Comms Dealer

Cloud computing is the most valuable skill for IT professionals to have in terms of career path and advancement, according to new research from recruitment specialist Robert Half Technology.

Thirty-nine per cent of IT directors said that cloud computing is the most valuable skill for IT professionals to have, followed by security (37%), project management (33%), virtualization (29%), network administration and engineering (27%), mobile and application development (27%), database management (24%), C# development (15%), business intelligence (14%) and Java development (13%).

The rise in adoption of cloud computing initiatives is driving organisations to employ greater numbers of cloud experts, found the research.

Almost half (41%) of IT directors said that they would hire additional staff to support cloud initiatives. Of these, permanent employees would make up 17% of new hires, while contractors or interims would make up 24%. An equal number (41%) of IT directors said that their cloud initiatives were fully staffed. Just 18% said that they did not have cloud initiatives in place, suggesting that the vast majority of companies (82%) have undertaken or will undertake cloud projects.

As well as hiring new cloud experts, IT directors are investing in training and education to bring their current teams up to speed. Almost half (49%) say that they deliver in-house training and development, while a third (32%) invest in external training courses and 30% provide webinar and e-learning. A quarter of companies deliver on-the-job training while a fifth (20%) rely on previous experience in another company.

Phil Sheridan, UK Managing Director, Robert Half Technology said: "The fact that so many companies are investing in cloud initiatives as well as training for their teams means that there are rich opportunities and a clear career path for IT professionals with cloud skills.

"With such a high proportion of companies planning to hire additional staff in this area, it's clearly a good time to focus on cloud skills as well as security around cloud initiatives and across the technology function. However, project management and virtualisation skills are also highly valued by IT directors so these are worth focusing on too."

VCOMM has rolled out a white labelled engineering services and technical support portfolio designed to help resellers and service providers deliver a range of new Unified Communication products and solutions.

The portfolio offers support services ranging from training, field engineering, 24/7/365 technical support and four hour emergency on-site engineering support and spares management. V

COMM's engineering services are provided as part of a platform purchase or on an ad-hoc basis and include design services, installation services and ad-hoc services. VCOMM's technical capabilities are provided by a team of skilled VoIP engineers who have real-world experience and certification across a wide range of vendor systems and services, said the firm.

Steve Harris, Managing Director of VCOMM Distribution, said: "Since completing the operational integration of VCOMM and SIPHON, we have been able to provide a set of services to VCOMM customers that reflect the principles we established in SIPHON.

"Our customers want more from distribution and want us to support them in driving innovation and new services to their end customers. They also want the peace of mind that they can rely on us to help them design, deliver, deploy and then support the products we sell which we can now promise them."

Airtime provider Daisy Distribution has announced the winners of its competition run in partnership with BlackBerry offering a VIP trip to the Abu Dhabi Formula One Grand Prix (1st-4th November).

The lucky winners were Dave Webster and Stuart Mico, joint owners of Midland Communications, who were drawn at random from the qualifying entrants of the competition.

The winners will fly out to the UAE courtesy of Etihad Airways and will receive; 5 star accommodation for four nights; three day hospitality race access including Golden Circle entry to the post-race concert with the teams and drivers; a team gift pack; and premium passes to the Yas Island theme parks.

Stuart Mico said upon winning the competition: "We're both extremely excited to go to Abu Dhabi as it's somewhere we've never been before. Rewards like this justify all the hard work and effort all our staff put in to ensure we achieve our accreditations."

To have entered the prize draw, Daisy Distribution's partners needed to acquire 'tickets' that could only be earned through the purchase of a BlackBerry 10 smartphone - including the BlackBerry Q10, BlackBerry Z10 and BlackBerry Q5 - between 20th August and 26th September.

Participating partners also had to complete the online BlackBerry 10 eLearning modules to take part, enabling them to be fully equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to successfully sell BlackBerry 10 smartphones.

Julien Parven, Marketing Director at Daisy Distribution, said: "We'd like to thank everyone that took part in the competition, but special congratulations to our lucky winners Dave and Stuart from Midland Communications.

"The promotion proved to be a huge success thanks to it being open to our existing partners, those acquired through the recent MoCo Communications acquisition and any other independent channel partners."

