Comms Dealer

In launching Connect Cloud to the UK market ShoreTel has also shown us that it is already moving ahead of the cloud revolution and entering the post-digital 'age of experience', according to CEO Don Joos (pictured) and EMEA Managing Director Adrian Hipkiss.

The leading role of UK partners in advancing ShoreTel's global expansion campaign was underscored last month when the vendor rolled out ShoreTel Connect Cloud and ShoreTel Connect Contact Centre for Cloud during two launch roadshows held in Manchester and London. The move signifies a big step forward in ShoreTel's transition from a maker of products to a globally focused software and services business, and follows the introduction of cloud-based solutions as a partner managed service to the UK in 2015.

ShoreTel Connect Cloud has been available to US customers for 16 months and according to Joos the time is right to take it into more theatres. "The launch is another step in the expansion of our hosted capabilities," stated Joos. "We have North America and the Australian market covered, but the launch of Connect Cloud in the UK is another starting point. From here we will expand these services into other countries."

Cloud focused resellers are well served by ShoreTel's data centre partner Rackspace and its private cloud, along with the end-to-end control exerted by ShoreTel which includes the connectivity infrastructure, thereby meeting customer demand for a framework of trust in technology and supplier partners. "Rackspace already has a global footprint and as it builds out more capability in SDWAN we get to leverage those investments," added Joos. "We also control the relationship with the carriers that come into the data centres. The QoS has absolutely improved and there are big technological advancements on the way. Furthermore, security issues are less prohibitive, that's why the mid-market is adopting up to the mass."

Joos also introduced to the UK an expanded channel approach that has been tried and tested in the US, a retail commission model based on the same service as the reseller model. According to Hipkiss, a section of ShoreTel's partners displayed a sharp appetite to sell the vendor's contract and its price to the client, so ShoreTel gave them what they wanted. "Developing this model is a strong indication of our commitment to the channel," he added.

The Connect Cloud launch was both pragmatic in terms of its timing and market focus and popular among partners with an eye to augment their portfolio and make the most of this new tool in the vendor's kit bag. It will help them to fulfil an upsurge in demand from customers (especially in the mid-market) who want to revise and modernise their communications strategy, a task made easier by the joined up nature of ShoreTel's primary comms solution Connect. "Connect has a single code base," explained Hipkiss. "It enables us to offer three alternative deployment methodologies - on-site, hybrid and cloud. Partners in the UK have strongly adopted the Connect on-site solution, they have invested in skills, training and marketing. Their investment is immediately transferable because of the single code base and the single set of features and functionality."

The appetite for Connect Cloud among ShoreTel partners was swiftly exposed by the roadshows. "Our partner community is showing great interest in Cloud Connect and already we have strong engagement following high attendances at the launch events," commented Hipkiss. "Some partners wanted to sign up pre-launch and on the spot, one partner even sold a Connect Cloud solution before the official UK roll out. This is a reflection of the reality in the market and the confidence partners have in our ability to deliver. We also have strong relationships with US-based cloud services distributors and they see an opportunity in the UK. It will be natural for us to extend those relationships."

A combination of ShoreTel's Cloud Connect launch and the firm's long-time presence in the mid-market has made the forecast a positive one for resellers and SIs. "The sweet spot for us is companies with less than 5,000 employees," stated Joos. "This is not a technical limitation, but a focus area from a go-to-market perspective. That's where the majority of companies sit, and that's where ShoreTel operates. As the mid-market advances into hosted, it moves towards ShoreTel."

The vendor's single code base displays coherency not just in technology but also strategy and leadership, a combination that breathes life into Joos's brand of business transformation which has advanced ShoreTel's revenues to a much wider recurring profile, notably in hosted. "In our September Q2 we passed an important inflection point where hosted revenue became greater than product revenue on a quarterly basis," he stated. "Hosted was 42 per cent of total revenue, but adding-in the support agreements, which are also recurring, takes us to 61 per cent. The transformation of our business is all about moving to the recurring revenue model and I expect that to continue accelerating. There is no looking back."

ShoreTel's dramatic forward advance needs a closer look to gain an understanding of what is driving growth and its trajectory towards becoming a cloud-based software business. "In terms of growth, I expect to see a step function every six months, whether that's more partners coming on board, new logos from a hosted perspective, or some of our existing installed base converting to hosted," explained Joos. "I see growth in two areas. One is the adoption that's occurring from a UK perspective, and there is an opportunity to attract more partners now that we have both delivery models, including those 'born in the cloud'. Our SaaS solution has open APIs, so I see SIs coming to us who, from a hosted standpoint, want to integrate services into a solution for their customers. We have already witnessed this in the American and Australian markets."

The rise of cloud services and their likely impact on the comms landscape is no longer debated. Talk of the cloud has passed from the realm of 'what if and when' to that of everyday discourse among not just the industry but also end user decision makers. The world is going that way, and so is ShoreTel. "The change in buying behaviour has been building and rapid acceleration is happening now," noted Joos. "For decision makers, the time frame required for a return on their investment has changed. It used to be three to five years, now it's 18 to 24 months. They know technology is changing beyond recognition, and they want the continual flexibility of a hosted offering to ensure they keep pace with change. That's a big shift."

