Comms Dealer

Advanced Business Solutions has been praised for the rapid turnaround of an urgent IT migration project for Moray Council after its existing managed services provider went into administration. 

The council, which had been using an external managed service, decided to bring its finance management system back in-house to reduce running costs following severe public sector cutbacks.

However, the migration project risked being derailed when the service provider went into administration earlier this year. Advanced worked closely with the Council and managed to recover the service and bring it in-house within just three weeks.

Diane Beattie, Payments Manager at Moray Council, said: "Advanced consultants reacted quickly. They retrieved all our data and built a live system within a week, which we went live with two weeks later.

"Advanced's finance management system, e5, has also supported the council's procurement improvement plan which achieved £1.9 million in annual procurement savings thanks to tight integration between systems, centralised visibility and greater control of spending.

Advanced Business Solutions is a division of Advanced Computer Software Group, a supplier of software and IT services to the health, care and business services sectors.

Spar UK has selected Avaya's real-time collaboration technologies, delivered via cloud and provided by our partner Videonations, to increase the company's efficiency across seven business units.

The seven business units previously used basic teleconferencing systems - which was inefficient and ineffective for collaboration - and required executives to travel to have face-to-face meetings instead.

Roy Ford, IT Controller, Spar UK, said: "The combination of Avaya's video solution, which allows SPAR to have multiple connections in high definition to each of our seven business units, using the cloud-based, hosted platform from Videonations, made the decision process easy."

Simon Culmer, Managing Director, Avaya UK, added: "Avaya technologies are optimal for use both in a hosted as well as an owned environment. They're designed to be flexible, scalable and open - and our Scopia solution ensures that business leaders and employees can interact face-to-face whenever and wherever they wish - without the hassle of traditional telepresence systems."

Superfast fibre broadband delivering speeds of 24Mbps and above will be rolled out to more than 42,000 homes and businesses in the East Riding of Yorkshire within the next three years as a result of a multi-million partnership between East Riding of Yorkshire Council and BT.

The project, Broadband East Riding, plans to extend high speed fibre broadband to households and businesses across the county.[1] As well as making high-speed fibre more widely available, the partnership will ensure everyone will be able to enjoy broadband speeds of more than 2Mbps.

Broadband East Riding builds on the existing on-going commercial fibre deployment across the region and aims to provide a high-speed broadband network to an additional 42,734 premises in the area by December 2015.

John Skidmore, interim director of corporate strategy and commissioning at East Riding of Yorkshire Council, said: "Having access to the internet is an important aspect of modern life with many of us using it on a daily basis whether that is personally, such as keeping in contact with family and friends through social networks, or commercially and with more and more businesses requiring a secure, reliable and faster connection in order to compete and trade.

"The council is committed to improving broadband infrastructure in the East Riding to ensure that we do all we can to support businesses, residents and visitors to the area to have access to broadband provision, especially given our largely rural locality, and hope to deliver this over the coming years through the contract with BT."

Nimans is running a series of training webinars designed to help resellers get on board with leasing.

The first session, called Selling on Rentals, attracted 30-plus resellers and will be followed by two more webinars under the headings Targeting the Decision Maker and Return on Investment.

"Leasing is fast becoming a major factor in any successful sales strategy," said Head of Dealer Sales, Tom Maxwell.

"Adding a lease option with a reputable finance partner can significantly enhance revenue potential and overcome a customer's budget restrictions.

"We highlighted the benefits of breaking down a one-off cost that could scare off customers, so that dealers can sell solutions in a more attractive and cost effective way."

"Leasing continues to be a very valuable resource for resellers and we want to spread the word as far and wide as possible. Since launching this financial service over two years ago we've seen demand increase year-on-year by more than 200%."

Channel Telecom partners were on course for a great day's golfing at Hertfordshire's Hanbury Manor Hotel & Country Club.

Top honours went to Hipcom's Rob Murdoch who collected the best overall golfer prize having teed off with a birdie and then racking up 42 stableford points.

Channel Telecom MD Clifford Norton said: "It was great to share the day with so many of our channel partners, suppliers and friends in the industry."

Pictured: Norton (left) presenting Murdoch with the winner's trophy.

Huawei's European R&D operations, currently operating across 13 sites with a total head count of 800-plus, are to receive a minimum of 10% reinvestment every year, according to VP of the European Research Centre Renato Lombardi.

"In 2012 we reinvested over 13% of our global revenue in R&D, one of the largest single commitments to R&D in the ICT industry by a private company," he claimed.

"Our investment in R&D in Europe also continues to grow. It doubled between 2010 and 2013 and we expect it will double again over the next five years."

Huawei's European development spans ICT hardware and software, microprocessing, optical data transmission and wireless networks.

"As Huawei expanded its sales operations internationally at the turn of the new millennium, it chose, like many other enterprises, to implement a distributed innovation strategy," added Lombardi.

"This led to the creation of R&D facilities in multiple geographies, each with a specific innovation focus. The majority of Huawei's R&D sites were located in established innovation clusters or centres of excellence. These decisions were driven by a number of requirements."

