Comms Dealer

Daisy Connect's trophy cabinet is home to two new gongs following a double award scoop, collecting O2's Digital Excellence Award and Customer Excellence Award 2017.

To win a Digital Excellence Award O2 partners must achieve an annual digital growth rate that is equivalent to 10% of their total mobile connections. Daisy Connect achieved 209% of its target.

The Customer Excellence Award is based on customer service index (CSI) scores and customer retention rates. Over the year, Daisy Connect achieved an average CSI score of 72 and a churn rate of 7.6%.

Dave McGinn, MD of Daisy SMB Services, stated: "These awards will form the foundation for our strategy for Daisy Connect in this coming financial year where we are looking to acquire customers and other bases, with the awards demonstrating our capabilities."

Timico has enlisted Alex Hendry (pictured), ex-Commercial and Pricing Director at Alternative Networks, as its new Head of Commercial.

He brings 14 years experience at Alternative Networks and previously held commercial positions including a stint at The Carphone Warehouse.

Hendry will now be heading up a new commercial team at Timico with responsibility for all pricing, bid management and supplier management, as well as building strong commercial governance.

Hendry said: "We will also focus on managing suppliers to make sure we're getting maximum value for money and support for our clients."

Simon Payne, Chief Commercial Officer at Timico, added: "Alex has an excellent track record having negotiated a number of deals with network operators that facilitated rapid and profitable growth of the customer base."

Last month Timico secured more than £50m in investment from growth investors Lyceum Capital.

Channel Telecom's influence in the hosted telephony space is more strongly felt following a buoyant six months that has seen the recruitment of 50 active Nimbus UC resellers and the sale of over 1,000 user licences.

A strong feature set, free Skype for Business integration, full-time monitoring of call quality and an attractive pricing structure have helped to catch the imagination of new resellers according to Head of IP Voice Tim Nelson.

"A platform-wide deployment of RTCP-XR means that all calls involving Polycom and Yealink handsets are routinely monitored, so that any call over the last five days can be examined to see the phone's view of the quality of the audio and video portion of the call," he explained.

"Each call is given a Mean Opinion Score (MOS), based on parameters such as packet loss, delay and jitter."

He also noted that data is collated to provide a view of the whole system, averaging all the MOS scores across thousands of calls an hour.

"This overall score takes into account the platform, internet peering and all customer Internet connectivity," he added.

"The call quality information collated is then used to complement the stats that are already collected, and is now enabling the Channel Telecom team to provide faster problem resolution."

MD Clifford Norton commented: "The proof is in the pudding and our resellers have noticed the benefits of the product."

Ireland network operator enet has made its first entry into the UK market following a partnership with SSE Enterprise Telecoms.

Under the terms of the deal enet will use SSE Enterprise Telecoms' full range of dark fibre, Carrier Ethernet and optical networking services across 13,700km of national network.

enet also gains access to over 265 Points of Presence (PoPs), with further expansion planned over the next 12 months, as well as over 76 UK on-net commercial data centres and over 2,000 PoPs from other key players in the market.

Conal Henry, enet CEO, said: "It's important to us that our carrier customers have access to resilient, high-capacity, scalable Ethernet services both in Ireland and now in the UK. We look forward to working with SSE Enterprise Telecoms to help our customers extend their reach into the market."

This UK network deal is the latest in a series of investments undertaken by enet and its parent, Granahan McCourt Capital.

These include investing more than €100 million in access fibre deployments, metro fibre acquisition and construction, core fibre roll outs, as well as gigabit wireless network integration.

BT is creating 1,700 new apprenticeship and graduate jobs in roles ranging from cyber security and traditional engineering to production at BT Sport.

BT is one of the UK's largest employers with 81,000 UK-based people. The new roles, which include those with EE and Plusnet, are spread across a number of locations including London, Glasgow, Belfast, Sheffield, Nottingham, Cardiff, Leeds and Newcastle-upon-Tyne.

Openreach, BT's local access network business, will launch its own recruitment drive in due course.

Apprenticeships and Skills Minister, Robert Halfon, said: "By committing to injecting 1,700 new graduate and apprentice jobs into the UK, BT is offering a real chance to be trained by some of the best in their field.

"This is especially great news ahead of what will be the 10th annual National Apprenticeship Week where we will showcase the life-changing potential of apprenticeships for people up and down the country."

Gavin Patterson, chief executive of BT, added: "Young people today need three basic skills - reading, writing, and tech know-how.

"BT is investing in the next generation, helping to train primary school teachers to teach computer science and recruiting large numbers of apprentices and graduates. This is the right thing for us to do if the UK is to remain a digital leader."

US security company Palo Alto Networks has wrapped up its $105m all cash acquisition of cyber security specialist LightCyber, which has developed automated analytics technology using machine learning to identify attacks based on behavioural anomalies inside the network.

