Comms Dealer

Unify, formerly known as Siemens Enterprise Communications, has announced a number of new features and enhancements to the OpenScape Contact Center Suite, delivering improved efficiency and flexibility through expanded support for major mobile devices, tighter social media integration and improved analytics.

Responding to the BYOD trend Unify now offers Mobile Agent and Mobile Supervisor applications for the OpenScape Contact Center Suite, enabling full access to contact center tools via iPhones, iPads, Android smartphones and tablets. This provides anywhere workers increased flexibility and improves responsiveness to customers.

New to the OpenScape Contact Center Suite is an Analytics package through a new partnership with Softcom. By incorporating Softcom's InsideEdge line of analytics solutions into Unify's OpenScape Contact Center Suite, contact center managers will be able to monitor agent and campaign stats in real-time, uncover weaknesses, and streamline training to maximize agent productivity and profits.

Other enhancements to existing OpenScape Contact Center Suite offerings include: Social Media solution can now route Facebook posts to agents, improving responseiveness; Campaign Director is now a pure SIP, software-only solution that dramatically reduces TCO; improved Workforce Optimisation through strengthened partnerships with Verint and ASC, helping drive further efficiencies and effectiveness for contact center users; and AgentDesktop-Web client allows agents to work from anywhere on any device without installing any software on their PCs.

"Today's contact center requires a complete arsenal of tools to provide greater responsiveness to customers and to effectively manage internal processes," said Nancy Jamison, Principal Analyst, Customer Contact at Frost & Sullivan.

"Unify's OpenScape Contact Center Suite provides a robust tool set for omni-channel customer engagement, with proactive outbound, social and mobile - for agents, supervisors and managers."

The new OpenScape Contact Center Suite is available now directly and through Unify's global partner channel.

Nimans has produced a 12-page booklet designed to make SIP more accessible for resellers. It follows the launch of a dedicated SIP trunk service and outlines  key areas for successful deployment.

Data bandwidth requirements, how many trunks, connectivity criteria, SIP benefits and management considerations are some of the many topics covered.

Nimans says the launch of its own SIP trunk service provides resellers with 'more control' and access to a complete range of network-based products and expertise.

The Nimans proposition gives resellers a strong and proven platform to capture a bigger share of the growing SIP market, claims Head of Network Services Mark Curtis-Wood.

"There's a right way of doing SIP and a wrong way. Resellers need to understand what the client wants, put a solution together and deliver it to them," he explained.

"The new guide is part of this ethos, a key building block in helping resellers identify and capitalise on market opportunities especially at the SMB level. We want to open their eyes to the huge market potential.

"It's about creating a holistic solution. Conversations often start off about how SIP can cut ISDN costs by 25%. But it's really about flexibility, disaster recovery and number portability. We can help resellers embrace SIP for the first time or take their service to the next level."

Wholesale comms provider Entanet has given its partners a New Year boost by extending its free activation offer on new FTTC orders until the end of January 2014.

The offer, which has now been running for four months, applies no charge for activation on new FTTC connections and no charge for standard copper-to-FTTC broadband migrations on new connections. A one-off charge is normally applied to each of these services.

The promotion has drawn plenty of interest and generated many new fibre broadband sales, according to Paul Heritage-Redpath, Product Manager at Entanet.

"It's been hugely popular and with a number of prospective sales still moving through the pipeline, we have made this further extension to give our partners every chance of completing new business sales."

The offer is equally appealing for existing customers on standard BT or LLU copper broadband looking to upgrade to fibre or brand new fibre customers, says Heritage-Redpath.

"If that's something a customer is considering, the offer of free activation and migration may just persuade them to make the decision."

Entanet will be continuing to drive sales of FTTC this year, he adds. With more customers looking to make use of higher-speed online services, we expect to see robust demand for FTTC and the offer is a good way of drawing attention to our offerings in what we expect to be a good year for new connections. This offer helps our partners to be competitive while also underlining the extra value and personal and specialist service that sets Entanet and its partners apart from the competition."

The promotion covers all of Entanet's allowance-based and unlimited FTTC packages, and both Family and Business offerings on 12- and 24-month contracts.

The offer is available to registered reseller partners only.

A new service launched by Voiceflex provides guaranteed speeds of 0.5Mb for five SIP trunks, 1Mb for 10 SIP trunks and 2Mb for 20 SIP trunks.

The wires only option has a FOC installation and the Managed option has a minimal installation fee with a free router.

"As 95% of our ADSL2 connections are sold for voice, the upload speed is paramount to the success of the application," said Paul Taylor, Voiceflex. "SIP trunking and hosted telephony is all about the data connectivity."

The coalition government is forcing through plans to spend upwards of £45 billion on a new high speed railway (HS2) but bringing the country's businesses access to super-fast broadband through fibre-to-the-premises (FTTP) and fibre-to-the-home (FTTH) would be cheaper and far more financially beneficial to the country says leading IT entrepreneur Scott Fletcher.

"The way we conduct business is rapidly changing and will continue to change in the future. The only thing that we can predict for certain is that the fast interchange of data will be an essential feature of the digital age," said Scott Fletcher who is the chairman and founder of UK cloud infrastructure specialists ANS Group.

"The need for face to face business meetings, and hence the need for superfast trains, will become less important in a world that is more dependent on digital conferencing and mobile computing devices.

"By the time the first phase of HS2 becomes operational in 2026 it may well be now more than a quaint obsolescence," he said.

Transport minister Patrick McLoughlin told the House of Commons that HS2 would be producing 'around £50bn worth of economic benefits once it is up and running' but even the National Audit Office disputes this figure.

