Comms Dealer

Full-service business support systems provider Cerillion has launched a new partner programme for its cloud-billing solutions, called Cerillion Skyline, dedicated to cloud infrastructure and solutions provider from across the verticals.

New partners will be certified by Cerillion to implement consultancy services and encouraged to build joint solutions as well as to offer their own billing service on a white-label basis.

Cerillion's cloud-based solution combines its billing and charging engines with customer, payment and collections management and product catalogue and offers a mix of recurring fees and usage-based pricing, it says.

http://www.cerillion.com

Symantec has named Mark Nutt as vice president, EMEA Partner Management, to be in charge of the development and execution of Symantec's channel strategy across the EMEA region.

"Symantec is more committed to partners and distributors than ever before," said Nutt. "It is vital that we enable partners to deliver superior value to customers and that, in turn, we demonstrate our commitment to directly supporting our channel partners' business growth. I am delighted to be playing a role in defining and implementing our new channel strategy."

Nutt joined Symantec in 2011 to run EMEA's Strategy and Sales Operations organisation, responsible for driving sales performance and operational excellence across the business.

Prior to joining Symantec, he was general manager at Morse, where he was responsible for all aspects of business unit strategy, structure, reporting and planning.

Nutt started his career in 1987 at HP where he held various sales positions.

Eighty channel petrol heads have safely returned home after 'racing' a cavalcade of old bangers over 1000 miles from England to Hungary in the second Gamma Ball Rally, bringing home an amazing £50,000 for charity.

The rally, sponsored by Cisco, saw 22 cars - all bought for a maximum of £500 - set off from Gamma's headquarters in Newbury to undertake a series of mad challenges en route through France, Belgium, and Germany.

The route also took in a harrowing spin around the infamous Nurburgring - which resulted in a few bumper benders but no major casualties - before a last leg dash to the finish line in Budapest. All but two cars made it to the finish including Comms Dealer's paint daubed Comms Wheeler vehicle with race organiser John Haw of Gamma on board.

Inevitably there were madcap stories involving dodgy diversions and unplanned pit stops, but Haw was pleased to comment: "Thankfully no one got on the wrong side of the law and although there were some shaky legs after some prangs on the Nurburgring, everyone arrived in Hungary unscathed. It was an amazing effort and the amount raised by the cars and in the 'Money Can't Buy' gift auction during the race night gala evening was truly awesome. We netted £50,000 in total which is amazing!

"There were almost too many incidents and hilarious moments to recall as everyone entered into the spirit of the rally and had a great time. I would like to thank everyone who took part especially our amazing Gamma support team that probably drove twice as many miles as anyone else helping cars in trouble, and of course our generous main sponsor Cisco."

The £50,000 raised will go to two deserving charities, The East Cheshire Hospice who cared for Julie Wright, Operations director at Chess Telecom who lost her battle with cancer earlier this year and Action Through Enterprise which helps disadvantaged people in Ghana.

The final results of the Gamma Ball Rally were as follows:
Roll of Honour
First Place - Team Spirit Cannonball 
Second Place - STL        
Third Place - DOMinate          
Spirit of the Rally - Smokey and Abandon it               
Booby prize - Olive Hoons (for flying from Frankfurt to Budapest due to car sickness!)

To see more pictures and the mad cap rally highlights see the October issue of Comms Dealer.

BlackBerry has signalled its intent to be acquired by a consortium led by Fairfax Financial Holdings for $4.7bn. The news follows Blackberry's recent announcement about plans to cut 4,500 jobs, tantamount to 40% of its worldwide workforce, in an effort to stem losses.

A letter of intent contemplates a transaction in which BlackBerry shareholders would receive $9 in cash for each share of BlackBerry share they hold. The consortium would acquire for cash all of the outstanding shares of BlackBerry not held by Fairfax.

Fairfax, which owns approximately 10 per cent of BlackBerry's common shares, intends to contribute the shares of BlackBerry it currently holds into the transaction.

The BlackBerry Board of Directors, acting on the recommendation of a special committee of the board of directors, approved the terms of the letter of intent under which the consortium, which is seeking financing from BofA Merrill Lynch and BMO Capital Markets, would acquire BlackBerry and take the company private subject to a number of conditions, including due diligence, negotiation and execution of a definitive agreement and customary regulatory approvals.

Barbara Stymiest, Chair of BlackBerry's Board of Directors, said: "The Special Committee is seeking the best available outcome for the Company's constituents, including for shareholders. Importantly, the go-shop process provides an opportunity to determine if there are alternatives superior to the present proposal from the Fairfax consortium."

Prem Watsa, Chairman and CEO of Fairfax, said: "We believe this transaction will open an exciting new private chapter for BlackBerry, its customers, carriers and employees. We can deliver immediate value to shareholders, while we continue the execution of a long-term strategy in a private company with a focus on delivering superior and secure enterprise solutions to BlackBerry customers around the world."

