Comms Dealer

A rapidly growing law firm has called on the expertise of a local telecoms provider to respond to a surge in business and use Internet-based technology to quickly open up a new contact centre.

Blackburn based solicitors Curtis Law has expanded its workforce from two to over 150 since its inception just five years ago.

With a steady increase in personnel again this year, the company has recently opened the new inbound call facility at its headquarters with the help of neighbouring company Abbey Telecom.

The telephone systems installer has introduced a new network of secure, resilient and clear lines by utilising the law firm's existing internet capabilities. This means new sets of lines can be made active within 24 hours, providing the flexibility to quickly meet the rise in customer enquiries.

Curtis Law Solicitors Enterprise Manager Ish Ahmed explained: "We needed a reliable supplier and a strong B2B relationship to move ahead with the various new business enterprises that would help Curtis Law Solicitors continue its expansion. Due to Abbey Telecom's locality, our work history, and the fact we have grown together over recent years, they were the natural choice.

"Since the installation of our inbound call system we've not experienced any problems and the client care from Danny Pickin and everyone at Abbey Telecom has been second to none."

The new system will give the company the scope and flexibility to meet longer term growth plans and quickly add new lines when they need them.

Abbey Telecom sales manager Danny Pickin said: "We have been handling the telephone systems for Curtis Law Solicitors for several years now, maintaining technology between its Blackburn, Manchester and Middlesbrough offices and adding new lines to cater for their rapid growth in personnel.

"Our latest task was to quickly open up a contact centre for them with 30 additional lines which incorporate an automated system, inbound routing software and call recording facilities.

"With the growth they are experiencing and the number of clients they now serve, it made sense to advise them to utilise and build on their Internet technology rather than opt for traditional phone lines."

Distributor Northamber has reported a pre-tax loss for the year - £1.05 million, compared with a profit of £37,000 a year ago .

Chairman David Phillips said: "Without dwelling or delving into the core causes, our foresight and focus over recent years was to move away from 'empty revenue', a term I have repeatedly used in my reports to shareholders, as the cash value of margins continued to fall, while growing our non-PC hardware based revenues. However, we were outpaced by the severity and speed of the latest downward twist in the spiral."

The direct effect of the unexpected acceleration in the downturn of demand, on stock turns, prices and margins for PCs on the Group's sales, resulted in revenues for the year ended 30th June 2013 falling by 23% from £100.6m to £77.5m.

"While we managed our gross margins to be near stable at 7.6% from last year's 7.8%, responsive delays to the revenue shift were unavoidable," he added.

"The reduction in turnover necessitated reduction in both staffing and overheads. We had to make costly redundancies during the year, which will result in ongoing savings of some £800,000 and are the major element in achieving more immediate reductions in our total overhead of approximately £850,000."

The necessary restructure of the cost base, product focus and staffing, had a considerable effect on resultant pre?tax result, Phillips noted.

He added: "The true role of the distributor is one of a wholesaler enabling the fulfilment of demand and wholly dependent on decisions made by prime vendors over which it has no control. This is particularly true when it is the major vendors who are the primary innovators and drivers of manufactured technologies, products and demand.

"The company's strategy is dependent on perceiving opportunities within the actions of major vendors and whose actions are at present unclear. Therefore, I am unable to give a clear view on the immediate way forward for the company. Our strength, as always, lies in our liquidity and our balance sheet."

Outsourcery's top Premier Partners (including Freedom Communications, Damovo, Neptune and IP Solutions) are to benefit from the CSP's latest partner programme, InFlite.

The educational programme aims to provide everything these partners need to either launch or continue to grow their cloud business.

Piers Linney, Co-CEO of Outsourcery said: "Many of our partners are approaching the cloud for the first time and often there can be an underlying nervousness when incorporating something new into their service offering.

"InFlite has been developed to address this exact scenario. We've created an all-encompassing programme so partners have a dedicated resource to go to for support during the process of moving to cloud."

Later this month, partners will gain access to Outsourcery's new InSite Partner Portal. With InSite, partners will be able to access marketing collateral, sales material, support and communications as well as provision their customer solutions via this self-service portal.

