Comms Dealer

The boss of cloud and colocation firm, UKFast, is launching a fund to help protect businesses from online threats.

UKFast's BASE (Building A Safer Environment) fund makes top quality security solutions available to businesses who can't cope with suddenly-inflated prices from IT companies hoping to cash-in on their fears of online attacks.

The pot of cash is put aside by Lawrence Jones - the entrepreneur behind Manchester's fastest-growing tech company - to help businesses add security features to their network and grow to the next level. UKFast grants £5,000 for each business that qualifies for the funding to boost their solution.

Jones says: "It is common place to have online shops hosted on networks and environments that aren't behind a firewall. Many trusted sites that you'd assume would take this seriously are opting out, knowing that customers never check.

"The problem is less about people's desires to create a safe environment and more to do with astronomical pricing for firewalls and online security.

"If making your website safe is cost prohibitive, it's often the things you cannot see that are compromised, quite literally.

"We want to make it easy. We are demonstrating our longer-term commitment by being prepared to invest in the clients' firewall too. The BASE Fund is designed to help businesses get the security they need.

"It makes sense and seems logical to me. It's a small price to pay when you consider the £12m we put into developing our own data centres.

"I'd like to think that one day all hosting providers will be doing the same.

"We're hearing from businesses who are seeing their security costs multiply because their hosting provider is taking advantage of growing fears around safety online. People are hearing more and more about DDoS attacks and some companies are using that to hike their prices up.

"Businesses are being forced to upgrade their firewalls and pay excessive costs for a basic safeguard. It's wrong! Britain's businesses shouldn't be held to ransom on this and forced to operate without the fundamental protections because of cost.

Jones is determined to protect business people from the kind of problems that can bring a company to its knees.

He added: "With the explosion of cloud, businesses are opting for convenience. It's quick and easy. Yet with data on US servers, often with little or no protection, it is a sure way to fail when things go wrong.

"We see both sides of the equation. Business people who have lost everything. If I can save one person from the despair that I have been unfortunate to witness in the past then it's worth the investment. We make our profits on retaining clients and building long term lasting relationships. I believe this is another sound way of building a safer environment together."

BASEfund provides anti-virus, backup systems, safety protocols and 24-hour monitoring at no extra cost for UKFast dedicated or managed hosting clients.

Grants of up to £5,000 per businesses are available to anyone hosting on the UKFast network.

Big hearted Richard Reid of Watford-based audio visual and telecommunications reseller RCS has netted £2,380 by completing the Rays of Sunshine Children's Charity Bike Ride with the help of sponsor New Star Networks.

The charity gives children living with serious or life threatening conditions and illnesses the chance to enjoy a moment of escape and an opportunity to realise their dreams.

The carrier router/switch market is coming back in 2Q13, with previous backslider Europe gaining too. Market research firm Infonetics Research released vendor market share and preliminary analysis from its 2nd quarter 2013 (2Q13) Service Provider Routers and Switches report.

"The 2nd quarter is usually up for carrier routers and switches, but this one is exceptional given the sluggishness of the past few years. Every major geographical region except Japan notched double-digit sequential growth and, more important, gained from the year-ago quarter," reports Michael Howard, principal analyst for carrier networks and co-founder of Infonetics Research.

"In Asia Pacific, carrier router and switch revenue jumped 45% from the previous quarter thanks in large part to Huawei's and ZTE's stellar performance," Howard adds. "And even recent laggard Europe/EMEA gained nicely, possibly signaling a pitch forward."

Globally, service provider router and switch revenue is up 27% in 2Q13 from 1Q13, to $4 billion, showing that service providers are ready to spend after holding back in the previous quarter. In the overall carrier router and switch market, Huawei gained 4 market share points in 2Q13, rising back into the #2 spot behind leader Cisco. IP edge (edge routers and carrier Ethernet switches) revenue grew 30% sequentially in 2Q13, attributable in part to an uptick in the move to 100GE on routers and 100G in optical transport.