Jan Dawson, chief telecoms analyst at Ovum, commented: "Taking BlackBerry private doesn't solve the fundamental problems at the company. First, the company's device sales are cratering, and its announcement last week that it no longer intends to pursue the consumer market is essentially the death knell for this business.

"Normally, companies are taken private in order to give a long-term strategy time to payoff without the hassles of short-term investor scrutiny. But BlackBerry's key problem for the last couple of years has been the lack of such a long-term strategy. It simply hasn't articulated a way to rebuild its business as its device sales drop precipitously.

"Unless Fairfax plans to radically change or accelerate BlackBerry's strategy, it's unlikely to be able to turn the company around. And that means we're likely seeing the beginning of the end for one of the most iconic brands in mobile technology."

Azzurri has implemented a new cloud-based contact centre architecture for decade-long customer Vanquis Bank based on the Avaya platform and the Callmedia 5.0 contact centre management application.
 
To cope with the growth of Vanquis Bank, which has seen its number of agents increase from 25 to 550+ agents since it was founded in 2002, the company needed to switch from its existing system which was at near full capacity.

They needed a highly resilient high-capacity, multi-site contact centre infrastructure that was scalable and worked across multiple locations thus seeing the company throughout its future growth and international expansion.
 
The new cloud-based contact centre Azzurri has deployed will meet Vanquis Bank's most ambitious growth goals for at least the next five years, with support for upwards of 1,000 extensions and 1,000 telephone lines.

The project began by migrating the company's core contact centre operations to a centralised data centre in Corsham, from which calls are routed to the company's four contact centres in various locations across the UK and South Africa.
  
Vanquis Bank is part of the Provident Financial Group and has over 1.0 million UK customers.
 

Canadian-based tech firm Phybridge, which specialises in IP telephony and UC, has embarked on an expansion campaign across EMEA and the man at the centre of its cross Atlantic push is the newly appointed Senior VP for EMEA and former Aastra channel supremo Viv Singh.

"Phybridge switch innovation delivers Ethernet and Power over Ethernet over a single pair of wire with four times the reach of traditional switches," he said.

"They are designed specifically to allow businesses to leverage their existing voice infrastructure and transform it into an IP path with power ideal for IP telephony."

According to Singh the Phybridge switch innovation eliminates many of the local area network barriers and costs associated with IP Telephony migration.

"Quality of service, voice continuity, elimination of risk and disruption, a highly secure network and a lower total cost of ownership are some of the benefits being realised by the 1,000 plus customers using the Phybridge switch offering," he stated.

"Phybridge technology has successfully been deployed throughout Europe including embassies around the world for one of Europe's largest governments.

"The launch of the PoLRE (Power over Long Reach Ethernet) family of switches combined with the increasing interest and demand from EMEA customers and partners warrants a local presence."

John Croce, CEO of Phybridge, sees the European market as a 'tremendous' opportunity for growth.

"Viv will be responsible for managing our EMEA Team, bringing new initiatives, recruiting and training new resellers, elevating existing partners to higher levels of accreditation and growing our overall EMEA business," he said.

Singh added: "To expand our EMEA growth over the next four months our key objective and focus remains on recruiting four to six strategically placed distribution partners plus establish partnership with five global partners.

"We are able to provide a number of case studies where we have helped our Business Partners to secure significant number of deals using our solution."

One deal of importance cited by Singh involved the deployment of a Phybridge solution that saved a customer wanting 1,400 endpoints more than $1.5m.

"We are confident that by working together with our new and existing business partners in EMEA we will secure these type of projects.

"And now with the launch of the 8 Port Polre switch we can scale right down to two IP extensions on a hosted IP platform."

The economic uplift is prompting greater demand for cloud-based communications, and according to The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the outlook is brightening with an upgraded forecast for UK growth this year for 1.5%, up from 0.8%, indicating that the recovery is gaining momentum.

Cloud computing specialist Qubic is upbeat about these positive predictions and its MD Chris Papa reckons the 'booming' information economy is helping to kick-start the UK's recovery with the pay-as-you-go hosted model gaining in appeal.

"Increasing demand for Qubic's services reflects the positive economic outlook as companies attempt to capitalise on the latest IT advances without large capital expenditure projects," he said.

"A hosted solution can help encourage start-ups and SMEs in general to grow as it means that businesses can use technology on a pay-as-you-use basis rather than tying up cash in a costly server with a telephone system.

"Hosted technology can help by streamlining these companies' operations and making them more efficient, in particular those who have limited resources in terms of staff and capital.

"Using hosted technology to create efficiencies can actually save costs and allow companies to operate far more effectively."

