Comms Dealer

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."

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."