Comms Dealer

Nexus Telecommunications has built on its marketing strategy with the appointment of Ruth Panton as Marketing & Administration Manager.

She joined Nexus two years ago as PA to Rob Sims, COO. Previous roles include a position in Advertising at ITV and most recently as Account Manager at a PR firm. In the new role Panton will manage the recently formed Marketing team, as well continuing to oversee some of the HR and Office Management aspects of her previous role where required.

Panton stated: "My involvement in Nexus as PA has given me a huge insight into the management style and future vision for the company which I am positive will aid me in performing the new role.

"I am excited about the changes and developments that I have witnessed to date at Nexus and feel the opportunity has now arisen for me to increasingly put my marketing experience into practice as we work towards creating a new brand image for the company, from both an internal and external point of view."

COO Rob Sims added: "Ruth's contribution to the business has been fantastic. She has brought creativity, discipline and process to our Marketing activity and I am confident her drive and enthusiasm will take the business even further in the coming months."

Vodafone is to launch Vodafone Ultrafast 4G in London on 29th August with 12 more cities being activated before the end of the year, backed by £900m fixed and mobile network investment Guy Laurence, CEO, Vodafone UK said: "Speed is just the start, it's what businesses can do with it that counts. Businesses of every shape and size need to be able to get online when they want and how they want.

"Even the smallest business user has multiple devices that they want to use to access crucial information and with Vodafone Red Business 4G-ready they'll be able to share their allowance in the way they want.

"The launch of Vodafone Ultrafast 4G is an important step in our journey towards helping businesses change the way they work for the better."

Vodafone will launch Ultrafast 4G services in London on 29 August and all customers on Vodafone Red 4G-ready will be switched onto the new service when it goes live.

After London, launches in Birmingham, Bradford, Coventry, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Nottingham and Sheffield will come before the end of the year. Vodafone will bring indoor 4G coverage to 98% of the UK population by 2015.

Gamma is once again breaking out the bangers for the second Gamma Ball Rally, a thousand plus mile journey between Gamma's Newbury and Budapest offices in cars that must cost no more than £500!

Gamma's channel partners will be convening early at Gamma's Newbury offices on Wednesday 11th September to start the challenge, with overnight stops planned in Bruges, Nuremberg and finally Budapest on the 13th September.

Along the route will be Top Gear style activities at iconic venues including Brands Hatch and the Nurbugring and the event will close in Budapest where there will be a gala dinner with a prize ceremony and a 'money can't buy' charity auction.

The Gamma Ball Rally is a charity event with all proceeds to be donated to two very worthy causes: Action Through Enterprise, a charity that raises money for starving children in Ghana; and East Cheshire Hospice who cared for one of Gamma's channel partners whilst she battled cancer. Participants must make a minimum £500 donation to enter the rally.

John Haw, Sales Director at Gamma, said "The last Gamma Ball Rally we ran was a huge success and this year we are building on the theme with more cars and more challenges. This is not a race but competitors should not be fooled - it's still a competition and points will be awarded along the way! We're pleased to have already raised £10,000 for the charities and hope to build on this total over the coming weeks and at the gala dinner."

The majority of UK IT leaders still do not have a handle on adopting the BYOD trend into their organisations.

According to a report published by AppSense, 67 per cent of IT leaders cite developing BYOD IT policy as a major challenge, despite a similar amount (69 per cent) of them already supplying two or more devices to employees.

"The defining factor of BYOD is freedom of user choice," said Nick Lowe, Vice President Sales and General Manager, EMEA. "With so many devices offering different kinds of user experience, BYOD instantly becomes a challenge of scale - more devices equals more operating systems, more security protocols, more application portals, more user profiles to manage consistently and more platforms to support.

"Improperly managed, BYOD can also mean more trouble for today's IT department. Since it relates very specifically to user experience, when those users don't enjoy the quality of service that they've come to expect, it can create a rift between the two parties. IT can commonly be seen as inflexible or stubborn, while users become perceived as unfairly demanding. IT departments are struggling to keep up the pace end users want them to keep - finding themselves compromised by a user base that fails to understand the effort required, and the potential issues raised, in achieving this goal.

"This report shows a potentially perilous gap between user expectations and IT's perceived remit. From a user perspective, the BYOD experience is hampered by IT not delivering on the promise of 'any device, anywhere'. Simplicity, not case-by-case decision making, needs to be at the heart of any good BYOD strategy. Anything else will frustrate not only the end user, but make the IT department's life more difficult."

Adept Telecom has bagged 3,000 more business customers from Bluebell Telecom.

Adept's chief exec Ian Fishwick said: "The business customers acquired from Bluebell complement the Adept Telecom portfolio as they are all UK based fixed-line telecom business customers taking communications products including lines, calls, data connectivity, inbound telephony and maintenance services.

"Management of the contracts will be transferred to AdEPT telecom's office in Tunbridge Wells, Kent during August.

The total consideration will be funded out of AdEPT Telecom's existing bank facilities."

More big name sponsors have signed up for the Managed Services & Hosting Summit, 26th September 2013 at the Lancaster London Hotel.

IBM, Arrow ECS, ccapps, Symantec, Adaptec and Webroot have joined AVG, Autotask, Dot Hill, EVault, Gigamon, Interxion and Tarmin as event sponsors, as interest in the Managed Services business model increases.

With Managed Services revenue forecast to grow at 11.3% CAGR through to 2017, according to Insight Research, M&A activity in this segment is also accelerating as telecoms service providers, vendors and systems integrators all jostle to bring in the skills to fulfil increasing customer demand.

"With economies around the world showing no signs of any rapid growth, IT departments seem to be turning to Managed Services organisations to either take over the running of some of their IT services, allowing them to focus on new developments, or use Managed Services and the Cloud to enable them to deliver new applications without up-front capital or manpower investments," said John Chapman, Content Director for the Managed Services & Hosting Summit.