Meanwhile, core routers grew the slowest quarter-over-quarter where Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco, Huawei and Juniper together account for about 90% of total router (edge and core) revenue in 2Q13. Over the past 2 years (4-quarter rolling average), Huawei gained the most edge and core router market share points of any vendor, up 5.6 points.

The Mobile Security Management (MSM) market is emerging as a strong, fledgling submarket of Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), says research. As Mobile Device Management (MDM) evolves into application and content management, the core driver for this evolution is the demand for greater security around corporate assets, wherever they may reside and regardless of format.

Concerns for data leak prevention, access control, compliance reporting, and monitoring are pushing EMM providers to increasingly provide more security-based mobility features to their existing solutions.

The ripening demand for security is enabling vendors to differentiate their offerings and stand out from the competition. But the window for MSM is short; security will become a basic requirement for all EMM solutions and successful differentiation will demand a long-term sustainable strategy. This could be through a number of different channels; either mergers and strategic acquisitions, or investment into other EMM submarkets, such as mobile network and identity management.

ABI Research estimates the current MSM market to total $560m by the end of 2013 globally. "While MDM will continue to provide the largest share of revenues, growth rates from other sectors, and, in particular, security and content management, will increasingly account for a much larger portion of the market," says Michela Menting, ABI Research's senior analyst in cyber security.

The market will offer significant opportunities for vendors in the EMM value chain, including pure-play mobility management vendors, original equipment manufacturers, technology companies, mobile network operators, and Internet security software developers. Leading and innovative niche vendors interviewed for this report include: AirWatch, BlackBerry, Citrix, F5 Networks, Fixmo, Fortinet, Good Technology, Juniper Networks, ManageEngine, MobileIron, Samsung, and SAP.

Independent hardware distributor Gamma Global has added three new directors to its board. Gamma's Head of Value Added Distribution (VAD) Business, Andy Kelly, is promoted to Sales Director with responsibility for all sales and marketing activity. Simon Greenhalgh has joined as the firm's new Financial Director and Mark Gilbert is promoted to the role of Operations Director.

Commenting on the new appointments, Gamma's Managing Director, Martin Smith, said: "These new additions to our senior team will give the business an injection of energy and a welcome new approach, adding increased pace and professionalism to the business"

"Andy, Simon, Mark and Craig Newell, who joined us on 1st July as Andy's replacement, have a wealth of knowledge and experience between them as well as many new ideas and business development plans which will help us to steer Gamma through the next exciting phase of our amazing journey.

"Our main objective is to ensure we have a world beating team who are in the right place at the right time, enabling us to exploit existing and emerging opportunities in our core and new incremental markets."

Kelly added: "Having worked my way up from entry level sales to proving my business building ability in the VAD business unit, I feel now is the right time for me to take on this new role. There are many opportunities to grow the business and, by involving the excellent sales team we already have in place, we can take Gamma to the next level."

Existing board members, Mark Winter and Mike Cookson continue in their respective posts as Commercial Director and IT Director.

Tech Data Europe says it will participate in the Microsoft Devices Program, enabling the company to distribute the Surface Pro and Surface RT. Tech Data will supply the Surface products to Microsoft Authorised Device Resellers (ADRs) across Europe.

Reza Honarmand, vice president, Software and Cloud at Tech Data Europe said: "We are excited to participate in the Microsoft Devices Program and distribute one of Microsoft's most anticipated products and its complementary accessories. The Surface Pro and Surface RT fit the needs of business customers seeking devices that adapt seamlessly to both work and play. Our participation in this program further demonstrates our commitment to our Microsoft channel partners."

"Bringing Surface Pro and Surface RT to the European commercial channel through Tech Data extends the reach of our devices-and-services strategy, delivering our family of devices enabled by cloud services to more organizations than ever before," said Michael Hartmann, General Manager EMEA Small and Midmarket Solutions and Partners at Microsoft Corp.

"We look forward to working closely with our Microsoft devices authorized distributors to better serve their partners and create compelling solutions together."

