Comms Dealer

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."

Colt has unveiled new cloud infrastructure backup and replication services for VARs, extending the availability of its VMware vCloud data centre services offerings into its data centres in Italy and Switzerland, building on an existing estate in the UK, France, Spain and Germany.

Colt has also announced services are now available from a second data centre in Spain, with Barcelona adding to the existing Madrid capacity.

Colt's new backup service for VMware vCloud provides VARs with flexible service options for their end user customers who can now choose what data they want to protect and backup, the level of resiliency, and in which European locations.

Managed via an online portal, the new service gives Colt's channel partners the option to create and operate a managed cloud backup service, or to pass self-management rights directly to their own customers. The service is available on a pay-as-you-go basis with no upfront costs.

Colt also announces the launch of a replication service. Managed through a portal, the service permits VARs to administer the location of their workloads in the event of a disaster.

By building replication into the fabric of its vCloud estate, Colt has greatly simplified the creation of geo-resilient solutions. This will enable VARs to better meet the needs of customers with on-site VMware deployments who require cost-effective disaster recovery capabilities. Colt's new service also allows resellers to offer their customers cloud-to-cloud resilience.

Keith Humphrey at EuroLAN commented: "With the launch of these new business continuity features, Colt has significantly enhanced its vCloud portfolio and taken another step towards industrialising the hybrid and public cloud.

"Solid backup and recovery is an essential component of most IT solutions, and customers increasingly expect a degree of DR capability in their infrastructure.

"We particularly like the fact that Colt has put the tools into a portal, and opened their infrastructure up to resellers, allowing them to create their own managed services."

Marco Andersen has been appointed by Acer as its new General Manager in the UK. He will replace Neil Marshall who has been promoted to the role of regional manager for North Europe.

Andersen, who will co-act with Marshall from November to January, is currently country manager at Acer Sweden and serves as marketing director for the Nordic region.

Prior to Acer, he was responsible for business development and marketing at retailer MediaMarkt during its entry to Sweden. He also worked at HP and IBM.

"Marco has a solid reputation for building and leading successful teams and for forging great relationships with our customers and partners. We are confident that he will be successful in applying his experience and commercial acumen in his new role in the UK," says Neil Marshall, country manager, Acer UK.

NGC Networks directors were among the guests of honour at Yorkshire County Cricket Club's 150th anniversary dinner held at Elland Road, Leeds.

The telecoms specialist is sponsoring the club's 150th anniversary Hawke blazers which all the first team were wearing at the celebratory event attended by some 700 people including Geoffrey Boycott OBE, former Yorkshire and England cricketer.

The Hawke blazers are an exact replica of the blazer worn by Lord Hawke, who captained the club with distinction from 1883 to 1910.

NGC Networks Director Dean Harrop said: "Yorkshire County Cricket Club is in our view the world's greatest cricket club and we are delighted to contribute our sponsorship in its 150th anniversary year."

Pictured (l-r): NGC Chairman Nigel Adams, cricketer Tim Bresnan, Geoffrey Boycott and NGC Directors Nikki Guest and Dean Harrop.

EMEA PC sales fell in the third quarter by nearly 10% yr/yr, in line with IDC forecasts, the analyst says. PC shipments remained constrained particularly in the home segment, which continued to suffer from weak consumer demand amid an ongoing budget shift to tablets.

Gartner had even higher decline rates: PC shipments in EMEA totaled 22.4 million units in the third quarter of 2013, a 13.7% decline from the same period last year. The EMEA region suffered its sixth consecutive quarter of declining PC shipments. All areas of the region - Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the Middle East and Africa - showed a shipment decline. PC shipments across all of Eastern Europe remained weak due to the ongoing popularity of tablets and some weakening of the Russian Ruble versus the euro and dollar, which led to a PC price increase.

IDC says that from a supply perspective, the quarter was also affected by an unfavourable year-on-year comparison with 3Q12, when shipments were supported by preparation to Windows 8 launch. Lean inventory remained a priority for channel partners across EMEA during 3Q13, inhibiting further sell-in. Portable PC shipments suffered a particularly strong decline, while desktops were less constrained. As forecast, the commercial market was less negative than the consumer market due to pockets of investments remaining available despite constrained spending. Shipments were also supported by seasonal back-to-school projects.

HP finished the quarter in the number two position after Lenovo, with growth improving from recent quarters. HP's shipment trends improved in the US and EMEA.

Worldwide PC shipments totaled 81.6 million units in the third quarter of 2013. In year-on-year terms, the market contracted -7.6%, ahead of a projected decline of -9.5% for the quarter.

Nimans has advanced its Everything Connected strategy with the introduction of a cloud-based Video as a Service solution.

Everything Connected encompasses networks and data infrastructure to systems, end points and support services.

The new VaaS solution is said to be easy to deploy, making instant high definition collaboration available anywhere, regardless of connectivity.

So says Nimans' Head of Conferencing, Ian Brindle. "Cost effective HD video conferencing and collaboration is now within the reach of every reseller. Users simply connect to a meeting over IP, ISDN or SIP, for either room-based, mobile or desktop conferencing," he said.

"VaaS is a cornerstone of our Everything Connected strategy, equipping resellers with everything they need to move further forward in a fully converged world."