The UK Managed Services & Hosting Summit 2013 is a management-level event designed to help channel organisations identify opportunities arising from the increasing demand for managed and hosted services and to develop and strengthen partnerships aimed at supporting sales.

The Managed Services Summit 2013 will take place at The London Lancaster Hotel, London, on 26 September 2013. www.mshsummit.com

Elitetele.com has teamed up with Swyx to produce a whitepaper that, they claim, plugs the knowledge gap in the retail sector on how unified communications can drive greater profits.

According to research nearly 70% are unaware of how they can profit from the latest communications technology.
 
The free whitepaper, 'How Retailers Can Drive Growth with Unified Communications', explains how retail businesses can take advantage of  such technology in a number of ways including how to service multiple customer channels, decrease customer churn rates, increase sales and turnover, enhance brand credentials, improve staff wellbeing and speed up expansion plans.
 
In May, Elite and Swyx teamed up with Retail Week to poll senior retail executives about how they communicate with customers and integrate key trends to gauge their awareness regarding the potential of unified communications.
 
The results revealed that almost 70% of respondents had not heard of, or understood the benefits of the technology.
 
Matt Newing, CEO of Elite, said: "Our survey pointed to a clear need to educate retailers on how technology can support key operational targets.  This year we have already seen many high street retail businesses such as HMV and Blockbuster fail as a result of not evolving their business models to combine physical and digital journeys to suit changing customer preferences and behaviour.
 
"As a unified communications specialist, we know that this technology is a great platform for retailers to be able to converge physical shopping experiences with virtual ones - combining the best of 'bricks and clicks' - whilst cutting costs and allowing for flexible expansion across all platforms.

"Last month online shopping grew by 20%, the highest figure to date, showing a clear need for retailers to adapt and optimise their communications so they can take full advantage of this opportunity."
 
CEO at Swyx, Ralf Ebbinghaus commented: "The new whitepaper identifies how senior retail executives can use unified communications to transform their particular business, from providing better service to supporting multiple channels, or simply saving costs and time when rolling out new outlets."
 
The paper also looks into key trends such as mobile and social media and how unified communications can help retail businesses successfully adapt to incorporate these into their main infrastructure and operations.

Nimans has devised a two-day reseller training course on its iQ PBX comms platform and given delegates the opportunity to gain a 60% discount off the RRP of an iQ PBX 600 system.

iQ PBX Business Manager, Judith Addison, says resellers have the option of paying £100 to cover the course costs or purchase the iQ PBX 600 at a discount.

"Day one will focus on putting the system on the network in a safe and secure way, looking at firewalls etc," she explained. "Telephony functionality and system programming such as auto attendant and voicemail are the main themes of the second day."

Available in three versions, the iQ PBX platform is designed for the sub 25, 60 and 200 user markets and includes Microsoft Lync integration as part of an all-in-one solution.

Akixi has added Presence functionality to its hosted call management and ACD reporting services, providing users with a browser based 'Busy Lamp Field', a traditional feature on 'key and lamp' phone systems for under £1 a month per user.

In operation users can see the presence status of colleagues with the ability to make and transfer calls to colleagues via a web browser interface.

When out of the office users can still see the status of colleagues at a glance via a mobile device and a personal Call History report enables users to see all their individual call activity. A tooltip Wallboard also allows users to see a snapshot of colleagues' call statistics.

Bart Delgado, Managing Director of Akixi, said: "Presence information is one of the big benefits of UC telephony."

Entanet has expressed concerns over the Prime Minister's instruction to all UK ISPs to apply content filters that, by default, block access to pornography for all customers, both existing and future, in an effort to protect children.

Entanet asks whether ISPs rather than parents and guardians should be responsible for controlling access to web content, and points out that the filtering requirement will increase costs for consumers.

Prime Minister David Cameron has outlined government plans to work with search engine providers to stamp-out access to both images of child pornography and depictions of sexual violence - a policy which Entanet wholeheartedly supports in an opinion piece on the matter. 

He also outlined plans to make ISPs set up content filters that are set to 'on' by default to make it harder for children to access pornography from uncontrolled home computers. He made it clear that smaller ISPs will not be exempt from this demand.

It is this specific issue that Entanet discusses in its opinion piece, questioning whether it should be the responsibility of ISPs or of parents and guardians to take primary responsibility for the content that can or cannot be accessed with home computers.

Entanet also points out that the requirement to provide filtering as a default will add additional costs for smaller ISPs, which will ultimately be passed onto the consumer, and hand a competitive advantage to larger players.

There is also a wider concern that the proposed measures will lead to further government censorship of the web, which would be detrimental to users and society in general, as expressed by the Open Rights Group (see https://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2013/government-wants-default-block...), which has started an online petition calling for the government to drop the plans immediately.

In an article on the company's blog (http://bit.ly/1eg1lqR), Neil Watson, Head of Service Operations at Entanet states: "Cameron has stipulated that ISPs must swing the technology sledgehammer to protect these customers' children. To do that will inevitably incur additional cost which will be passed on to all customers, regardless of whether they have children or not.

"In a market in which the big players are able to leverage their economies of scale, such an imposition by government serves only to make it even harder for smaller ISPs to compete against them to win customers. Perhaps that's what Cameron ultimately wants - a market served by a small handful of big players whom it vainly thinks it can control via Ofcom. Most would agree that doesn't generally happen.

"At the moment, the PM's requests are not compulsory by law and smaller ISPs can continue to offer an Internet service without these constraining controls. We will look out for developments of Cameron's plan with interest. No doubt this will continue to be a much-debated topic, both in terms of how acceptable it is to impose controls on customers and the impact it will have on smaller ISPs."