CEO Meg Whitman has cited 'challenges' in PCs and the enterprise group for a downbeat view of fiscal 2014 revenue that followed Q3 numbers that did not impress. Among the management changes, Bill Veghte has replaced Dave Donatelli as head of HP's key enterprise business group.

CEO Meg Whitman said: "We see a continued weak enterprise spending environment. Sentiment in the US is improving although not translating to our results yet due to inconsistent execution. I would characterize Europe as challenging and China continues to be soft."

Chief Financial Officer Cathie Lesjak said the company was facing 'extreme competitive pricing in industry server storage and continued weakness in traditional storage demand', while the software business posted a 1% year-over-year growth.

Lesjak said: "We are especially pleased with the continued performance in our strategic areas of cloud, security, and big data.

"At a macro level we expect consumer demand weaknessin the PC industry will likely continue to impact personal systems and we expect continued pricing pressure in printing, personal systems, and Industry Standard Servers."

Whitman added: "We must see networking grow faster. We are the upstart in this business so a flat networking performance is not what we need to see."

HP made a big push into networking a few years ago, challenging Cisco Systems, which, in turn, challenged HP in blade servers. Analysts say Cisco has been gaining in servers, and HP is now conceding that it's struggling in networking.

Dr Sotirios Paroutis, Associate Professor of Strategic Management at Warwick Business School, has researched the company extensively.

Dr Paroutis said: "Where should the focus of Hewlett-Packard's strategic efforts lie? Three areas demand attention. First, the pace of execution needs to accelerate both on the internal and external front. Internally, there needs to be more effort towards quicker resource reallocation from lower performing to higher demand units. Externally, an aggressive set of strategic acquisitions need to materialise in the next few months - similar to Yahoo CEO Melissa Mayer's push for acquisitions. Second, the firm should also put more effort to develop customised solutions for emerging markets, and particularly China. Third, the firm needs to bring to market even more innovative products to meet the increasingly converging consumer and enterprise needs."

"For the past two years, Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman and her leadership team have been exploring ways to develop a strategy that could help the firm keep in tune with falling global PC sales and increasing tablet and smartphone demand. As HP leaders have admitted, this required some serious soul-searching. But while this soul-searching was taking place, key competitors like Lenovo have been aggressively moving into the mobile space. As a result, Lenovo is now the world's fourth largest smartphone supplier, helping the firm post a 23 per cent increase in profits for Q1 2013, while HP is 'unlikely' to see revenue growth in 2014. It shows just why the company needs to accelerate its pace of execution."

Avaya has unveiled its Software-Defined Data Center framework designed to deliver productivity, agility and time-to-service enhancements to businesses operating virtualised data centres.

The Avaya Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) framework aims to break down traditional data centre silos that require weeks or months to turn up an application and replace it with a simple five-step process that takes minutes.

The Avaya SDDC framework includes an orchestration process that combines, customises and commissions compute, storage and network components.

Use of the OpenStack cloud computing platform will allow data centre administrations to deploy virtual machines, assign storage and configure networks through a single graphical user interface.

Avaya Fabric Connect further enhances the OpenStack environment by removing restrictions in traditional Ethernet VLAN / Spanning Tree-based networks to enable a more dynamic, flexible and scalable network services model than exists today.

Avaya's Software-Defined Data Center framework is the first phase of its Software-Defined Networking roadmap.

Avaya Fabric Connect is available today on a range of networking platforms including Virtual Service Platform 9000, Ethernet Routing Switch 8800, Virtual Services Platform 7000 and Virtual Services Platform 4000.

The Avaya Horizon-based Management Platform and open APIs will be generally available next year. Future initiatives include the extension of Fabric Connect and Orchestration to deliver end-to-end service creation and delivery from data centre to desktop.

Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure, IDC, said: "In many ways this is a logical evolution of Avaya's Data Center networking portfolio. Having executed on its vision of using Fabric Connect (based on enhanced Shortest Path Bridging) as an end-to-end architecture, it only makes sense to wrap it with an orchestration and automation enabler like OpenStack. This is a natural and powerful extension for Avaya, and their present and future customers will surely embrace it."

