Comms Dealer

The 2017 edition of Nimans' free Trade Catalogue contains 484 pages and details over 7,000 products. A key feature of this year's publication is an expanded data infrastructure range along with new system developments and headset innovations including a convertible two-in-one Radius model.

Director of Channel Sales Richard Carter (pictured) commented: "In an age of digital media the Trade Catalogue still has a firm place at the heart of our business and remains popular as a reference point. It is affectionately known as the 'industry's bible' and this year we have a huge range of new products from traditional systems and data infrastructure to two-way radios and headsets."

Miles Rippon has joined endpoint security firm Carbon Black as EMEA Channel Director.

The appointment comes three weeks after the company sealed a distribution deal with Arrow ECS.

Rippon moved from HPE where he was EMEA Channel and Alliance Director for the Enterprise Security Products Division.

He was previously VP of Global Channels for Clearswift, a provider of email and web content security solutions.

Rippon also spent 10 years driving channel engagement as VP of EMEA Channels for RSA Security.

Mark Reeves, VP for EMEA Sales at Carbon Black, said: "Miles is an EMEA channel expert with extensive experience and hands-on sales territory and sales management skills.

"In particular, he has maintained strong sales performance records in developed and emerging territories.

"With the recent launch of our streaming prevention technology and the appointment of Arrow, we are now well set up to service the channel and build momentum in the market."

Call management company Invosys has acquired VoIP platform developer Telux HD. The move sees the integration of Invosys's cloud-based Number Manager portal with Telux's open source cloud communications platform. The Number Manager portal enables customers to configure, manage and monitor their call management solutions. The service will form part of a new channel offering called Invosys Hosted and incorporate cloud-based telephony.

"Instead of reselling hosted from one of the legacy suppliers we wanted to launch a hosted product to integrate with Number Manager," said Invosys CEO Rob Booth.

"Direct access to the owners and developers, swift development and support resolutions along with an open API that means easy and limitless integrations made Telux a clear fit for Invosys.

"The acquisition has allowed us to harness new technology and expand our wholesale channel."

Telux HD co-founder and MD Murray Leach commented: "We have invested heavily in developing our VoIP technology and we share Invosys's ambitious plans to capitalise on the impending changes to the voice market in the UK and beyond."

Invosys co-founder Peter Crooks added: "Invosys's wholesale channel is already experienced in hosted telephony, so we know our offering needs to be commercially viable while including access to features and services not currently available from our competitors.

"With support from Telux we've created something in line with our philosophy of devising feature rich services that are simple to set up, easy to use and priced competitively. Ultimately, we believe that Invosys Hosted can shake the market up and become an important part of what we do."

Telux remains at its Manchester city centre offices and the two companies will continue to operate as separate entities.

Pictured above (l-r): Rob Booth, Murray Leach, Rosie Moth (Telux) and Peter Crooks 

T-Systems and NFON have partnered to create a new UC bundle called 'Dynamic Services for UC NFON Enterprise'.

The service is designed for companies from 100 extensions and comprises the TC system within the NFON cloud, scheduling of voice into public networks with Quality of Service as well as individual and network access from the customer site to the MPLS of T-Systems.

Up to three devices can be attached to each extension. For example, one workplace telephone and one soft client both on the PC as well as on the mobile device.

"Companies that want to keep up with a visibly dynamic and ever faster advancing digitisation must enable their employees to go with the high speed of both the competition and the technological progress," said Patrick Molck-Ude, Managing Director Telecommunication Division at T-Systems.

"Contemporary collaboration tools are becoming an enabler for innovation in the digital age. Even if technology accelerates the introduction of new business ideas and models it is still people who actually develop and launch business ideas. Dynamic Services for UC NFON Enterprise is an important component in this."

"The services of T-Systems and NFON AG complement each other, we foster a partnership at eye level", added Hans Szymanski, Chief Executive Officer of NFON AG.

As the first wholesale distribution partner in the EU for Avaya's cloud solutions distributor ScanSource linked up with the vendor to stage two 'scanSource VaaS-t Powered by Avaya IP Office' workshops in Guildford and Bury.

UK MD for Avaya Ioan MacRae and Paul Emery, VP of ScanSource Communications UK, addressed reseller partners to demystify the cloud and outline the business growth opportunities it represents.

Roadshow delegate Mark Stephens, Head of Group Services at Charterhouse Voice and Data, said: "Having attended ScanSource's workshop Charterhouse Voice and Data is now ready to go to market with this cloud solution.

"We can utilise our existing IP Office skillset while taking advantage of all the benefits that cloud can bring, to provide our customers with an on-premise, hybrid, or entirely cloud-based Avaya offering."

VoIP Distributor ProVu and Cisco are to stage two reseller launch events in Birmingham and Glasgow next month.

These events follow the Manchester and London launches where resellers got to grips with Cisco's latest multi-platform SIP phone range, the 7800 and 8800 series.

