Comms Dealer

Congrats to Nimans' Chairman Julian Niman who celebrated his 60th birthday (October 11th) with a party for staff hosted by TV celeb Bobby Davro, just hours after collecting a lifetime achievement prize at Comms Dealer's Comms National Awards.

To mark his 60th, giant balloons and a 20ft banner decorated the company's Manchester headquarters, and Niman was presented with a replica cake of his office and warehouse complex, a gold bar and a vintage computer to remind him of how he first started the business more than 30 years ago, inspired by his CB radio hobby.

Niman previously held an outdoor family fun day to mark his birthday celebrations, inviting all Nimans staff to an open-air summer party at a local sports centre.

"Nimans is like one big family to me so what better way to celebrate than with the people I work with," he said. "We've come a long way together. As for the future, I'm looking forward to launching a number of new initiatives to help staff further develop their careers."

The sweet taste of success is nothing new to Niman, pictured below with his remarkable birthday cake.

Sonus Networks has introduced the Sonus SBC SWe, a software-based Session Border Controller (SBC) architected to deliver unlimited scalability with the same advanced features and functionality of the Sonus SBC 5000 Series on a virtualised platform.

The SBC SWe is feature equivalent to Sonus' hardware-based SBC 5000 Series. The only difference between the Sonus SBC SWe and the Sonus SBC 5000 Series is how customers choose to deploy it: on industry-standard servers or in virtualised environments.

Scalable from as few as 25 to an unlimited number of sessions, the user-defined scope of the SBC SWe means that Sonus customers get to choose where they reside on the performance curve. Sonus will provide customers with a set of performance specifications for customers' host platforms, and customers can then rapidly expand capacity, calls per second, features, transcoding and security capabilities with a license key as business demands change, said the firm.

"Sonus customers can now move seamlessly between hardware and software solutions, with assurance that their existing communications and network investments are fully protected," said David Tipping, vice president and general manager, SBC Business, Sonus.

"Service providers are not 'boxed in' by hardware and no longer have to compromise on features or functionality when moving to software."

Diane Myers, principal analyst, Infonetics Research: noted: "Security was recently cited by enterprises as the second leading barrier to Unified Communications deployment. New types of traffic - voice, video, messaging - traverse the IP network, and unsecured borders could lead to unwanted attacks.

"One of the strengths of the SBC SWe is that Sonus incorporates security and interworking experience into a 'bring your own' platform approach."

Irwin Lazar, vice president and service director, Nemertes Research, added: "More than 67 per cent of companies have virtualised Unified Communications applications to reduce costs, improve resiliency and enable more efficient utilisation of server resources. The ability to run Unified Communications infrastructure on virtual servers is critical buying criteria."

Straight Communications, a new business telecoms firm launched in Northern Ireland, does what it says on the tin and is on a mission to do away with confusing jargon and provide no-nonsense solutions.

With a consultative approach Straight aims to help businesses make the best use of the latest mobile, landline, phone systems, broadband and IT solutions.

The company, headed by Managing Director Adrian McCourt, has ambitious growth plans and with new custom-designed office the company has employs 16 people so far with plans for additional employment growth in the coming months.

McCourt said: "We work with key partners across the business telecoms space and our flexible approach means we will recommend the solution that delivers the best value for the individual business and not one that
simply conforms to a particular network or tariff.

"For example, we offer rolling mobile contracts from as little as 30 days. This has proven popular with companies with a temporary mobile workforce or those who like the flexibility to scale up or down easily in response to changing dynamics of the business environment.

"We have heard of businesses being signed up to three, four and in some cases, even five year deals - I believe there is simply no place in the market for these lengthy, inflexible contracts."

Straight has secured partnerships allowing the company to offer solutions from mobile network providers including Vodafone, O2, EE as well as handset and mobile technology manufacturers including Apple, BlackBerry and Samsung and Straight will also be utilising the BT network to offer landline and broadband solutions.

McCourt added: "The Straight Charter reflects our commitment to be clear and straight-forward when communicating with our customers and to delivering advice that is free from meaningless jargon and consumer hype."

Coms has scooped the Best Performing Share of 2013 on AIM award following a year of ups and downs.

"We have truly had a rollercoaster of a year and now winning this award makes it all
seem worthwhile," said CEO Dave Breith. "I want to say a big thank you to all who have contributed to our success this year- we are all thrilled as out of all the awards given last night, it was this one which I felt was the one to win.

"Being the new boy in town I expect winning this award two years back to back has never been done. I will see you next year to collect this award again."

Congrats to the winners of this year's Comms National Awards (sponsored by Nine Telecom), the most coveted and celebrated awards for the ICT channel. Taking centre stage at London's prestigious Hilton Hotel on Park Lane on October 10th was Azzurri which capped a trio of award wins with the Reseller of the Year accolade (pictured).

Top TV comic Patrick Keilty led proceedings with an inimitable side-splitting stage presence. And industry veteran Julian Niman collected a Special Award in recognition of his industry achievements and ongong contribution to channel growth.

Comms Dealer Editorial Director Nigel Sergent commented: "I would like congratulate our winners and finalists, our judges and Nine, and all our sponsors for supporting this fantastic event."