Marc Randall, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Avaya Networking, added: "This announcement demonstrates that enterprises can immediately realise the operational benefits of real-time orchestration and automation."

Sennheiser has launched the Century series of wired headsets built to withstand the rigours of the toughest contact centre or office, claims the firm.

The new Century series is available in single-sided and double-sided configurations. There are models designed specifically for use with desk phones; for USB connection optimised for unified communication solutions and softphones; and optimised for Microsoft Lync with USB connection.

The Century series comes with large leatherette ear-pads and unibody headband construction to provide a comfortable user experience for all-day wearing in the most demanding contact centre or office environments. The use of quality materials such as stainless steel hinges, brushed aluminium parts and Kevlar cables ensures maximum durability and low total cost of ownership, claims Sennheiser.

All models feature Sennheiser ultra noise-cancelling microphones to filter out background noise for perfect wideband communications in busy and noisy environments, improving speech intelligibility. Hearing experience is enhanced with top grade neodymium speakers providing outstanding high definition audio quality.

An important health and safety feature of the Century series is Sennheiser's patented ActiveGardTM technology. ActiveGard technology detects unsafe audio levels and compresses the signal within milliseconds. ActiveGard doesn't just reduce, but rather removes dangerous energy from an acoustic burst, eliminating the distortion from an excessive incoming signal and keeping the volume of a sound peak at a safe and comfortable level to protect the users hearing.

Jane Craven, Director of Sales, stated: "The flexible choice of wearing styles and connectivity options, including Microsoft Lync optimisation, will ensure that the Century series is a hit with desk-oriented users that require convenient functionality and build quality."

Cloud services provider Vapour Media has entered the channel market with the launch of its communications platform, Vapour NxG.

Alongside Vapour's cloud-based network access and SaaS offerings, Vapour NxG is set to play a key part in the company's core SME and small corporate strategy.

The launch of Vapour NxG represents the culmination of months of preparation by Vapour's trio of founding directors, serial entrepreneur Dom Waterson; former Group Finance Director at Daisy Telecom, Jason Sharp; and experienced telecoms sales professional Tim Mercer.

Over the past six months, Vapour's team of directors have pooled their expertise to plot an ambitious go-to-market campaign for the business. A key element of this campaign has been investment.

Backed by venture capital, Vapour has invested in building its own MPLS network. With interconnects to each of the four tier 1 carriers, Vapour's infrastructure is set to enable the delivery of NxG services on a national scale.

Central to Vapour's ambitious growth strategy is the business' strong belief in the potential of cloud technology. A dedicated cloud business, Vapour is committed to providing fully managed end-to-end services for its customers. This, explains Mercer, is all part of the company's hands-on approach to the channel.

"When we founded Vapour we wanted to take ownership of the solutions that we were going to deliver for our customers," he said.

"Price is important but service is our number one priority. We wanted to break away from a reliance on vendor technology and build our own bespoke solutions that would elevate the level of service we can provide for our customers."

Vapour's commitment to this philosophy is reflected in its choice of core technology. Vapour NxG is built using Content Guru's NGware platform, providing a seamless suite of functionality that can be switched on or off as required, allowing Vapour Media to adapt services to the constantly evolving needs of the end user.

"Having a vision for delivering quality service is vital, but realising that vision requires the right technology," commented Mercer. "The flexibility of our cloud platform has given us the freedom to innovate and make communications technology work for our customers in a way that traditional delivery models cannot. The complete level of control that Vapour NxG offers will be instrumental in helping to deliver the kind of end-to-end service we have set out to provide."

Mercer's excitement surrounding the launch of Vapour NxG was echoed by technology partner, Content Guru.

John Rees, Content Guru Commercial Director, added: "True cloud is all about providing a complete end-to-end experience for the customer. With the know-how and financial backing that Vapour brings to the table they have the potential to go on and become a key player in the channel."