Comms Dealer

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."

Comms-care has been recognised in this year's marketing industry awards for its PITS (Poor IT Support) prospect campaign, launched to the IT channel earlier this year.
 
The PITS campaign, designed and developed with our digital marketing agency, Purestone, received three finalist places in two of the marketing industry's biggest awards, the B2B Marketing Excellence awards and the Digital Impact Awards.
 
Comms-care successfully took home the silver award at the Digital Impact Awards in the Best Digital Communications as part of an Integrated Campaign and also received the runner-up position in the Most Commercially Successful Campaign category at the B2B Marketing Excellence awards.
 
Richard Eglon, Marketing Director at Comms-care, said: "All campaigns are developed to provide Comms-care with valuable insight into the needs of our customers and prospects, which in turn enables us to deliver relevant services that make an immediate impact to our partners' service proposition.

"To receive two runners-up places at these national marketing awards, alongside some big named brands is great testament to the professionalism, capability and dedication of the Comms-care Marketing team."
 

Channel Telecom has launched a year-end incentive for the new popular Sony PlayStation 4 games console.

Already a sell-out the PS4 is on backorder until mid-January, but Channel Telecom has secured stock to award its winning channel partners.
 
The incentive runs through December with existing partners targeted with selling a modest amount of additional monthly recurring new business to win one of the coveted PS4 games consoles. The incentive is limited to one Sony PlayStation 4 games console per channel partner and other terms and conditions apply.
 
"There's a huge amount of buzz and demand for the PS4," says Clifford Norton, Managing Director of Channel Telecom.

"We have been able to get our hands on some of these superb consoles for the benefit of our channel community. All they have to do is step up to the plate and put in a little extra effort before the year-end to secure this ultimate Christmas goodie and we're delighted to be playing Santa Claus!"
 

EE has been selected by the Government Procurement Service as one of ten approved providers of fixed line telephony services under its Telephony Services Framework.

The Framework, formally referred to as RM1035, forms part of the Government's ICT strategy to migrate public sector organisations to next generation services under the Public Services Network. It enables government departments and local authorities to find cost savings and efficiencies by procuring services from a list of approved providers.

Barry Bolton, Head of Public Sector Marketing at EE, said: "Being awarded a place on the Telephony Services Framework builds on our selection for the Public Services Network last year and demonstrates EE's capability in delivering public sector services. It is an exciting opportunity for us to develop innovative products and services that provide best value to public sector organisations."

EE's selection follows a three-month tendering process, in which Framework Agreements were offered to providers in two lots.

Colt has enhanced its SIP trunking service, Colt VoIP Access, with a feature set that enables customers to take advantage of value added services such as online VoIP reporting, built-in resiliency, disaster recovery and encryption to secure voice calls.

These native encryption protocols provide customers with protection from attacks including eavesdropping and interception.

Colt's VoIP Access removes the need for separate voice and IP networks, so customers can utilise a single converged infrastructure across their multiple sites, which reduces costs and is the key requirement for a consistent and efficient unified communications environment.

The new features enable customers to more easily secure their VoIP traffic, retrieve online in-depth analysis of traffic, performance, network utilisation and generate call monitoring reports. As a result of the comprehensive resiliency now available, including multiple trunks and Points of Presence (PoP), redundancy, and disaster recovery capabilities such as call diversion to an IP address, customers benefit from a highly available and reliable VoIP service.

Marta Muñoz Méndez-Villamil, research director, telecommunications at IDC EMEA, said, "According to IDC's research, end users today are increasingly looking for a voice provider who not only has a robust pan European service, but increasingly one that is supported by real time reporting features and a seamless customer experience.

"Increasingly customers who are seeking an enhanced voice provider require guarantees that their business critical and back-office functions can be ably supported by their SIP trunking or VoIP service provider. Colt's solutions and their cross-Europe capability means multi-branch offices can expect the same service, no matter where they operate."

iPass has strengthened its position in the enterprise mobility channel with two significant partner agreements in the UK, Olive Communications and Specialist Computer Centres (SCC), and mITE GmbH in Germany.

iPass provides mobility services to enterprises and telecom service providers, and its Open Mobile Wi-Fi solution aligns neatly with trends in mobile working and the need for mobile device management.

"BYOD is becoming more common for many enterprise users and iPass Open Mobile gives mobile workers access to a global commercial network of Wi-Fi hotspots, eliminating concerns about bill shock while providing users with consistent and secure network access, which allows them to work productively wherever they are," stated Rene Hendrikse, VP EMEA.

Olive has a strong enterprise mobility offering for UK-based organisations working both domestically, and abroad.

"Our customers want solutions to the challenges of BYOD and mobility, and so strategic partnerships are central to the Olive proposition," said Paul Butler, Commercial Director. "iPass enables us to use Wi-Fi as a differentiator in a competitive marketplace."

Guy Hodges, Public Sector Sales Director, SCC, added: "As mobile working becomes an increasingly common practice, enterprises need reliable, cost effective connectivity to enable their workers to be productive when they travel.

"We are helping many of our customers to become more efficient and effective with large scale enterprise mobility projects, and by partnering with iPass we can ensure their employees have access to low cost, highly secure Wi-Fi across the globe."