Comms Dealer

Swingeing job cuts loom for Alcatel-Lucent workers across all regions as the company reveals plans to halve the number of its business hubs globally by 2015 with the loss of around 10,000 jobs worldwide.

All geographic areas where Alcatel-Lucent operates will be hit, with the loss of 4,100 positions in EMEA, 3,800 in Asia Pacific and 2,100 in the Americas.

Sweeping job cuts are the price to pay for ensuring a 'sustainable financial future and a successful transformation of the company', said the firm, which is repositioning as a specialist in the next generation technologies of IP networking, cloud and ultra-broadband access.

Alcatel-Lucent has committed to achieve fixed cost savings of 1bn euro, or more than 15% of fixed costs by the end of 2015.

The vendor informed its European works council (ECID) of the actions planned as part of The Shift Plan announced on June 19th by its new Chief Executive Officer, Michel Combes.

The Shift Plan also aims to restore profitability to the company, being based on a transformation of Alcatel-Lucent's R&D activities for greater efficiency and a reallocation of resources to focus on future technologies while making a significant reduction of fixed costs.

This will be achieved by reallocating R&D investment to next-generation technologies which should represent 85% of R&D spend in 2015, as opposed to 65% today; reducing R&D spend in legacy technologies by 60%; and reducing administrative, sales and support functions to bring SG&A costs in line with industry standards.

Combes said : "We launched The Shift Plan in June to give Alcatel-Lucent an industrially sustainable future. The strategic choices we made have been validated by our customers.

"To carry out this plan we must make difficult decisions and we will make them with open and transparent dialogue with our employees and their representatives. The Shift Plan is about the company regaining control of its destiny."

Organisations have underestimated their employees' desire for quality work devices and are largely in the dark as to the extent to which their employees are working around corporate policies, according to a survey by Azzurri.

Half of employees now use their personal devices to access work files and data, yet employers believe this figure to only be 15% of their workforce - a disparity of 232%.

According to Azzurri, this lack of cohesion is leaving organisations exposed to significant data security risks, wastes corporate investment in mobile devices and services and often leaves employees out of pocket (as 67% fail to claim back the costs of work-related tasks).

While BYOD is largely heralded as the answer to this issue, only 17% of UK organisations have deployed companywide BYOD policies, significantly less than those who have deployed CYOD or 'Choose Your Own Device' (adopted by 31% of organisations).

Believed to be the first BYOD study of its kind to directly compare the actions and opinions of staff with the perceptions of their employers, Azzurri Communications set out to understand why BYOD adoption remains so low - at only 17% of UK organisations.

The most significant disparity regards how many employees access work files and data on personal devices, whose lack of enterprise-level security safeguards can expose company data to potential loss or theft.

While companies only believe that 15% of their workforce do this, a staggering 50% admitted to accessing work data or files on their personal device. This is nearly 2.5 times (232%) as many as employers thought.

The majority of employees use their personal mobile phones for a range of tasks:

65% use their personal mobile phone to make business calls at least every week (40% do this daily)

44% use their personal mobile phone to send emails at least once a week (34% daily)

8.5% use their personal device to access work file sharing sites (such as Dropbox) at least once a week

Despite the high numbers of employees using their personal devices for work purposes, the majority (67%) do not claim the costs back - either because they are unable to (55%) or are unsure whether they can (12%). Only 33% reclaim the costs of business-related tasks on their personal devices, which could explain why employers are in the dark as to the extent that this takes place.

The primary reason for employees using their personal devices for work purposes is simply because their work devices are not as easy to use or don't offer the same levels of functionality. In fact ease-of-use is by far the biggest factor, as cited by 82% of employees.

"By offering to meet the combined demands of organisations (lower communications costs) and their employees (one excellent device for both business and personal use), BYOD should, in theory, receive widespread support from both groups. Yet with only 17% of UK organisations adopting companywide BYOD policies, this is clearly not the case," states Rufus Grig, CTO, Azzurri Communications.

"What's more, companies are very much misguided when it comes to how much their employees use their own mobile devices for work related activities, raising questions of security, the usability of work-provisioned devices vs. consumer ones, the value-for-money that organisations are receiving from their communications services and even the work-life balance of employees.

"In our experience, and as reflected in this study, organisations get far better value and security from CYOD than they do from either the free-for-all and vulnerability offered by BYOD, and the safe but increasingly-bypassed corporate provision. In fact our study showed that CYOD was the most appropriate solution for 60% of organisations vs. just 13% who favoured BYOD."

