Comms Dealer

By Elvire Gosnold, Director, Blabbermouth Marketing: Key words are old hat but content marketing is a must for your 2014 wardrobe. The good news is that SEO is no longer mythical wizardry costing thousands of pounds a month with nothing to show for a good part of the year.

Our friends at Google have altered the rules yet again in a bid to support genuine businesses and individuals who have something interesting to say. Organic growth in search engine optimisation can now be more easily achieved by simply creating original and meaningful content.

Content marketing complements Google's aims of creating a fairer, more realistic online search environment that not only offers a better experience for users but also the writers that genuinely have something to say. This means that successful SEO can be more easily achieved by resellers as the focus has moved away from key words and now encourages legitimate, intelligent content that truly enriches reader's knowledge.

Therefore resellers need to move away from the opinion that you will only get exposure if you constantly repeat words such as cloud, broadband and hosted. Those days have long gone and now you can actually get penalised for over using words. Intelligent news and discussions is what you need to be focusing on as constant, fresh and original opinion pieces will make you the blue eyed boy of the Google Guy.

Prospective clients will see you when they are looking for information for their business as a whole, not just when they are doing the obvious searches for IT and telecoms services. Creating content gives you better visibility in search engines so as your impressions increase so too should your click-throughs and site exposure.

Westcon Group's Comstor business unit has strengthened its relationship with CA Technologies, expanding the company's data centre market presence in a move that sees Comstor partners across the UK gain access to CA Technologies' IT monitoring software.

Andreas Dohmen, Executive Vice President EMEA, Comstor, said: "It's a natural progression to anchor our portfolio with this foundational monitoring technology."
 
Andrea Dossena, Vice President of Partner Sales, CA Technologies EMEA, added. "By joining forces with Comstor, we're able to bring this value proposition to customers in the UK and across vertical markets via the reseller channel."

Spending on IT per person is much higher in the UK, Germany and France than in southern Europe. A study by German high-tech association BITKOM showed an EU average of €1,197. At the lower end were Italy (€930), Spain (€928), Russia (€403), China (€213) and India (€49).

Similarly higher expenditures in Germany for information technology and telecommunications were significantly higher than many other major industrial nations at €1,477. Japan (€1,807, UK (€1,994) and the USA (€2,430) were higher, however. France was just behind Germany at €1,470.

"ICT investment are the most important indicator of the development of the digital economy and society," says BITKOM President Prof. Dieter Kempf. "The gap [for Germany] with the UK and the USA is far too great."

While the ICT spend in 2013 stagnated in Germany compared with 2012, the weaker countries did significantly increase their spending. The fastest growing was India (up 11%), followed by Brazil (10%), China (9%) and Russia (5%).

South West Communications Group has announced ambitions plan to significantly grow its business by the end of 2014.

Now in its 30th year as a telephone systems provider, South West Communications Group is aiming to expand its market share in telephony but also to increase the use of its purpose-built data centre hosting facility in Exeter and to expand the connectivity side of the business.

To support its growth plans, South West Communications Group is launching a recruitment drive to fulfil new roles in office-based and field sales.

Sales director Sarah Flowers said: "People generally know us for two things, telephone systems and Exeter Chiefs, but we offer so much more.

"Our data centre enables hosting, disaster recovery and data backup services and we offer a full range of Internet connectivity, data network and video conferencing solutions.

"Our aim is to build on the telephony core of our business and to put more resource in these other services to offer a complete business communications service. It is an ambitious plan but we are eager to embrace growth to well and truly leave behind the tough economic times of recent years."

South West Communications Group is also planning to broaden its customer catchment area by offering its range of products and services to businesses in the midlands.

Eclipse has named Dave Manning as its new Director of Operations. He joins at a time when the company plans to double the size of the business and create dozens of new roles.

Over the coming months Eclipse will be developing its product portfolios to deliver a flexible range of connectivity, communications and cloud services to support business productivity and growth, and customer focus will be key to Eclipse's success.

Manning said: "The team at Eclipse is passionate about delivering an exceptional experience to their customers all the way through their relationship with us, and I can't wait to be part of the evolution of this already successful company."

Clodagh Murphy, Managing Director, added: "I'm delighted to be welcoming Dave to the team and at such an exciting time for us as a business. Dave's knowledge and experience will help us to diversify and grow while maintaining and improving what we currently do."

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.