Confidence is increasing in the UK and IT service providers are playing a vital role in helping companies to expand quickly and become more agile, claims Papa.

"As well as minimising the ongoing costs associated with managing and installing IT systems in-house, the infrastructure provided by Qubic allows rapid expansion with IT resources allocated and available, often in a matter of minutes," he added.

Research among 17,000 IT managers global research and consulting company, Eastern Management Group (EMG) states that sales of SIP phones, both corded and wireless, are growing steadily for several reasons, among them the growing popularity of hosted PBX and PBXs built on open source technologies.

The research identifies that although most hosted PBX sales are to small to medium size businesses and account for less than 10% of all PBX endpoint sales, the market is experiencing significant growth.

"We know this from our own dealings of companies that are in the SME bracket, they are increasingly switched onto the features and benefits of hosted telephony," said James Passingham, CEO of independent managed communications provider, Foehn.

EMG points out that today's target customer for a hosted PBX is typically a multi-location small or medium business (under 10 branches) and the initial hosted PBX sale is 1-3 locations and 10-25 SIP phones.

"In the UK, SMEs represent a sizeable proportion of the overall business market and the rise of hosted PBX is presenting significant marketing opportunities, certainly evidenced by the number of suppliers in this vibrant sector," added Passingham.

The report also highlights the fact that many new PBXs are built on open source software frameworks, such as Asterisk from Digium. With open source continuing to mushroom in popularity among businesses and organisations in the public and non-for-profit sectors, the open source PBX represents a massive market and is driving the adoption of SIP phones.

EMG identifies that approximately 10% of all new PBX systems qualify as open source, a trend that is benefiting the low end of the market, with 75% of open source endpoints being on PBXs with fewer than 50 end users. Open source PBX appliances also have an average of 54 phone extensions.

"EMG concludes that it is 'bullish' about the market for SIP phones, although does factor in potential dampeners such as the world economy and unemployment," noted Passingham.

"From our own experience of marketing and selling both hosted and open source solutions, SIP has come of age, partly because Internet access is faster and at the heart of communication in most businesses, but also because hosted and open source PBXs are driving take-up, as borne out by EMG's research."

Five years have passed since the banking crash and this September is a whole lot more upbeat than its recent predecessors. There hasn't been any major dirt pulled out from under the financial sector's carpet, unemployment continues to fall, driven down by a strengthening economy in the south east, and GDP growth figures are above expectations, writes Clive Jefferys, JMA Network.

However, people in work are loath to contemplate moving employer, not just yet anyway. A friend in Ireland has taken to recruiting people from Spain and Greece to fulfil tech roles in Dublin. Apparently local people just slam the phone down if you suggest discussing their career choices. A crazy world indeed if you can't even offer to improve someone's lot in life without them taking umbrage!

Well I'm glad to say that UK recruitment is not that tough. We are hitting our targets, and our bank manager is happy. He invited himself round the other afternoon and hung about so long talking to our staff I had to throw him out eventually, with a smile of course. He's been a good friend so I don't begrudge his pop-in meeting for his stats, and the extensive range of pension and life assurance information that magically appeared on our desks.

I've been on the road too, visiting clients across the UK. Last week my roadshow headed north and one major employer gave me the whole afternoon. I think I met practically everyone, brought into sales meetings, and greeted by the people we had placed there over the last two years. I even met the big boss himself. I was flattered and proud that we had made such a positive impact on this major corporate.

Elsewhere companies have invited us in and talked enthusiastically about the future, their staffing plans and even offered higher rates to get to the front of the queue for staff. A widespread feeling of confidence is returning to businesses within JMA's world. Of course visiting clients is a little like fishing for compliments, but in today's brave new world... they are only given if well deserved.

So the rub...my personal positivity survey has returned good results. If you are a telecoms job seeker reading this, it's now your turn to step forward and be counted too. There are some great new jobs out there if you ask for them.

IBM is buying Daeja Image Systems, based in the UK, a software specialist with tools to view large documents and images. Daeja is a privately held software company with headquarters in Milton Keynes. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Daeja delivers software that helps line of business employees across all industries, especially data intensive ones such as banking, insurance and healthcare, get faster access to critical business information. 

The interactive features of Daeja software complement IBM's ability to mask and annotate documents and images to anonymize or protect sensitive data. A financial analyst, for instance, can distribute a spreadsheet for review by senior management. Reviewers can view the file and add comments as annotations before sending it back for further analysis. Meanwhile, Daeja software provides control over who can see and modify the document, providing security and privacy thoughout the process.

"As a longtime business partner, Daeja has integrated its solutions with IBM solutions for more than a decade," said Stu Moss, CEO at Daeja. "With our combined strengths, we can help clients manage their data challenges and directly enhance IBM's key market initiatives for big data, mobile, and content management."