In a six month trading statement for the period ending 30th September 2013 Daisy Group reports that revenue and adjusted EBITDA is in line with management expectations at the half year point and the Group is comfortable in its ability to meet full year market expectations.

Daisy Data Centre Solutions (DDCSL), the data centre business formerly owned by 2e2, is performing in line with management expectations and there has been 'very good progress' in signing new contracts with its former customer base, stated the firm.

In addition, within the core retail business there have been a number of managed service contract wins with public and private sector customers. These types of contract provide good quality cashflow over the span of the contract following a level of upfront investment.

During the period the Group has agreed new commercial arrangements with Vodafone that it believes will accelerate the growth of the mobile business. These arrangements provide an improvement in mobile margins over the long term but with a reduction in up-front commissions received from the network.

The Group will be announcing its results for the six months ended 30th September 2013 on 3rd December 2013.

Matthew Riley, Chief Executive Officer of Daisy Group, said: "I am pleased with the progress made during the period, particularly with the large managed service wins and the customer reaction to our acquisition of the hosting business DDCSL.

"We are proud to be paying our first dividend following our acquisition strategy over the last few years and we reiterate our commitment to this while still being able to invest to support our mid market customers."

Microsoft has advanced its enterprise cloud strategy with a new wave of solutions that complement Office 365 and other services.

New Windows Server, System Center, Visual Studio, Windows Azure, Windows Intune, SQL Server, and Dynamics solutions will accelerate cloud benefits for customers, claims the software giant.

Satya Nadella, Cloud and Enterprise Executive VP, said: "As enterprises move to the cloud they are going to bet on vendors that have best-in-class software as a service applications, operate a global public cloud that supports a broad ecosystem of third party services, and deliver multi-cloud mobility through true hybrid solutions."

To help customers build IT infrastructure that delivers continuous services and applications across clouds, on October 18th Microsoft will release Windows Server 2012 R2 and System Center 2012 R2.

Together, these new products enable companies to create data centres using Hyper-V for high-scale virtualisation, high-performance storage at lower costs, built-in software-defined networking, and hybrid business continuity.

The new Windows Azure Pack runs on top of Windows Server and System Center, enabling enterprises and service providers to deliver self-service infrastructure and platforms from their datacenters.

Building on these hybrid cloud platforms, customers can use Visual Studio 2013 and the new .NET 4.5.1, also available October 18th, to create applications for devices and services.

As software development becomes pervasive within every company, the new preview Studio 2013 Modern Lifecycle Management solution helps enable development teams, businesspeople and IT managers to build and deliver better applications, faster.

Recognizing that most enterprises will take a hybrid approach to cloud, Microsoft wants to help customers utilise their investments in on-premises software solutions toward the adoption of cloud computing.

On November 1st, Microsoft will offer Enterprise Agreement (EA) customers access to discounted Windows Azure prices, regardless of upfront commitment, without overuse penalties and with the flexibility of annual payments.

As another part of this effort to reduce cloud adoption barriers, Microsoft announced a strategic partnership with Equinix. Building on recently announced partnerships with AT&T and others, this alliance will provide customers with even more options for private and fast connections to the cloud.

Customers will be able to connect their networks with Windows Azure at Equinix exchange locations for greater throughput, availability and security features.

Governments are among the most demanding enterprise customers. To help U.S. federal, state and local government agencies realize the benefits of public cloud computing, Microsoft is introducing its Windows Azure US Government Cloud. This will offer US government customers a dedicated community cloud for data, applications and infrastructure, hosted in the continental US and managed by US personnel.

As part of its vision to help more people unlock actionable insights from big data, Microsoft next week will release a second preview of SQL Server 2014. The new version offers industry-leading in-memory technologies at no additional cost, giving customers 10 times to 30 times performance improvements without application rewrites or new hardware. SQL Server 2014 also works with Windows Azure to give customers built-in cloud backup and disaster recovery.

For big data analytics, later this month Microsoft will release Windows Azure HDInsight Service, an Apache Hadoop-based service that works with SQL Server and widely used business intelligence tools, such as Microsoft Excel and Power BI for Office 365. With Power BI, people can combine private and public data in the cloud for rich visualizations and fast insights.

The proliferation of cloud applications, data and consumer devices is moving many enterprises to a bring-your-own-device model. The new release of Windows Intune, also available Oct. 18, combines with System Center Configuration Manager to help IT departments give mobile employees security-enhanced access to the applications and data they need on the Windows, iOS and Android devices of their choice. This unified management environment for PCs and mobile devices complements the new access and information protection capabilities in Windows Server 2012 R2.