Mobile analyst firm Juniper Research estimates that the number of smartphone shipments exceeded a quarterly record of 250 million in Q3 2013, representing a y-o-y growth of almost 49% from Q3 2012, and q-o-q growth of 10%.

Samsung now accounts for a third of all smartphones shipped with an estimated 85 million smartphones - a record for the company. The company reported a 26% growth in profit, driven by an increase of smartphone sales in both Premium and Economy segments.

The iPhone accounted for one in seven smartphone shipments during Q3 2013, representing a quarterly growth of 8% from Q2 2013.

Juniper's latest research forecasts that Apple and Samsung will continue to dominate the global market, shipping 17% more smartphones in 2018 than were shipped globally by all vendors in 2012.

These top-end players are expected to continue to witness impressive growth next quarter due to seasonality, however Juniper expects a steady decline in growth thereafter especially in maturing markets.

At this point differentiation becomes vital to continued success, and the strategies used to achieve differentiation need to be different for maturing and emerging markets.

Juniper notes that increasingly vendors will be required to anticipate customers 'future needs', while at the same time creating 'new needs' that customers will find desirable. This will become of paramount importance as new customers become a scarce resource and vendor churn becomes a major factor.

Nokia shipped a record 8.8 million Lumia devices and nearly six million Asha smartphones in Q3 2013, together exceeding LG for the second time this year. LG maintained its smartphone shipment pace compared to the previous quarter, shipping another 12 million in Q3 2013, representing a 24% increases year-over-year.

BlackBerry's recent results - which run to a different financial schedule - are expected to see them ship just under four million smartphones in Q3 2013. In the three months to the end of August 2010, BlackBerry clocked up some 12 million smartphone shipments and more than $4.6 billion in revenues; in its most recent quarter, smartphone shipments had fallen to a paltry 3.7 million against revenues of less than $1.6 billion; the costs of sales were now exceeding the revenues earned.

Huawei, ZTE and LG together shipped over 37 million smartphones in Q3 2013, accounting for a combined market share of 15%.

Six Degrees Group raised almost £35,000 for HOPEHIV at its annual charity golf day on September 17th at Foxhills golf course, Surrey.

The event drew in more than 50 IT industry experts who clubbed together and raised over £17,000 for the charity. This sum was then doubled by 6DG, meaning the results came in well above par.

Six Degrees of Hope, the service provider's CSR programme was launched in 2011 to support HOPEHIV.

In the two years since its launch, Six Degrees of Hope has raised more than £125,000 for the organisation.

As part of the scheme, 6DG doubles any funds raised by its employees for Six Degrees of Hope. The golf day finished with dinner and a charity auction. Items offered for auction included a first class trip to Paris, tickets to see England v Argentina at Twickenham and two days of brand consultancy with Mr B & Friends Brand Consultancy.

Alastair Mills, CEO at Six Degrees Group, stated: "Whether our staff are organising formal events, fun quizzes or cycling across the country, at 6DG we are always looking for ways to raise money in the name of Six Degrees of Hope.

"We wanted to build on last year's golf day success by raising even more money this year and we are pleased to have had so many enthusiastic players on board. Several of our staff members have recently returned from a trip to Tanzania, where they volunteered at one of our projects so we know that the amount of money raised by just this one event will help to transform the lives of young people in many communities. We look forward to hearing more about the charity's continued success as a result."

Avnet Technology Solutions has announced the launch of its new CloudEnhance Programme in the UK aimed at helping business partners and managed service providers to maximise the opportunity around the growth in unstructured data.

Avnet will provide participants in the programme with a complete portfolio of simple, cost-effective and secure, service-based archiving solutions that reduce costs, simplify IT and minimise risk.

As part of the programme, Avnet will use its pivotal position in the channel to facilitate introductions between service providers and business partners to drive increased cloud opportunities for both parties.

Avnet's CloudEnhance Programme focuses on the largely untapped market for offering archiving as a managed service rather than the more traditional methods currently used to store large amounts of unstructured data, particularly in distributed and un-virtualised environments. As a result organisations will benefit from a non-disruptive, high performing approach to moving data into a cloud environment.

Sukh Rayat, senior vice president, north region, Avnet Technology Solutions EMEA, said: "As unstructured data proliferates organisations are re-evaluating their IT strategies. They need to deal with everything from increased performance and capacity requirements, rising power and cooling costs to regulatory pressures. More often than not, organisations are turning to cloud-based solutions to address their needs and with industry analysts predicting double-digit growth in the public cloud services market channel partners will need to act fast."