InSite will act as a one-stop-shop for info accessible via a single sign-on.

"For many businesses that have already 'gone cloud' and committed to working in partnership with us, turning this decision into tangible sales of cloud solutions is not always a straightforward step, which is why this extra support from Outsourcery to get them off the ground could be crucial to their success," Piers concluded.

Data centre operator Next Generation Data (NGD) has appointed Lee Cauchie as Head of Channel.

He is to ramp up NGD's UK and international channel sales through partnerships with service providers requiring colocation facilities for hosting web, cloud, infrastructure- and software-as-a-service (Iaas/Saas) solutions.

With his hardware, software, networks and security sales background, Cauchie is well equipped to drive NGD's channel business forward. He joins from LenovoEMC (formerly Iomega Corporation) where he was Business Development Manager and prior to this Sales Manager for IT distributor, ASBIS Group.

Since NGD launched its Channel Partner programme last year a growing number of UK and international service provider and reseller organisations have installed racks at its NGD Europe mega data centre conveniently located from the M4 motorway near Newport, South Wales.

These include such companies as UNIT4, Certus IT, Commercial IT, CAE, Surf Telecom, Netplan and TechQuarter.

"NGD Europe is proving to be a popular and profitable haven for channel customers of all sizes and I am very excited about the opportunity of recruiting many more in the months to come," commented Cauchie.

Tablets are ever more prevalent in the workplace, and while they are not usually a replacement for a desktop or laptop their capabilities provide opportunities for organisations to update and change their business processes, according to global analyst firm Ovum.

In a recent market report it was found that as the market for tablets grows, usage of these devices is contributing to a change in the way people work and having a noticeable impact on the enterprise. Whether through corporate provisioning BYOD, fast increasing numbers of tablets are being used to access corporate data and applications.

Richard Absalom, analyst for Consumer Impact Technology at Ovum and author of the report said: "Coupled with imaginative thinking around how mobile apps could provide new or improved processes in specific roles, tablet deployments have the potential to change the way that businesses operate.

"The primary challenge for the enterprise is to turn tablet usage into a genuinely transformative deployment, taking into account but not just reacting to demand from employees that are bringing their own tablet or want to be provided with one. "

Ovum's multi-market employee survey, conducted in 2Q13, found that 17.6% of employees had already been provided with a tablet by their employer, up from 12.5% in 2012. Of respondents that owned a personal tablet, 66.7% used that device at work. The number of personal tablet owners increased from 28.4% in 2012 to 44.5% in 2013. Given this growth, a fast increasing number of personally owned tablets are also being used at work.

"Even given the immaturity of the platform, tablet usage is fast becoming common practice in the enterprise, whether through BYOD or corporate provisioning," according to Absalom. "Although increasing numbers of employees are being provided with a tablet by their employer, the primary route for tablets into the enterprise is through the consumer/employee channel. Over 66% of employees who personally own a tablet use them for work.

A"The first step to a successful tablet deployment is to understand employee behaviour and activity. Employees are using multiple devices to access corporate data and content, and any tablet or mobility strategy must be set in this context."

Providing access to corporate data and applications should not come at the expense of data security, but it is also vital that a secure solution does not come at the expense of user experience. Doing so can ultimately be counterproductive as it turns users off from using the approved device or application and leads to them finding their own way of working - one of the primary drivers of BYOD in the first place.

"Whatever strategy an enterprise opts for, given the fast pace of change in the market and an environment where employees are using personally owned tablets regardless of their employer's official IT policy, generating ROI ultimately depends on getting deployments up and running quickly and understanding what does and does not work." concluded Absalom.

Siemens Enterprise Communications has zoned its UK distribution strategy down to a sole agreement with Nimans in a move that sees both companies become more integrated and better able to address mid-market opportunities.

A change to the vendor's distribution strategy comes as no surprise following former distie partner Westcon Convergence' sharp focus on Avaya.

The deal sees Nimans bolster its support structure for Siemens resellers and introduce an enterprise level lead generation programme.