Further, with Windows Server 2012 R2 Microsoft is introducing the Microsoft Remote Desktop app, available for download in applications stores later this month, to provide easy access to PCs and virtual desktops on variety of devices and platforms, including Windows, Windows RT, iOS, OS X and Android.

The next major version of the company's CRM solution, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Fall '13 will be available later this month, helping make customer interactions more personal via contextual information for deeper insights than the previous version, delivered on a variety of devices.

The on-premises version is expected to be available later in the fall for deployment either in-house or hosted by a partner. More information is available here. In addition, Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2013 R2 is available today, offering small and midsize businesses interoperability with Office 365, full multitenant support, and a range of tools designed to support large-scale hosting of the application on Windows Azure.

Nimans has kick-started a new partnership with Gigaset Pro by launching a series of introductory offers that can save resellers hundreds of pounds.

Running between October and December dealers can take advantage of four separate offers around the Gigaset Pro range of DECT solutions.

"We see this as a powerful new partnership that offers a host of benefits to all parties, most importantly the reseller community who are on the front line in an increasingly competitive market," says Nimans' Head of Category Sales, Paul Burn.

The Gigaset Pro range is specifically designed for the reseller market and is split into four key areas - Sip, Single Cell, Multi-Cell and Pro handsets.

"The DX800 for example is a micro PBX - built into a desktop handset from where you can run six DECT extensions - connected via SIP, analogue or ISDN or even through a mobile," Burn explained.

"There's a single cell solution that has a 150m range base station and associated handsets, while the multi cell DECT is for large deployment of up to 100 users. There's also a Pro range of handsets such as ruggedized versions."

Talks on the potential sale of Avaya to Oracle were held earlier this year according to a report posted by Reuters, citing sources 'familiar with the matter'.

The telecoms vendor's private equity owners entertained the idea of selling rather than going public, said the report.

Reuters also noted that Silver Lake and TPG Capital LP, which took Avaya private for $8.4bn in 2007, filed Avaya for an IPO in 2011 but its growth prospects were challenged by rivals such as Cisco and ShoreTel making an IPO less appealing to stock market investors.

Avaya notched up revenues of $5.17bn in its 2012 financial year, down 7% on the previous year. For the third fiscal quarter of 2013, revenue was $1.15bn, down 8% from the year ago.

Data recovery experts are the 'fourth emergency service' in the modern era, according to the CEO of Manchester-based hosting and colocation firm UKFast.

Speaking during BBC Radio 4's Bottom Line programme on Big Data, Lawrence Jones described the fundamental importance of technology firms always being readily available to offer a lifeline to customers when their whole business is at stake.

Jones said: "We're a managed hosting company, so fundamentally it's about being able to pick up the phone to receive support in times of need. Technology firms like UKFast are the fourth emergency service. We're the people you really don't want to have to call but if you have to, we're there for you.

"Businesses need to know that they can rely on the firm that is looking after its critical data, in the same way they can rely on emergency services for personal times of need. Data recovery teams give the peace of mind that businesses need if their hard drive completely fails and their critical business data is lost.

"You have to have the right firewalls, intrusion detection and anomaly detectors. It's about getting the basics in place as well as going the extra mile - for example at UKFast, we spot the traffic you don't want, because we've got 40 people looking at monitors 24-hours a day and we can begin data recovery immediately as we have an on-site clean room in the data centre, the only one in the UK."

Joining Jones on the panel were three technology experts - Conrad Feldman, CEO of digital adversity company Quantcast, Dave Coplin, Chief Envisioning Officer and Director of Search, Microsoft UK - along with host Evan Davies. They discussed how the creation and storage of data is changing businesses across the world as the ‘Big Data' trend evolves.

Feldman described how harnessing and assessing online data can provide a useful insight into trends and demographics. He said: "We help website owners and advertisers understand who the audiences are that are consuming online digital media.

"We amass data from a lot of different websites, and then we apply sophisticated software based on mathematical modelling to help us understand and estimate the characteristics of the audience, which could be standard graphics such as age and income, or more lifestyle information such as what they're interested in."

Coplin referred to the change in storage of data, saying: "In the old days your server would probably be under your desk and people would kick the cable walking past.

"The issue is not the data itself, it's what you're doing with it. The power of big data is going to change how we think about what it means to be humans. It's going to give us so much insight, and will enable humans to take much more control over their lives."