Nexus Telecommunications has been named Zen Wholesale Partner of the Year.

The award was presented to Rob Sims, COO at Nexus Telecommunications, by Zen's Managing Director Richard Tang.

Sims stated: "We are delighted to win Wholesale Partner of the Year for the second time. I believe this year's award is testament to how our two companies are working closely together having created a solid partnership".

Leanne Peasnall, Channel Marketing Manager at Zen Internet, added: "Nexus are consistently among our top performing partners, largely due to the way they have embraced our business connectivity portfolio to develop solutions for their customers."

The Cloud Industry Forum's (CIF) fourth annual research project into cloud adoption trends in the UK has revealed a lack of concern being paid to SLAs by end users when migrating to the cloud.

While this may be because they feel cloud providers are meeting their SLA commitments, a study by Queen Mary University has shown a myriad of problems with cloud SLAs. APM Group, the CIF's independent certification partner, has called on users to review SLAs with care, pointing to the CIF Code of Practice as a means to vet potential cloud suppliers.

The research, conducted in Q3 2013, polled 250 senior IT and business decision-makers to gain insight into attitudes, experiences and trends across the UK end user community.

Although concerns about data security and data privacy ranked highly among end users during the migration process, just one in five (20 per cent) stated that they were concerned about contractual liability for services if SLAs are not met.

According to Richard Pharro, CEO of APM Group, the CIF figures betray a lack of awareness as to the importance of cloud contracts when selecting a CSP:.

He said: "That just one in five of respondents cite concern over contractual liability for cloud services is a concern in itself. In the wake of recent service provider closures, such as that of Nirvanix, 2e2 and Doyenz, which were unexpected and left users and their data vulnerable, we would have expected this figure to be a good deal higher. As these cases attest, by failing to pay proper attention to cloud contracts, business may be putting themselves, and their data, at risk."

Organisations across the healthcare value chain are realising the potential of embedding machine-to-machine (M2M) technology into mobile health solutions.

Mobile network operators (MNOs) have already begun exploring this opportunity, developing M2M-enabled solutions for various applications including remote patient monitoring, medical asset tracking, and healthcare workflow organisation.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan studies the success of two MNOs to reveal how telecom can build a stronger presence in the healthcare industry.

The research finds that after North America, Europe offers considerable growth potential for M2M in healthcare. Most European telecom operators have now dedicated M2M business units that focus on R&D, service development, and delivery. Frost & Sullivan estimates that M2M revenues of telecom service providers in Europe will grow to €2.6 billion by 2016, from €600 million in 2010.

"MNOs are well placed to participate in shaping future healthcare delivery as they own the essential communications infrastructure needed for mobile communications to become a core tool in the industry," said Frost & Sullivan Information and Communication Technologies Research Analyst Malgorzata Filar. "They have also built trust with their customers and can supply user-centric services."

Outsourcery has been accepted onto the G-Cloud 4 framework, a government programme committed to the adoption of cloud computing and delivering computing resources to the public sector through an approved seller marketplace.

G-Cloud 4 will be the fourth round of procurement of the government's G-Cloud framework, and Outsourcery, now an established member of the list of suppliers, has noticed that since the beginning of the programme, public sector organisations have become more decisive about moving to the cloud.

Piers Linney, Co-CEO of Outsourcery said: "Since we were first accepted onto the G-Cloud framework we have seen a huge increase in the number of public sector organisations looking to embrace cloud solutions and services.

"Through G-Cloud, the public sector has access to new efficient solutions without the huge capital expense. This means that they can make use of the most up-to-date solutions in the marketplace."

Along with other suppliers, Outsourcery is providing a range of cloud services and solutions, delivered from the Outsourcery O-Cloud, specifically full enterprise voice-enabled Unified Lync, SharePoint, Exchange and CRM, all via the G-Cloud's CloudStore online catalogue.

Linney added: "Being selected as a supplier for G-Cloud 4 is an important achievement for a number of different reasons - it helps us and our partners learn about the IT needs of the public sector and also gives us the confidence to know that we are going in the right direction in terms of the development of our offerings.

"This marks the next step for Outsourcery, our partners and all the public sector organisations which are taking a leap to better their IT systems."