One of most important requirements was to locate R&D operations close to customers within the existing ecosystem and linkages with universities and research institutions.

This led to the location of R&D sites here in northern Europe where clusters had been established in mobile network and base station technology development as well as mobile device design," added Lombardi.
"For the same reasons, optoelectronic research operations were located in Italy, in Germany and in the UK."

Fast-expanding GCI has taken 75th position in The Sunday Times Fast Track 100 of top performing privately owned companies and entrepreneurs, building on its June 2013 ranking as the 19th fastest growing privately owned businesses in the HOT100.

GCI's Managing Director John Whitty commented: "We have found ourselves in a great position to maintain our quality service whilst continuing to expand the breath of products on offer and customer base here at GCI."

GCI offers the complete suite of ICT products ranging from managed IT solutions and connectivity to cloud-based services.

The provision of machine-to-machine (M2M) solutions is fast becoming a hot market opportunity with demand projected to grow significantly over the coming decade.

Although often seen as a nascent industry sector the market is already worth $10bn worldwide with forecasts for $88bn by 2023, according to a report by Analysys Mason.

M2M solutions have been less affordable to SMEs than to large enterprises and the public sector, but all that will change and affordability will not be a prohibitive factor in the SMEs segment as M2M solutions become less expensive to implement at the application layer, and operators and service providers start offering off-the-shelf solutions.

"Operators are already generating strong revenue, and Future growth opportunities will be realised in emerging regions as applications are tailored to local markets and the cost of solutions declines," explained report author Morgan Mullooly.

"The forecast predicts that SMEs will account for an increasing percentage of total M2M device connections. Excluding connections in the utilities sector, the proportion of SME M2M connections will increase from 14.6% of total connections in 2013 to 24.6% in 2023, representing a CAGR of 33%."

Operators have already been successful in selling productised M2M solutions such as fleet management to SME customers, he pointed out.

"We believe operators will find success in selling security and surveillance, some healthcare solutions and some retail sector M2M solutions to SME buyers," added Mullooly.

He also forecasts that the number of M2M device connections will start to increase in emerging markets by 2015.

"Developed markets' share of connections will decline from 68% to 62% during the forecast period as operators in emerging markets seek additional customer connections and the cost of deploying M2M solutions declines," added Mullooly.

"As operators in developed markets have learned, it takes 18 months or more to organise the various aspects of an M2M business. Operators that have assembled the appropriate teams and resources will be poised for greater success as the market begins to grow."

Emerging market operators are currently focusing on growth in the number of mobile handsets, he pointed out.

"Running an M2M business carries a higher risk than a traditional mobile handset and broadband business," commented Mullooly.

"However, we expect that M2M solutions in the utilities, automotive and security sectors will have more easily understood business models by 2016, and operators will be more willing to sell these M2M solutions."

Maintel's unaudited interim results for the six months to 30th June 2013 show a modest rise in group revenue of 1% to £13.6m (H1 2012-£13.5m) derived from organic growth.

Adjusted profit before tax is reported as up 0.2% at £2.36m (H1 2012-£2.35m); unadjusted profit before tax was £2.00m compared with £0.19m in H1 2012, the latter stated after the expensing of acquisition consideration of £1.79m

Adjusted earnings per share up 2% at 16.9p (H1 2012-16.6p); unadjusted earnings per share were 14.4p, compared with a loss of 2.8p per share in H1 2012, the latter after expensing the acquisition consideration

Period end cash of £0.7m and no debt following payment of the final tranche of the mobile acquisition and increased dividend payments.

Interim dividend proposed of 6.7p per share (H1 2012 - 6.3p), an increase of 6% year on year.

Eddie Buxton, CEO, said: "This has been a solid six month period in which we have consolidated in key areas and focused on both organic and acquisition-led growth for the second half of the year. The further development of the Maintel customer base in the UK and Ireland through the acquisition provides an excellent platform for growth as the economy recovers.

"Telecoms is, and will remain, a highly volatile and competitive marketplace and Maintel has a proven ability to capitalise on developing market sectors and deliver value to customers and shareholders.\"

Outsourcery has extended its market reach following an agreement with Ingram Micro UK under which the distributor's partners will sell Outsourcery's hosted version of Microsoft Lync. Piers Linney, Co-CEO at Outsourcery, said: "Many resellers are unprepared to meet cloud demand from customers and our partnership with Ingram Micro is an important step to address this."

The partnership signals Ingram Micro's strategy to develop its UK cloud initiative having witnessed the market shift to cloud, particularly in the United States.

Apay Obang-Oyway, General Manager, Enterprise Software and Services at Ingram Micro, commented: "We have created the Advanced Solutions Division to help channel partners identify and pursue opportunities within advanced technology categories.

"Through higher touch enablement programmes, dedicated resources and our strengths in the areas of specialisation and scale, Ingram Micro will help its partners to grow and diversify while facilitating development in the channel.

"The successful model Outsourcery has already established complements these objectives so taking hosted cloud solutions to market together was the natural next step."