Comms Dealer

Small business telecoms and energy provider Unicom has launched the 7th year of its Graduate Management Programme and re-launched its Community Support Scheme across the UK.

Unicom's Graduate Management Programme was launched in 2007 has been responsible for filling many key positions within the company.

During the 12 month programme graduates experience a variety of roles within each of the key departments of the business, giving them the opportunity to gain new skills and obtain a comprehensive understanding of how the company operates before being placed into tailor made positions on completion of the scheme. This year graduates have gone into permanent positions within Correspondence, Marketing, Operations Development and Provisioning.

"The graduate scheme has been invaluable to my understanding of the business. Coming in at a ground floor level really helps us understand the values and challenges of the business before entering our permanent job roles," said Holly Taylor who recently completed the course.

As well as investing in its staff the company has also relaunched its Community Support Scheme, providing financial support for projects aimed at improving the quality of life for the local residents surrounding its offices. Unicom have 12 offices nationwide employing over 500 staff. The scheme is being re-launched, inviting local community projects and charities to apply for up to £500 worth of funding. The first project to benefit from the re-launch will be announced later this year.

"We believe investing in the communities we work in is important, as is investing in high calibre staff." said Chris Earle, CEO of Unicom.

Exclusive Networks Group has confirmed a new package of substantial corporate investment across its international business.

"Our investors have again demonstrated their confidence in the direction of the business and in our strategy for further market scale and share," said Olivier Breittmayer, CEO of Exclusive Networks Group.

"The Group's goal to hit €1bn revenues by 2017 is further assured by successful closure of this funding package worth around €60m.

"It is particularly pleasing to see all our management team reinvesting and participating in the round, further demonstrating a collective belief in the potential of a major value added distribution business strengthening its regional presence."

Data centre and communications specialist Node4 has enhanced and relaunched its Partner Programme in a move designed to expand its channel business via greater incentivisation and support for existing and new partners.

The programme simplifies Node4's service offering and buying process for partners, and its relaunch follows the appointment of Ian Millward as Head of Channel Sales in September.

A key addition to the programme will be a new Partner Portal offering detailed information on Node4's proposition, simple pricing structures and direct contact with Node4's team.

Millward commented: "We truly believe everyone wins when vendors and channel partners work hand in hand as real business partners to properly serve the customers they supply.

"All of the new services and support in the relaunched programme have been designed to make us easy to do business with and to reward our partners for their volume, loyalty and self sufficiency."

Westcon Group's Comstor business unit has signed an agreement with X-IO meaning that Cisco resellers across EMEA have the ability to drive accelerated revenue via access to 'Intelligent Storage Element' technology from X-IO, claimed the distributor.

"As one of the only distributors focused on Cisco technology we're eliminating multiple distractions associated with choosing the right competitive cloud platform," said Russell Blackburn, Senior Director of Data Center Solutions, Comstor EMEA.

"But to accelerate both traditional enterprise data centers and cloud platforms, the infrastructure demands intelligent storage like the X-IO technology."

With a foundation based on reliability, performance and scalability, X-IO's Intelligent Storage Element (ISE), optimises price and operational efficiency.

Solutions focus on both consistent and accelerated performance via hard disk drives (HDD), or real-time hybrid solutions with enterprise SSDs and HDDs.

Roger Walton, Vice President of X-IO EMEA, added: "Data center and cloud infrastructures demand the highest levels of availability and reliability - and effective, intelligent, and flexible storage is key to making that happen."

The global telecoms industry's revenues will remain roughly flat over the next few years, with a decline in spending on voice services counterbalanced by growth in spending on mobile and fixed (broadband) data services, according to global analyst firm Ovum.

In a recent market forecast analysis report, it was found that as growth slows, market realities mean telcos must find ways to serve their existing customers profitability rather than simply growing their customer bases.

Shagun Bali, analyst for Telecoms Technology at Ovum and author of the report said, "Over the next five years, service and tariff innovation will be key revenue-generating strategies, while LTE rollout, network optimisation, and creative approaches to partnerships will become focal points for cost savings. Telcos need to monetise new business models, leverage customer data by investing in analytics, and define their response to over-the-top (OTT) players."

Ovum estimates that telco IT spending will reach $60bn in 2017, growing at a CAGR of 0.6 percent between 2013 and 2017. Growth in telco IT spending will be driven primarily by investments in packaged software and system integration. Spending in emerging markets in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa (MEA), and South and Central America (SCA) will drive global IT spending.

Bali states that, "Although overall telco IT spending will grow modestly, the trend is for telcos to reduce internal IT spending and increase spending on external IT projects. To control costs, telcos are outsourcing the maintenance of legacy IT and turning to trusted partners, both to implement unified and standards-based systems and software and to provide skills such as those of data scientists for Big Data analytics projects. Consequently, the overall addressable market for vendors will increase."