As the cloud revolution marches on, a process of adjustment is required by business leaders to rethink and realign their strategy. "Many organisations are evaluating their operations and identifying functions that can be outsourced," added Joos. "Security and QoS have dramatically improved, so companies are more receptive to outsourcing as a way to focus on core competencies. Their challenge is how to embed UC, flexible working and team working etc to improve the customer experience while becoming operationally efficient. Another driver is the high level of M&A activity. As companies merge the cost savings and synergies they look for include cost-effectively unifying disparate systems."

Migration to the cloud is a widely accepted feature of the digital revolution, hastening the decline of on-premise hardware in fixed places of work. And as the edifice of conventional communications collapses all around us, traditional vendors unable to leave their past behind them are becoming disempowered. Not ShoreTel. In its journey from being a product company towards a software and services one, ShoreTel is on the back stage.

"When I stepped into the CEO role in August 2013 we broke this transformation down into three phases - foundation, migration and acceleration," explained Joos. "The first two are done, and our acceleration phase is driven by five factors - ongoing product releases, the geographic expansion of our hosted solution, scaling the channel, mid-market adoption and our installed base migration. We have four million seats and endpoints in our installed base to be converted, and because Connect is one product the migration is easy for us."

ShoreTel's transformation is another proof point that cloud technology is in the ascendency and upending the comms market. But it doesn't stop there. The ensuing drift into the realm of 'experience' underlines that this technology is an enabler, not the headline act. Digitalisation has passed the peak, we are now heading for post-digital, an age where experience transcends the medium, which is reflected in how ShoreTel's stance is moving beyond communications towards innovation in interactions.

"We talk less about communications and more about interactions," explained Joos. "The term 'communications' has connotations of people-to-people, but people-to-machine and machine-to-machine is emerging. It's not about making communications simple, it's about how we, in our world, make these interactions simple. One example we have prototyped is a 'smart conference room'. I walk into the room, my primary device knows who I am, it knows the time of the meeting, autodials, and using beacon technology activates the projector because it knows I'm presenting. That's machine-to-machine. When I talk about innovation of the experience, we're focused on the most common use cases. Hosted is half of our direction, the other half is how we improve the overall customer experience because they are buying a service, not a product. The experience is the sexy part, and we innovate to make it simple."

The digital revolution is riding roughshod over traditional technologies and business models and requires organisations to embed a smarter way of working which is echoed in the steps taken by ShoreTel to help partners deliver modern day solutions. "When making the transition from a product company to a services business it's not enough to simply introduce new releases into the marketplace," added Hipkiss. "ShoreTel's European organisation has been realigned to make us accountable for the end-to-end experience of our partners and customers. This extends to how partners are found by potential clients, so we have planned marketing forums to help them raise their profile, focusing on digital marketing and ways to nurture relationships with customers who want to benefit from UCaaS, voice, video, mobile, conferencing, messaging and contact centre communication services."

It would be folly for channel companies to turn their back on the digital transformation that is forcing organisations in nearly all industries and sectors to reassess their place in the evolving technology and business landscape. "Standing still isn't an option, and having the ability to continually rethink and reinvent is the new standard," added Joos.•

Riverbed Technology has appointed former Intel Security's EMEA President EMEA, Andy Elder, as its new Senior Vice President (SVP) Sales in the EMEA region.

Elder, who has 25 years of industry experience across the region, will be reporting directly to Riverbed's Senior Vice President and Chief Sales Officer, Paul Mountford.

In his new role, he will be responsible for the company's sales strategy and go-to-market execution in the EMEA as well as accelerating "the next wave of growth across the region, the company said.

Elder joined from Intel Security where he was in charge of the company's operations across around 100 geographies and prior to that, he served as Executive Vice President of Global Licensing at Intellectual Ventures.

He also worked for 13 years at Cisco where he was Vice President of Global Sales for the sports and entertainment division.

Beta Distribution is to offer Nakivo's data protection products in the UK and Ireland.

Over 1,600 software solution providers in 117 countries across the Americas, Europe, Africa, Middle-East, and Asia-Pacific offer Nakivo data protection products to their SMB and enterprise customers.

The solution offers VMware backup, replication, backup to cloud, global deduplication, instant VM and object recovery, backup copy and screenshot verification.

Beta Distribution's appointment of Miguel Castro to the newly created role of Head of Solutions Architecture reflects the company's strengthening focus on supporting MSPs and VARs in the enterprise space.

Castro brings 13 years experience working in the IT industry and joins Beta from network storage vendor Infortrend where he was Technical Manager.

Also recruited is Chris Moore as Head of Sales for the newly opened northern sales office in Leeds.

He was previously Sales Manager at CMS Distribution where he worked for 19 years.

Ben Jackson, Director of Technology Sales at Beta, stated: "Attracting people of this calibre is testament to the fact that we have successfully developed a meaningful proposition in the enterprise arena."

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.