Red Box Recorders has scooped the top accolade of SME Deal of the Year at the Insider's Midlands Dealmakers Awards.

The award is in recognition of the company's management buyout earlier this year which was undertaken to support the continuing expansion of its global operations. The buyout was backed by a £14 million investment from ISIS Equity Partners with Cavendish Corporate Finance advising on the deal.

Lee Jones, CEO at Red Box Recorders, said: "This is a great award as it acknowledges the hard work and effort made by all parties to bring this deal to fruition. The MBO is designed to facilitate the continued development of the business, which has achieved annual growth of more than 20 per cent for the past five years.

"This will include taking advantage of new business opportunities within overseas markets, in particular North America and Asia Pacific, and extending Red Box's global workforce by almost 50 per cent."

Red Box is headquartered in Nottingham, with regional offices including London, New York, Singapore and Dubai, as well as a worldwide reseller network of more than 200 partners.

The company provides customer-focused solutions that help overcome the precise challenges of the contact centre, financial services, healthcare, government and emergency services sectors.

Canalys has named Softcat as 2013's top revenue growth partner in EMEA at this year's Canalys Channel Forum Awards.

Softcat chairman Martin Hellawell accepted the Canalys 'Revenue Growth Partner of the Year' award at a packed ceremony held at the Hotel Arts Barcelona.

Softcat announced 30% growth this financial year, following a three-year growth stint that has seen its revenues grow from £146m to £400m. It has won multiple partner awards and accreditations as a result of its revenue growth and partnership investments, just this week announcing HP's Platinum Partner status, and Red Hat's 'stronger Together' award.

Hellawell said: "Most of our awards tend to be UK-based, so it's humbling to have been nominated for an EMEA award, never mind win it. Due to our size and relative 'youth' we're still regarded as an up-and-coming player, which makes attaining this award even more of an achievement.

"The business environment has been challenging over the past few years and many of our competitors struggled to achieve significant growth last year. Winning this award is a testament to the hard work of our brilliant staff, who remain incredibly driven to provide great customer service, and committed to helping the company grow. We're privileged to work with so many great customers, and of course our relationships with our partners have contributed hugely to our growth."

Last year Softcat won the EMEA channel partner of the year at the same event. The Canalys Forum is an annual event that recognises vendors, resellers and other partners in the IT industry for their successes in the channel.

Cloud and SaaS specialist to the channel intY has confirmed two significant new sign-ups to its intY CASCADE cloud provisioning platform.

Eclipse and alwaysON now line up alongside other CASCADE users including Cisco, Symantec and Microsoft, as well as many ISVs.

The addition of Eclipse to the co-operative-style marketplace will provide partners with high end business class Internet services that ensure the end user experience for cloud solutions.

alwaysOn will offer Microsoft Lync 2013 as a hosted application delivered over its resilient private MPLS network.

As part of CASCADE, partners and resellers will be able to sell and provision alwaysOn on its own or as part of their service bundles for end user organsations.

Chris Baldock, MD of intY CASCADE, commented: "Unified Communications remains an exciting and competitive space in the industry. We're thrilled alwaysOn has decided to bring its latest platform to a wider audience via CASCADE.

"The partnership with Eclipse represents a substantial milestone in creating the option for a complete end-to-end solution for CASCADE users."

Pete Tomlinson, Director of Sales and Marketing at Eclipse comments "SMBs are now really seeing the value of adopting cloud services as part of a more flexible, productive way of working. Being able to work with their communications provider to adopt cloud services in a way that is straightforward and well supported is the perfect route to success."

Eclipse's real time connection-monitoring tool, Sentinel will also be available to intY support to service customers by proactively monitoring connections and providing support as and when it is needed.

Baldock added: "These two companies demonstrate the bring and buy benefits of CASCADE. Both are exploiting the platform to better sell to its customers, whilst offering its products and services to other partners.

"Of particular significance to our resellers will be the signing of Eclipse. The reputation of cloud services is the quality of the connection - connectivity and the physical infrastructure required to enable a high performance cloud solution should be a priority for resellers wanting to get in the game. With the recent addition of Cisco products and now Eclipse' services on CASCADE, end users can realise the true RoI of cloud."

James Byles, MD at alwaysOn, commented: "Being a CASCADE partner enabled us to deploy cloud services and building blocks for new solutions, tailored to suit our clients needs. We now want to take the relationship with intY to another level and offer our Lync 2013 product for partners and resellers to utilise as part of their offerings. We remain focused on the expansion of our business, and this relationship will help the two companies grow together side by side."