"The combination of middling profits, high capital requirements, high risk, and uncertain economic growth requires telcos to place their bets carefully, including investing in growing revenue streams and managing customer experience more than ever before. The result is increased opportunities for the IT industry. In the long term, telcos will place more focus than they have before on software to drive innovation," concludes Bali.

Intrinsic Technology has bolstered its growth ambitions with the appointment of Darron Antill as Chief Exec.

He joins from of AppSense where, as CEO, he increased revenues by 270% to over $100m via product innovation and opening up new markets.

Prior to AppSense, Antill was CEO of information security services Vistorm where he led the firm to record revenues and oversaw the business through its acquisition by EDS and subsequent transition to HP.

Antill commented: "This is a fast changing industry driven by our customers' increasing business demands and need to support an ever growing mobile and demanding workforce.

"BYOD, cloud-based services and the need for secure and mobile access to applications and data is important to every business and employee.

"The shift from on premise to off premise IT solutions is already happening at a considerable rate to our customers as we continue to see this acceleration into a hybrid world, and it is our role to help transition and support them through this.

"Intrinsic will continue to invest in and extend our managed and cloud based services offering, as well and growing our geographic footprint in the UK market."

Hybris, the SAP owned e-commerce and multichannel software firm is on the hunt for large, fast growing telecoms enterprises keen to sell more mobile devices and cloud services on the web and effectively reduce customer churn.

"We have engineered a solution which is a best practice fit for the telecoms industry," hybris Business Development Director for Telco Peter Conquest told Comms Dealer.

"It enables partners to deliver an on-line e-commerce solution that develops propositions, guides the customer to the right products or solution and along the way does verification checks on fraud, integrates with payment gateways and talks to billing and back end systems.

"But on-line is only one piece of it. In essence we provide customers with the ability to seamlessly move from one channel to the next. We can also look at in store kiosks, point of sale, customer care and even things like print catalogues and distribution to dealers. It means customers can check on line for a particular product, check the inventory in a particular store, reserve it and execute the transaction because they have all the physical information to hand. It's about consistency of information across the different touch points on the journey.

"It is a homogeneous stack and it can be easily extended. So, if a third party wants to bring in new business models, introduce a new service or look at an analytic capability, it is easy to introduce that into the stack."

Hybris, which has a 150 million dollar global turnover, has Telco customers such as Samsung and Brightpoint among its growing base of telecoms clients, as well as major wireless operators and service providers in the UK, Europe and Asia.

Peter Conquest will be speaking on Big Data at Comms Dealer's Comms Vision thought leadership conference at Gleneagles on (November 6th,7th and 8th).

Hats off to tenacious Senior UC account manager Will Wood of Datasharp Integrated Communications who raised over £1,100 for charity Sparks having completed the notorious Tough Mudder Challenge.

The event is designed to test physical and mental grit during a 12 mile challenge across rugged, mountainous, mud-filled territory fitted out with 25 obstacles designed by the British special forces. These include the participants being electrocuted, dunked, burned, and frozen in various forms.

Chess has been re-accredited to the ISO 14001 environmental standard.

Since 2009 the business has recycled over 20 tonnes of paper and plastics alongside reducing its annual energy consumption by 18% in 2013.

Its green initiatives are spurred on by the Eco-Team, a group of Chess employees who set targets and goals for the business to make it a greener company.

Anne Binnie, HR Director and a member of the Eco-Team stated: "It's part of our culture at Chess to minimise our impact on the environment and the Eco-Team have come up with various initiatives to further reduce our impact.

"Our most successful have been the 'bike to work' Government backed scheme encouraging us to ride instead of drive and also a green car incentive where our people can lease an eco-friendly vehicle at discounted rates."

Vaioni can press ahead with its growth plans having secured a funding boost of £500k following an agreement with Baker Tilly Corporate Finance and Maven Capital Partners.

According to Sachin Vaish of Vaioni the company will use the money to bolster its headcount and network infrastructure.

He said: "Clearly our advisors and more importantly our funders, Maven, see something special in Vaioni, our capability today and more importantly our potential for the future.

"I could not have done this without the support from my management team, my Financial Director Manish Dev and his exceptional efforts during this process and my Tech Director Matthew Hattersley for displaying our phenomenal network capabilities, and of course the Vaioni Team who ensure our customers are served at the highest quality day in, day out."

Vaioni was founded with just £300 in Manchester and has grown from being a back room and lifestyle business to a multi-million business providing high performance and ultra-resilient connectivity and cloud services over its National Carrier Class Network to over 350 businesses across the world.