Comms Dealer

Sennheiser has unveiled a contemporary office design scheme for its new 6,000 square feet headquarters in Marlow, Buckinghamshire, based on ideas from of five creative students at Buckinghamshire New University.

The chosen designs were by Jenny Brodie, Joe Burgess, Alice Goad, Katy Needham and Natalie Parkins, all studying for degrees in Spatial Design and Graphic Arts.

Their challenge was to find an innovative graphic design theme for the curved walls and glass partitioning at Sennheiser's new building.

Alison Shreeve, Head of School - Design, Craft & Visual Arts at the University commented: "Students tackled a design challenge to make the new offices for Sennheiser UK look more distinctive and convey core business values to people who use and visit the offices. This was a live, challenging task for the students and it is fantastic to see of their proposals become a reality."

Sennheiser UK is an official education partner of Buckinghamshire New University, creating industry-linked opportunities for students and focusing on their employability. The partnership provides a range of educational benefits for students including the University's main recording studio, 'The Sennheiser Sound Lab', where the company has provided equipment for use in the studio.

Phil Massey, General Manager of Sennheiser UK added: "The University's partnership agreement with Sennheiser UK had initially focused on opportunities in audio, music, film and television production, but this project has demonstrated the wider range of possibilities that have emerged allowing students to further develop their creative skills within industry sectors."

Channel Telecom has bolstered its data portfolio with two new products.

EoFTTC provides uncontended guaranteed bandwidth speeds up to 20Mbps up and down, with an enhanced SLA fix of 7 hours. The EoFTTC data product is currently available in 1,300 exchanges and has an order lead time of 35 working days.
 
Also rolled out is uncontended symmetric 3Mb EFM, offering low latency and increased resilience with multi-pair design.

Usage is unlimited making the product an excellent upgrade path to SDSL for customers that require services such as SIP trunks or hosted telephony. The product is backed with excellent SLAs and is available on a 45 working day order lead time.
 
Matt Donaldson, Channel Manager for Channel Telecom, stated: "These two new data products provide an excellent upgrade migration path for customers who require superior service levels without the higher costs you would receive with traditional EFM and Ethernet services.

"Today a one-size-fits-all approach to business network connectivity has been replaced by a tailored approach to customer requirements. These new products available at highly competitive rates will allow the Channel Telecom partner community to help their customers to select the right solution for their business needs."

AMD-based Notebook unit sales through Western European Distribution increased by +10% year-on-year during the first eight weeks of Q4 2013, according to data published by CONTEXT, the IT market research company.?

In a notebook market down by -12% year-on-year for the period, AMD-powered laptops saw their share increase from 14% in early Q412 to 18% for the equivalent period of 2013. ? ?

"What we see here is an example of the PC market fragmenting into more discreet customer segments", said Jeremy Davies, CEO & co-founder at CONTEXT. "Home buyers want tablets, businesses want higher specification notebooks and are willing to pay more, and where a consumer has chosen a notebook, value is a prime motivator."

Overall growth across Western Europe was driven principally by the UK, where AMD Notebooks by HP, Lenovo, Acer and Toshiba experienced significant growth (+70%). In terms of product, Lenovo's AMD-powered IdeaPad Z585 multimedia laptop led the list of top-selling Notebooks in the UK at the start of the holiday season. ? ?Other top countries performing well in terms of year-on-year growth included Italy (36%) and Spain (38%).

Distributor Arrow Electronics now offers trial and promotion options within its ArrowSphere cloud aggregation platform.

Citrix is the first of Arrow's cloud suppliers to participate in an automated campaign management feature, offering a promotion for its GoToMeeting and GoToAssist services to the end of the year. Solution providers can earn an additional 15% discount for customers purchasing five or more 12-month subscriptions of Citrix' virtual meeting service.

The trial feature offers the flexibility of trying a particular cloud service before committing to buy a subscription. Through the try-before-you-buy option, channel customers can now define the duration, manage the number of licences and determine the service options after the end of the trial period.

With a 'coupon code' feature, solution providers can make available special offers from their ArrowSphere store. Working within parameters set by cloud computing suppliers, solution providers can determine the discounts they would like to offer and to which customers.

Additionally, customers can request an individually tailored quote for a specific hybrid-cloud project or on-premise integration requirement.

"The addition of trial options in ArrowSphere will give Citrix customers the opportunity to explore and enjoy the video-, audio- and screen-sharing capability of GoToMeeting before they buy," said Richard Wolfe-Daimpre, senior director of strategic channels for the SaaS (software-as-a-service) division at Citrix.

Pinnacle Technology founder and Chief Executive Alan Bonner is to step down.

The announcement came in a trading statement as the company reported a fall in revenues for the year to the end of September.

Revenues of approximately £10.1m were down on last year's £12.7m.

Following the announcement of Interim Results to 30th March 2013, the board conducted a root and branch review of the group and took actions to reduce ongoing costs. As a result the group is now trading close to EBITDA breakeven on a monthly basis, however Bonner decided that after 15 years the time is right to seek a successor.

"I am hopeful that we can soon appoint a new Chief Executive who will help us achieve our objectives, and I look forward to ensuring a smooth transition in the best interests of our customers, staff and all other stakeholders," he said.

This financial result relates in large part to a poor performance from the previous acquisition of RMS IT Security, and the lack of any major UK high-profile events in the period (compared to the Queen's Diamond Jubilee celebrations and the London Olympic Games contracts, which were delivered in the year ended 30 September 2012).