Richard Carter, Group Sales and Business Development Director at Nimans, said:. "We are investing in an expanded team including a technical specialist to provide enhanced levels of reseller support. As part of a collaborative partnership we are also giving resellers access to large enterprise sales leads."

Tony Smith, Sales Director, Indirect Channel at Siemens Enterprise Communications, added: "By fully integrating our teams, it allows us to focus our combined resources on delivering more value added services to jointly help partners grow. Nimans is recruiting additional dedicated resources to bolster its partner support.

"This includes additional field sales and pre-sales personnel, plus marketing and technical support. These commitments have given the channel confidence in Nimans to act as our sole UK distributor.

"Our experience in the enterprise market is feeding into a sustained mid-market push. The launch of OpenScape Business for example presents a great opportunity for partners to migrate existing HiPath 3000 customers in order to secure the customer and drive incremental revenues. The end user customer benefits from simple and cost-effective UC, by leveraging their current investment."

A cross-sector survey by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has revealed the extent to which cloud solutions have penetrated the market, so much so that the CIF boldly proclaimed that cloud computing has 'achieved mainstream deployment' in the UK with 69% of organisations formally adopting at least one cloud-based service.

The survey tapped into the enterprise, SMB and public sector, and although the figures are not sector specific, with just 4% of the entire sample of 250 organisations having not wanting cloud-based services there appears to be a big appetite for cloud-based IT delivery among the majority.

The research also found that satisfaction with the use of cloud solutions is high at 91%. And the adoption of cloud services also remains healthy with 68% of current cloud users saying they will extend the use of cloud solutions within their organisations over the next year.

According to CIF, the majority of organisations (86%) operate an on-premise server room or data centre and therefore well invested in on-premise IT when they make a cloud service decision. The typical end user has a Hybrid IT estate comprising a range of cloud, on-premise and hosted services.

CIF founder Andy Burton commented: "This is the fourth year we have conducted this research and the fourth year in a row we have seen increased roll-out and deployment of cloud-based services.

"Looking forward to 2014, in regard to the 31% of companies not yet making use of cloud, a third of them are expected to within the year."

"Cloud is now recognised as a credible deployment model within the context of an organisation's IT strategy. But it is not seen as the only viable model and most organisations foresee the continued use of on-premise IT alongside cloud-based services for the foreseeable future, resulting in the sustainable prevalence of hybrid IT estates."

Alex Hilton, CEO of CIF, added: "In 2014 we believe that 15% of businesses will report a primary cloud-based IT strategy, a further 15% will remain entirely on-premise and 70% will have a hybrid IT environment, meaning that the majority of companies will continue to invest in on-premise IT alongside cloud solutions.

"Hybrid IT is the new norm and we will see the complexities of monitoring and managing hybrid IT environments subside as interoperability improves, as commercial policies and practices for data migration simplify and as technical standards mature. IT is now firmly evolving as an enabler of business agility and transformation rather than a cost centre to deliver applications and devices."

Inertia and complacency towards new technology is simply not an option for any organisation, according to Capgemini Consulting which (in partnership with MIT Sloan Management Review) conducted a global survey into Digital Transformation.

The study explored the opportunity for radical business change offered by the convergence of new digital technologies such as social media, mobile, analytics and embedded devices. And revealed some opportunities for channels to get closer to customers and help their issues.

The study - involving over 1,500 executives in 106 countries - shows that the opportunity offered by new digital technologies is clear. 78% of respondents feel that Digital Transformation will be critical to their organisation within the next two years. Where Digital Transformation is a permanent fixture on the executive agenda, 81% of people believe it will give their company a competitive advantage.

However, business leaders are struggling to translate this opportunity into a vision for change or a roadmap for execution. 63% of people said the pace of technology change in their organizations is too slow.