The ProVu and Cisco teams will be heading to The IET, Glasgow on 4th April and The IET, Birmingham on 6th April 2017.

ProVu's Sales Director Ian Godfrey commented: "Orders for the new 7800 and 8800 series are already gaining momentum but we know there's still a number of resellers who are yet to discover the capabilities of this new range of multi-platform phones.

"Our previous events proved to be a great success, we look forward to heading out on the road and welcoming resellers in Glasgow and Birmingham next month."

Following Direct Response's acquisitions of CallScripter, Ansaback and GoResponse the company has rebranded as The Yonder Digital Group.

Chris Robinson, Yonder Digital Group, said: "With this rebrand we confirm our commitment to provide client solutions powered by an omni-channel single view of the customer, allowing clients to fully understand the customer journey across channels that leads to real business results.

"We are able to provide the right intelligence for clients to balance risk and experience leveraging cross-selling and up-selling opportunities and delivering rapid problem resolution. This also allows us to measure and analyse performance and quality data across multiple touch points and maximise ROI on customer engagement for our customers."

Hosted UC provider thevoicefactory (tvf) has opened a data centre in Sacramento, California, to meet the needs of its growing customer base in the Americas.

This is tvf's second data centre in the USA after opening one in Washington DC at the end of 2016.

The two US data centres have been built using the N+1 approach to support geographic redundancy, which provides resiliency to component failure or complete data centre outage.

The US data centres will start by serving the hospitality industry, covering the US, Canada, Mexico, Caribbean and South America as reach points of tvf's solution with local regulatory compliant PSTN breakout.

Over time tvf will expand the solution to reach other verticals.

tvf MD Paul Harrison said: "The new data centre is part of our expansion to serve business we have already secured and build for what we will gain in the near future, based on our reputation in the UK and Europe."

Wireless ISP Luminet has enlisted channel builder Richard Jones (pictured) to drive the rollout of its new partner programme launched last year.

He joins the company as Channel Development Manager and brings 16 years connectivity experience including notable stints at Uniworld, Abzorb and Genius Networks where he led partner engagement programmes that more than trebled reseller numbers.

This appointment reflects Luminet's sharpened focus on the channel and its intent to add substantial numbers to its existing 50-plus active partner base which ranges from multi-national distributors to bespoke London-based IT companies.

Jones's primary task is to bed in the processes for Luminet's new automated portal for wholesale and resellers and engage with new vertical service provider partners.

He will also strengthen the channel team to address the 350-plus potential partners who have recently engaged with Luminet, representing a potential doubling of ARR.

"Having worked in the channel for over a decade I am well versed in the issues faced by VARs today," he stated.

"As connectivity becomes increasingly commoditised they want and need vendors that enable them to differentiate, scale revenues and increase margins.

"We have connectivity and multi-cloud computing propositions tailored for the London market which represents half of the UK's telecoms revenue."

Luminet's new channel programme includes Fibre Air, also launched last year, which is a wireless business Internet service that can be installed in 10 working days and provides customers with up to 1gb symmetrical broadband Internet connectivity.

Luminet CEO Sasha Williamson added: "For the last few years the business priority has been product development and investment into our expanded network and compute asset base.

"Our focus is now firmly on market execution, the channel is our best route and Richard has hit the ground running."

Interoute has integrated its managed global cloud infrastructure with the Rancher management platform in a bid to accelerate enterprise digital transformation.
 
Interoute announced the news at Cloud Expo 2017 today.

The advent of containers has revolutionised the way enterprises can build, and deploy software applications, bringing greater agility, quicker deployment times and lower operational costs.

In the past, Enterprise Operations and Infrastructure teams building new applications and software services had to manage all cloud infrastructure building blocks (the virtual server, OS, and application libraries) necessary to create their application development environment.

Using a container based approach enterprise developers can now focus on writing applications and deploying the code straight into a container.

The container is then deployed across the underling Interoute cloud infrastructure dramatically improving the time to develop and launch new applications and software.
 
The Interoute Container platform is part of the Interoute Enterprise Digital Platform, a secure global Infrastructure that combines a Software Defined Core Network integrated into a global mesh of 17 cloud zones, to optimise applications and services.

Interoute makes it possible for organisations to integrate legacy, third party and digital IT environments onto single, secure, privately-connected global cloud infrastructure, creating the foundation for Enterprise Digital Transformation.
 
By integrating Rancher software, Interoute is now able to provide access to a full set of orchestration and infrastructure services for containers, enabling users to deploy containers in any of Interoute's 17 cloud zones across the world. Rancher is an open-source container management platform that makes it simple to deploy and manage containers in production.
 
Matthew Finnie, Interoute CTO, commented: "Enterprises developing and building apps in the cloud and those on a path to Digital Transformation need Digital ICT Infrastructure that allows them to build, test and deploy faster than ever before.

"The integration of Rancher software with Interoute Digital Platform gives developers access to a managed container platform, that sits on a global privately networked cloud, enabling true distributed computing."