"The LightCyber team's vision to bring automation and machine learning to bear in addressing the difficult task of identifying otherwise undetected and often very sophisticated attacks inside the network is well-aligned with our platform approach," stated Mark McLaughlin, Chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks.

According to a report by the Ponemon Institute, when attackers successfully find their way into a network there is an industry average dwell time of approximately five months to discover their activity. During that time, an advanced attacker can initiate command and control, lateral movement, and data exfiltration. This kind of dwell time and advancement in the attack lifecycle can lead to extensive damage and loss of confidential data.

Common approaches to this problem include third-party, log-based collection and analysis tools that are often error-prone, limited in visibility, lack important context, are labor-intensive, require a data scientist to investigate false positives and tune for accurate outcomes, and lack enforcement capabilities.

To address these challenges, reduce attacker dwell time, minimise damage done and prevent breaches, the LightCyber technology employs accurate and automated machine learning techniques to analyse user and entity activity and then identifies and protects against anomalous activities that are indicative of an active attack.

This behavioural attack detection capability complements the existing protections delivered by the Palo Alto Networks platform to help security team members focus on only the most meaningful alerts and improve the time to breach response and prevention.

Almost half of channel leaders expect the channel to grow between now and 2020 according to research commissioned by inventory-as-a-service firm Agilitas.

The research commissioned by Agilitas and carried out by OnePoll surveyed 100 senior level executives at leading IT resellers, managed service providers and independent IT channel firms.

The research looked at the financial challenges the industry is set to face between now and 2020. Despite continued market disruption and uncertainty, a significant 47% still expect the channel to grow, 27% expect it to be a similar size with 26% less confident in the channel growing between now and 2020.

The research also examined what channel contracts will look like, revealing that the majority agree that IT based revenue streams will be even more OPEX based by 2020. IT services are expected to see the biggest contract shift from CAPEX to OPEX (30%), followed by hardware sales (19%).

In addition, the channel leaders surveyed also revealed that they expect software and hardware support services to provide some of the strongest revenue streams in 2020.

"The results of our research suggest that the channel will see significant movement to OPEX based support services in the next few years" stated Agilitas CEO, Shaun Lynn. "A rise in support services and contracts moving to an OPEX model provides significant new revenue streams for resellers, managed service providers and independent IT providers alike."

CSC and Virtual Clarity have joined forces to help organisations speed up their migration to cloud environments such as Amazon Web Services, IBM Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

The deal sees CSC make an undisclosed investment in Virtual Clarity which has become a strategic affiliate of CSC.

"This partnership will ensure that organisations can transform their business faster and safer than before, and at scale," said Steve Peskin, CEO, Virtual Clarity.

Steve Hilton, Executive VP & GM, Global Infrastructure Services, CSC, added: "Virtual Clarity's advisory services, combined with CSC's ability to deliver at scale, supports the journey toward IT transformation."

NFON UK has elevated Glemnet to Platinum Partner status following a year of 'stellar growth' and its recent specialisation in reselling NFON's Nhospitality product portfolio, a bespoke cloud telephony system for hospitality and managed services organisations.

NFON UK MD Rami Houbby said: "Glemnet's partner status upgrade recognises and rewards a hugely successful first year. The hospitality sector requires a specialist approach and Glemnet has invested considerable effort and resource into becoming an expert in this sector."

Platinum Partner status gives Glemnet access to more support, including assistance with marketing, event co-sponsorship and lead generation.

Adam Freeman, National Sales Manager, Glemnet, added: "We see huge demand from our hotel and hospitality customers for NFON's Nhospitality product. This sector requires a specialist approach and bespoke technology, and our expertise and the Nhospitality product range will ensure mutual success."

CityFibre has appointed technology and services industry veteran Christopher Stone as Non-Executive Chairman.

He brings a strong track record of building successful global businesses in the sector, most notably responsible for leading the transformation of Northgate Information Solutions (then known as McDonnell Douglas Information Systems) between 1999 to 2011 to become the world's second largest specialist HR technology and services business and the leading provider of software and services to the UK public sector.

He is currently a Non-Executive Director (formerly Chief Executive Officer) of Radius Worldwide, an expansion services company offering accounting, HR, legal, tax and compliance support to companies' international operations.

He led the business during its successful acquisition by private equity firm, HG Capital, in August 2013.

Previous positions include senior roles at Accenture, Electronic Data Systems, Digital Equipment Company, Fitness First and CSR, where he served as Non-Executive Director and Chairman of the Remuneration Committee.

Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, commented: "Chris brings to the Board extensive experience as a Non-Executive Director across a wide range of companies and sectors, and we look forward to his perspective and guidance as CityFibre continues its rapid growth and development in the dynamic and evolving UK communications infrastructure market."