• Engaging the organisation. Competing priorities and lack of digital skills were the top two challenges in execution.
•Getting leadership aligned and committed to Digital Transformation. Lack of urgency or no 'burning platform' was the number one most cited organizational barrier. In addition, only 36% of leaders have shared a vision for Digital Transformation with their employees (but within the third that have shared a vision, 93% of employees are behind it).
• Making the case for Digital Transformation. Only about half of organisations create business cases for digital investments.
• Putting the right governance structures in place. 40% said they had no formal governance practices around Digital Transformation and only 26% are using KPIs to track progress.

Among the obvious obstacles to digital transformation is lack of clarity about the pay-off. Companies want to know that they are getting something beneficial from investment in new technologies. Corporate leaders need to leverage metrics to help make digital transformation happen.

Only half of the companies surveyed said they create business cases for their digital initiatives. It can be hard to gauge a return on investment for emerging technologies. "It is still difficult to compute ROI on many social media activities (at least to the satisfaction of the executive board)" said one survey respondent.

Many organisations struggle to compute RoI. Merely one-fourth report having established key performance indicators to help them measure the impact of their digital transformation.

The authors of the report suggest that the pace of change may be a problem for particularly the older managers. For people of any age, there is also the possibility of technology fatigue.

"I get the impression sometimes that a lot of the management teams at companies say, 'would you please stop the technology innovation? We can take a break from this and just digest what we've been doing for the past few years'," said Andrew McAfee of the MIT Centrr for Digital Business.

"Unfortunately, that's not going to happen, so a critical skill at the top of a company is to have someone who can keep scanning the technology landscape and explaining it to the rest of the management team to say, gang, this is the cloud - it's actually a big deal. Inertia and complacency are deadly in the world that we live in today."

Global mobile value added service (VAS) revenues are set to grow at a slow pace between 2013 and 2018, with a CAGR of 10 per cent, according to global analyst firm Ovum.

In a recent market forecast, Ovum found that the increase in global mobile VAS revenues would be driven mainly by the African and Asia-Pacific markets.

Neha Dharia, analyst for Consumer Telecoms at Ovum and author of the report said: "The largest share of revenues will come from the Asia-Pacific region, at 13 percent CAGR. The second region with significant growth is the Middle East and Africa, with a CAGR of 12 percent."

The African market shows the greatest potential, given that it is still in the early stages of development and has lower revenues than the rest of the world. There will be high growth in VASs in this region over the forecast period, propelled by services based on mobile entertainment and mobile utility. This growth is heightened by the fact that Africa is a mobile-first market, which leads to more services being consumed on mobile than on the PC.

Meanwhile, the Asia-Pacific region will contribute the majority of mobile VAS revenues based on the large-scale consumption of operators' mobile services, particularly personalization services. In the less-developed parts of Asia-Pacific, operators will constantly reinvent VASs to offer a wide range of monetizable services, despite a heavy OTT presence. The widespread enthusiasm for personalization in Asia and the strong role of the operator in China will also help to drive this trend.

The increase in VAS revenues can also be attributed to the continued growth in subscriber numbers in the emerging markets and the push from operators to deliver relevant mobile services. The growth will come from telco efforts in mobile TV, connected home services, security, payments, and digital games.

Dharia added: "There is a slowdown in play due to third-party services offering apps and content for free. This is strongest in the European markets, with a -7 percent CAGR."

According to Ovum's research, telcos in North America and Asia-Pacific are attempting to grow VAS revenues by creating a range of new VASs.

"The mobile VAS market is dynamic, and allows telcos to innovate and find new revenue-generating services. Over the next five years, this innovation will focus mainly on mobile payments, connected home, security, and utility services," concluded Dharia.

Cloud contact centre and mobility solutions provider Cirrus aims to increase turnover twelvefold over a three year period and the man tasked with achieving this ambitious target, incoming VP of Sales Neil Moulton, has welcomed the challenge.

The channel stalwart aims to drive growth by leveraging his 18 years telecoms experience working for companies such as Siemens, Westcon and 4Com.

He commented: "Cirrus' growth over the past 18 months is a reflection of the strength of the proposition and there's a real buzz throughout the organisation that we're going places."

Jason Roos, Cirrus CEO, added: "Neil brings a wealth of experience to Cirrus which will be an essential component in our growth strategies."