security sales and marketing across the entire SAS Public Group in the UK, the Americas and other markets. In his new role at Bloxx he will be responsible for new channel partnerships and he is expected to enhance existing relationships with resellers in the UK, the company says.

Bloxx currently works with more than 50 channel partners in the UK including NTS, European Electronique, Caretower, Cygnia and Academia. Gibson is charged with growing the channel base by more than 50 percent by the end of 2014.

"With his proven track record in developing businesses and taking companies into new markets by direct and indirect routes, Mark is the ideal candidate to help us achieve our growth plans," said Charles Sweeney, CEO of Bloxx.

Rainbow Telecom is to adopt a dual go-to-market strategy following its acquisition of Essex-based AV specialist Charm Office Solutions.

Rainbow MD Dave Corgat (pictured) said: "The acquisition is an early tactical move that supports a new strategy to run alongside all our existing hosted services."

Charm specialises in video and online conferencing solutions as well as meeting room design and AV installation and maintenance.

Rainbow's sales have swung sharply towards hosted with 80% of all products sold being cloud-based. "We believe that video conferencing will be best sold as an application," added Corgat.
 
Charm MD Rod O'Brien added: "This exciting new phase in hosted services requires a greater reach than Charm can achieve, but working alongside Rainbow enables us to add a portfolio of hosted services and to leverage its expertise in this market."

Westcon Convergence has opened the doors to its LEAP Centre located at the distributor's European HQ in Crawley.

The multi-vendor solutions briefing centre is designed to showcase best in breed UC, collaboration and infrastructure solutions, and takes its name from the watchwords Learn, Experience, Architect and Plan.

The centre brings together Westcon's vendor portfolio and enables the firm to demonstrate how the technologies come together to create integrated solutions.

Other services include demonstrations, proof of concept, formal and informal training, which combined offer a learning experience for both sales and technical staff.

Ioan MacRae, General Manager, UK and Ireland, Westcon Convergence, said: "The LEAP Centre will accelerate and simplify the sales process, and increase partners' creditability by eliminating the difficulties of setting up different demonstrations with a multitude of vendors.

"This non-chargeable service from Westcon adds significant value to the channel community."

Greg Lane, Head of Pre-Sales, Worldstone, is an enthusiastic early proponent of the centre. "We have already had a training session," he stated. "Through the facility we have access to all of Westcon's products and hands-on practical training."

Softcat has appointed James Baker as Alliance Director. The former EMEA product management head at Insight joins Softcat in two months and will be responsible for partner strategy, relationships with several key vendors, business support and marketing.

Baker's previous experience also includes Veritas and Symantec.

"James' appointment is a huge boost for us. His reputation precedes him, he's a well-known talent in the industry and already knows several of the other Softcat directors," said Colin Brown, Softcat's Managing Director.

"As a member of Microsoft's global Partner Executive Board, he's bringing with him a network of senior contacts and years of experience managing business relationships."

The European arm of US-based cloud specialist 8x8 (formerly Voicenet Solutions now known as 8x8 Solutions following the acquisition of Voicenet) has upgraded George Best Belfast City Airport's ageing phone system with business VoIP and cloud-based unified communications services.

"The existing infrastructure could no longer handle the needs of the 1,500 employees and eight buildings spread across the airport's 100,000 square foot facility," explained Terry Moore, CEO of Outsource Solutions.

"A decision was made to replace the airport's old PBX system with 8x8's cloud-based communications solutions. The challenge we faced was upgrading the technology during the airport's normal day to day operations, which saw over 2.5 million passengers using the facility in 2013, making it one of the busiest periods in the airport's 30 year history."

Belfast City Airport's new cloud-based communications system is configured to not only handle the airport's present needs but to also scale to handle future requirements, seasonality and VIP communications with full wallboard and call statistics reporting. In addition, the airport can now accurately measure, rate and analyze telephone-based service aspects, along with providing real-time reporting and analytics.

"Belfast City Airport's deployment of cloud communications services could very well be the first for an airport, but I'm certain it won't be the last," said 8x8 Solutions CEO Kevin Scott-Cowell.

"Airports all over the world are facing the need for reliable, secure and scalable services that are well beyond the capabilities of traditional on-premise PBX systems.

"The ability of cloud communications services to provide the resiliency and reliability necessary to keep the communications systems of a mission critical public utility like an airport online and available confirms that IP communications not only meet but exceed traditional telephony capabilities."