2013 COMMS DEALER HALL OF FAME

Best Channel Fixed Line Network Provider - Gamma

Best Channel Mobile Network Provider - Gamma

Best Channel ISP - Entanet

Best Channel Wholesale Service Provider - Virtual 1

Best Channel Peripheral Solution - Sennheiser

Best Channel Software Solution - Union Street

Best Channel Telephony Solution - Cirrus

Best Channel Convergence Distributor - Micro-P

Best Channel Installer/Maintainer - Micro-P

Best Channel Mobile Distributor - Abzorb

Enterprise Contact Centre Solution - Azzurri

SME Contact Centre Solution - Cirrus

Enterprise Hosted Solution - 4net Technologies

SME Hosted Solution - Spitfire

Enterprise Mobile Solution - e-know.net with Shoretel

SME Mobile Solution - Cirrus

Enterprise UC Solution - Azzurri

SME UC Solution - TIG

Enterprise Vertical Solution - GHM Communications

SME Vertical Solution - Eclipse

Nine Customer Service Award - PSU

Reseller of the Year - Azzurri

Westcon Convergence hosted a two day sailing event on the Solent for its top performing Avaya partners who hit their sales targets over a three month period.

Ioan MacRae, General Manager, Westcon Convergence, commented: "The Sailing Incentive gives Avaya and Westcon the opportunity to thank our partners for their ongoing commitment and support. The partners have achieved fantastic results this financial year with Avaya business and services."

Partners experienced sailing tuition and racing onboard a 50 foot racing yacht followed by dinner and prize giving for achievements of the day.

"It was such a fantastic event that we have asked Westcon to extend next year's trip by an extra day," said Richard Pennington, Director, 4net Technologies.

Sennheiser Communications has entered into an EMEA distribution agreement with Westcon Convergence.

As part of the agreement, Westcon Convergence will now offer its UK reseller partners the Sennheiser range of business headsets with the ability to support global opportunities.

Sennheiser follows a product distribution model but with direct Sennheiser account management support for channel resellers in conjunction with distribution partners.

Sennheiser can offer the channel conventional and UC optimised headsets for both wireless and wired applications, such as the recently launched Presence Bluetooth series and Century wired series.

Andreas Bach, President of Sennheiser Communications stated: "Ou agreement with Westcon represents a major expansion of our distribution route to market.

"Westcon's strength in the growing UC market sector is a particular advantage. The combination of Westcon's large reseller and system integrator channel community and Sennheiser's range of premium business headsets is a tremendous growth opportunity for both companies."

CSP Vapour Media is to become Leeds-based Jungle IT's main supplier of Internet fibre access and cloud services following a link-up between the companies.

The partnership has already secured contracts worth £250k with more projects in the pipeline.

Jungle IT's Sales Director, Jonathan Asquith said "Over the last 10 years we have built a large customer base around our core product offerings and wanted to get more traction in the cloud services arena.

"Vapour has brought a specialist arm to our sales teams and fully equipped them to take advantage of the definite shift towards cloud shown from our customers."

Vapour Director Tim Mercer commented" "We help our resellers win cloud business it's as simple as that. They have the customer relationships and we bring our cloud expertise to the meetings, this is why we continue to win business with our partners.

"Vapour only provides three products - why complicate when we are good at what we do? We don't sell traditional services or hosted, we provide a pure cloud offering.

"We are aiming to add another 50 strategic partners in the next three months and we are well on the way to achieving this."

VanillaIP is gearing up for the international launch of its Uboss technology management platform at BroadSoft Connections 2013 (October 16-19, Hilton San Diego Bayfront).

Uboss enables carriers in multi-platform environments to increase revenue, improve differentiation, drive customer self-service and ARPU by consolidating back office functions and combining multi-vendor services within an on-demand user portal.

As such, says the VanillaIP, Uboss helps to maximise revenue by getting service providers to market quicker with a more sophisticated product offering.

For BroadSoft service providers, Uboss simplifies and expedites the roll-out of third party BroadSoft community apps, without having to do the interoperability testing every time.

Leslie Ferry, BroadSoft's VP for Marketing, commented: "The Uboss platform underlines the importance of automation for service providers to scale their hosted communication services.

"We believe the ability to easily add applications and services while streamlining operational and billing elements is critical for our telecommunications service provider customers to capitalise on the rapidly growing cloud Unified Communications market."

As a SaaS model, BroadSoft customers leveraging Uboss will not need to deploy any servers or databases in their network. Uboss is a hosted platform that seamlessly connects to BroadSoft platforms and any other vendor solutions customers need to integrate.

Cloud Service Provider Redstor has launched its Virtual Disaster Recovery (DR) service, designed to meet the requirement for copying servers and their data offsite and recovering them quickly in the event of a disaster.

The fully managed service requires little to no customer management. Once configured, an onsite appliance stores system snapshots locally and then securely transfers them to the DR platform in an encrypted format while minimising bandwidth usage.

Redstor's Virtual DR service tests every image nightly to ensure that success is guaranteed. The recovery systems are booted up and agents test and report on a variety of items and any failures or issues are investigated thoroughly.

Chris Sigley, General Manager of Redstor, said: "Professional businesses often can't afford the loss of access to critical business data for even a couple of hours. Redstor's virtual disaster recovery service ensures that when a disaster occurs, a business' systems and data are accessible via the Internet within minutes."