In consequence, both EBITDA and Pre-tax loss when finalised, will show a significant deterioration on the figures for the previous year (2012 adjusted EBITDA £284,554; 2012 Loss before tax (£1,115,558).

Mobility distributor Brightstar has bolstered its European business with the acquisition of 20:20 Mobile, a provider of distribution and integrated supply chain solutions to the European mobile industry. 20:20 Mobile currently serves over 3,500 customers with annual turnover of nearly £1bn.  

Marcelo Claure, Brightstar's president and CEO, said: "With the strategic acquisition of 20:20 Mobile Brightstar has a strong position in the European market, one of the most exciting and progressive markets in the world.

"Bringing the team of 20:20 Mobile into the Brightstar family will allow us to deliver some of the top innovations and services developed for mobility to the operators, retailers and manufacturers that are leading the wireless industry in Europe."

Brightstar serves more than 200 operators and 50,000 retailers and has a local presence in more than 50 countries.

The acquired company, which will be renamed Brightstar 20:20, will be led by a management team including German Lopez, currently MD of 20:20 Mobile in Spain and Portugal, who will lead the organisation as President, Europe.

During his tenure with 20:20 Lopez grew subsidiaries in Spain and Portugal from £15m when he joined in 2007 to record revenues of over £270m for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2013.

Jim Michel will serve as the MD of Brightstar 20:20 UK. Prior to joining Brightstar 20:20, Michel served as the Managing Director of Tech Data Mobile in the UK between October 2011 and July 2013 and previously held senior management positions with both Motorola and LG Electronics.

The acquisition is expected to close early in the first quarter of 2014 pending certain closing conditions.

Exclusive Networks has picked up Benelux-based value added distributor of security and networking solutions Terach.

The acquisition will create a 'critical mass in the region' says the firm, and is 'another milestone' in Exclusive Networks Groups' strategic growth strategy to become a pan EMEA Value Add Distributor with €1bn revenue by the end of 2017.

Terach has partnerships with Palo Alto Networks, Aruba Networks, EMC Isilon, SourceFire, Silver Peak, Wallix, Nutanix, WatchGuard, Quantum, A10 Networks, Trustwave, Rapid7 and FireMon.

"Terach is a successful and well respected business both within the Benelux region and among the global vendor community," said Olivier Breittmayer, CEO of Exclusive Networks Group.

"This acquisition is an important milestone for us as we continue to execute on our vision to be the market accelerator for disruptive and innovative IT security and networking technology companies in the EMEA marketplace."

UK-based IT security independent specialist Accumuli has posted a 23% growth in revenues during the first half of the year to £7.7m (€9.3m).

The positive financial results in H1 were supported by continuous acquisition strategy and an increasing demand for the company's solutions and services portfolio, it says. Additionally, 62% of its gross profit was generated from recurring revenues, represented by managed services or support contracts that have a typical term of twelve months or more, and a low rate of attrition and are billed in advance, according to Accumuli's chairman Nick Kingsbury.

Also, the company made some major acquisitions in the period under review and bought Signify, the managed service 2FA provider, and more recently Big Data monitoring and analytics specialist EQUALIS. The latter was acquired for £1.9m (€2.3m).

The EQALIS product portfolio complements Accumuli's security incident and event management (SIEM) solutions and will strengthen the company's big data monitoring and analytics capabilities, it says.
EQALIS' offices are in Bracknell, Berkshire and all employees, including company founders Ian Tinney, Kevin Tunsley, and commercial director Andrew Walley, will be incorporated into the Accumuli organisational structure.

"We continue to demonstrate the ability to execute our strategy in a way that provides headline growth numbers that are not simply reliant upon acquisition led growth and that more importantly generate cash. Growth in the period has come from a number of sources: the acquisition of Signify; product sales growth in our Network Control and Automation business line (formerly known as DDI); increasing demand for our consultancy services and growth in support; and managed services across our product portfolio," comments Kingsbury.

In H1 Accumuli saw some management changes as Rick Wilkinson and John Inns took up responsibility for sales and product management, respectively, while Andrew Cook was appointed as new head of operations across the business.

Fabric-based networks are increasingly being seen as the future networks to support virtualized data centres and private cloud environments, according to a Brocade study.
The research was conducted among 350 global resellers and systems integrators and 60% said their customers gave fabric networks the thumbs up.

However, almost a third of the channel stated that their customers only invested in networks to support the deployment of a specific new application or service, and more than one in 10 admitted that investment was made only when the network was already failing.

Jason Nolet, VP Data Centre Solutions, Brocade, said: "There is a growing recognition that fabrics are the future of data centre networking. However, many enterprises are still relying on legacy environments that are no longer fit for purpose, especially as they look to leverage the benefits of software-defined networking. This presents the channel with a terrific opportunity.

"Channel partners that can help customers take the journey to fabrics will succeed in the new networking landscape."

A brace of business award wins has put C4L indelibly on the comms industry map. The company provides cloud, colocation, connectivity and comms solutions and its Chairman and founder, Matt Hawkins, scooped the Entrepreneur of the Year accolade at the Dorset Business Awards, just days after C4L was named Best Breakthrough Company at the Solent 250 awards.

Hawkins said: "This recognition makes all the years of hard work even more worthwhile as well as being a real morale booster for the future. C4L's achievement is testimony to the expertise and hard work of the whole team."