The government's calculations include £12.6 billion for time saved on business travel, but the NAO reports this 'uses a simplifying assumption that time spent travelling is unproductive'. To this end, it would be more productive to simply provide faster broadband and more carriages on existing inter-city trains.

"I just cannot accept that spending that amount of money on cutting a journey time from London to Birmingham by 20 minutes will have anything like the financial benefits that are claimed for HS2," said Mr Fletcher.

"Superfast fibre-to-the-premises broadband would be of immense benefit to British business in the short term and would accelerate the development of new technology in the long term.

"If this country is to see any benefit from HS2 we should be accelerating growth and employment in the new technology centres in the north of England. We should be planning to build the railway from north to south and not the other way round," said Mr Fletcher.

Coms plc has released details of big contract wins for its connectivity and communication services.

The deals include a contract to supply telecommunications solutions including hardware, hosted seats and broadband to a brand new division of a blue-chip multinational company. Providing services to over 1,000 users, this contract will be worth £850,000 per year.

Also in the bag is a data centre project for a top UK university worth £460,000, with the design process starting in Spring 2014; and an infrastructure project worth £330,000 at the headquarters of a major commercial law firm.

Coms also snared an infrastructure project worth £250,000 for the London offices of an international bank, with installation scheduled for completion in March 2014; plus a contract to supply 600-plus broadband lines each month for the next 12 months, with estimated annual revenues of £108,000.

Dave Breith, CEO of Coms, said: "These contracts enable Coms to start 2014 with confidence in our ability to deliver end to end communication and connectivity solutions to UK industry.

"We anticipate 2014 will be a solid year for Coms and we look forward to announcing more contract wins and product launches as the year progresses."

Channel figurehead Lee Broxson has joined Daisy Wholesale as Product Director for Data, moving from Griffin where he was Head of Sales.

In his new role at Daisy, Broxson will be responsible for developing the data portfolio, working with both the sales and marketing teams and taking the proposition to the existing and prospect reseller community, maximising potential through the penetration of data in to their customer bases.

Terry O'Brien, Managing Director for Daisy Wholesale, said: "Lee has enormous credibility with the channel and is well liked and recognised as a leader in his field."

Broxson added: "I am excited to be joining Daisy Wholesale at such an exciting point in its history, investing in the business for the future and building it to be fit for the channel of the future.

"Over the last decade I have built up a wealth of experience and knowledge in many aspects of the industry, from carriers through to wholesale, and I am looking forward to working with Terry and the team to utilise this experience to develop and grow our partners' businesses."

Avnet Services, part of distributor Avnet Technology Solutions, has become an official Veeam Authorised Education Centre (VMAEC) and will deliver the technical courses required for partners, customers and resellers to achieve the Veeam Certified Engineer (VMCE) certification.

Through this collaboration with Veeam Software and its backup, replication and virtualisation management solutions for VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V, Avnet will roll out a VMAEC training program across the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands, Denmark, Italy and Spain from January 2014.

René Albert, director of education solutions for Avnet Services, EMEA, commented: "This partnership with Veeam Software extends our education portfolio at a time when the virtualisation market is growing at a significant rate. This allows our reseller partners across EMEA to gather the right knowledge to successfully seek opportunities and engage in this important IT growth market."

Nimans has added the Vulcan vandal resistant phone range to its line card. High impact steel casings, durable polycarbonate handset mouldings, armour plated cords and zinc alloy diecast keypads have been designed to promote resilience and withstand extreme heavy duty usage. Analogue, SIP and GSM variants are available.

Nimans says the Vulcan LC Industrial Phone is suited for heavy duty sites such as production plants, university campuses, shopping centres and transport terminals. It features an loud ringer and a secure steel wall mounting plate. There's also a weatherproof version that comes complete with a slam lock door and internal seals for dust tight performance.

Ian Brindle, Nimans' Head of Conferencing and Handset Sales, says the phones benefit from advanced features such as auto reporting. Non keypad versions are available.

"Vulcan represents a powerful addition to a reseller's kitbag. They are built to last and provide years of reliable operation in the most challenging of indoor and outdoor environments."

Pro-Data Group, a provider of IT infrastructure support services, has opted for Red Box Recorders as its sole partner to supply voice and data recording for unified communications solutions.

This latest agreement is part of an ongoing expansion of the Red Box partner and reseller network. It will see Pro-Data targeting opportunities within the financial sector with new and existing customers in the UK, mainland Europe, the Middle East and APAC.

Pro-Data has grown significantly and offers a range of IT services and training to companies including leading international banks, wealth management businesses and financial services institutions.

The company had previously utilised a number of voice and data providers but, following increasing demand from its growing customer base mainly in response to increased legislation, has decided to work solely with Red Box Recorders.

The deal will enable Pro-Data to enhance its offering to customers by utilising the Red Box Quantify Recording Suite as part of its communications solutions.

It can be seamlessly integrated with a range of platforms and tailored to meet precise requirements with a wide range of functionality including Quality Management, PCI Compliance, Call Management and Billing, Event Reconstruction and Audio Analytics.

Another key driver of the deal was the strength of Red Box's Quantify Mobile Recording Suite in enabling organisations to record mobile communications and assist them with remaining compliant in the face of ever increasing global regulation.

Olivier Roth, CEO at Pro-Data Group commented: "Increasingly companies are coming to us for advice on voice and data recording and we needed to find a partner who provided a solution that addressed their requirements and was easy to maintain and upgrade. Our research led us to Red Box and we initially trialled its solutions with a few key clients. The result was a success."

Lee Jones, CEO of Red Box Recorders, said: "Creating an international network of leading partners forms an integral part of our growth strategy and we now have more than 300 worldwide."