Comms Dealer

STL's MD Brendon Cross has been awarded the British Empire Medal in the New Year's Honours list for 'services to disabled people'.

Cross is also Vice President of the charity SpecialEffect and well known for organising the Twin Town Challenge, an event held in 2014 and 2016 that has already raised over £500,000 for the charity.

The Twin Town Challenge, which sees cars costing £500 drive from Witney to Le Touquet for a weekend of fun challenges, has been well supported by many leading players in the comms industry as well as from the games industry and local Oxfordshire businesses. 

SpecialEffect gives people with physical disabilities access to technology to play games and interact with friends and family.

The Twin Town Challenge has raised a life changing amount for the charity over the last 4 years, but Brendon's support behind the scenes for the charity has been equally impactful, involving everything from bucket shaking through to walking on fire in support of the cause.

Dr Mick Donegan, SpecialEffect Founder and CEO, said "There is no better way to start our 10th year than with this fantastic news which is so richly deserved.

"Brendon and his entire family are dear friends of SpecialEffect and their friendship and support has had a life changing impact for the people we help."

Cross commented: "I am truly humbled and honoured to accept this award on behalf of the Twin Town Challenge and all of the SpecialEffect family, many of whom have dedicated their lives to helping severely disabled young people.

"Each year we have smashed the Twin Town Challenge fundraising target and the event planning is well underway to make TTC18 even bigger and better which hopefully will be reflected in raising even more money for this brilliant charity."

Entries for the Twin Town Challenge 2018 will open in May.

Timico Technology Group has hired former Eclipse MD Clodagh Murphy (pictured) as Chief Operating Officer.

Murphy is well known as a business transformer having led Eclipse (which was acquired by KCOM) from a single product consumer broadband supplier to a multi-product business technology service provider.

Her experience also includes business planning roles at Eircom.

"Anyone who knows me, knows that I am passionate about two things - the people I work with and the customers we look after," stated Murphy.

"I will bring this passion and my energy to Timico and I know the next few years are going to be great fun as we deliver our plans to develop the business."

In another senior hire Jeff Palmer has been appointed as Timico's new Sales Director, bringing almost 20 years experience in sales and business development.

He joins from Daisy Group where he was Director for Group Vendor Alliances & Supply Chain Services.

Previous roles also include Head of Sales at Damovo UK and Account Director at Touchbase UK, dealing with enterprise and commercial customers. In his new role at Timico, Jeff will head up Timico's sales, client development and pre-sales teams.

Palmer said: "It's clear Timico has very clear plans for future growth and I'm looking forward to being a part of that journey as we enter this new phase."

Timico CEO Ben Marnham commented: "The arrival of Clodagh and Jeff comes just weeks after our new Chief Commercial Officer, Simon Payne, joined us from Capita.

"2017 will be a pivotal year for the company as we cement our new strategy for the business."

Report by Philip Carse, Analyst at Megabuyte.com
BGF-backed business comms provider GCI has started to spend its new £50m M&A war chest with the acquisition of owner-managed Freedom Communications for an undisclosed sum, boosting revenues by about £18m, or just under a third. On a call, CFO Mark Allen and Marketing Director Phil Hambly highlighted in particular the boost to GCI's Microsoft/Skype for Business (SFB) standing and its public sector presence, with the prospect of more M&A to come in 2017.

GCI is a business comms provider offering a full suite of telephony, connectivity, unified comms, hosting and data centre colocation services, with Microsoft, Vodafone and Cisco as key partners. It targets enterprises and large SMEs direct and via the channel. The business was founded by Wayne Martin, and received a minority investment from the Business Growth Fund in February 2012.

Its M&A activities stepped up a notch in 2016 with the acquisitions of Outsourcery, Packet Media and Fusion Media, and in October the company announced a new £50m bank-funded M&A war chest.

The acquisition of Freedom Comms represents the first acquisition under the new facility, and we estimate it is GCI's most significant to date. Founded in 1989, Watford-based, owner-managed Freedom Communications has expanded from its PBX, lines & minutes heritage to become a unified comms system integrator, providing a range of communication, data infrastructure and voice and data network services. Freedom supports over 6,000 voice, data and connectivity installations to companies and the UK public sector, including Home Retail Group, Hamleys, Shropshire Council and Cardiff University.

In 2011/12 Freedom decided to transition to unified communications off the back of Microsoft products, and particularly Lync/SFB. However, this investment in people, processes, systems and customer education has resulted in a lacklustre financial performance in recent times. Indeed, the newly available accounts to March 2016 show EBITDA halving to £0.3m on revenues down 4% at £18.8m, well down on the £1.4m EBITDA on £19.4m revenues in fiscal 2013. Of Freedom's near £19m revenues, CPE & software and support services each contribute about a third, with the remainder from Networks, Applications and Professional Services.

The acquisition thus boosts GCI's £57m revenue run rate by about a third to £75m, whilst the removal of various lifestyle costs and other cost synergies should lift Freedom EBITDA to about £2m by the end of the year, or a 20% uplift on GCI's £10m run rate. Price has not been revealed, but given GCI's record of paying modest prices, we would guess a valuation of perhaps £10-13m, or a mid-single digit multiple of post-synergy EBITDA.

Aside from the financial impact, GCI management was keen to highlight Freedom's Skype for Business and public sector credentials. Regarding the former, Freedom has 40k SFB seats to add to GCI's 140k (of which 40k came from Outsourcery), making the newly enlarged GCI one of Microsoft's largest SFB partners in the UK. Meanwhile, Freedom is present on nine of the 11 lots of RM1045 Network Services Framework, significantly enhancing GCI's public sector presence. Management also highlighted Freedom's significant pipeline, mirroring the optimistic tone of our conversations with Freedom in the Summer.

Away from Freedom, GCI management noted ongoing improvements to its sales and marketing functions which are starting to generate meaningful new contracts and organic growth, which it hopes to boost through the launch of a new Cloud PBX service in February.

Megabuyte view
Subject of course to the usual caveat over price, this seems a sensible strategic move for GCI, providing a significant boost to its Microsoft standing and adding significant scale. On paper, its target, Freedom, does not have a particularly attractive financial track record, which we attribute partly to being a lifestyle business and partly to the recent investment in SFB. The opportunity for GCI therefore is to both build profitability through taking out lifestyle costs (some of which will fall away immediately, for example a portion of the £1m of directors' remuneration), as well as energise Freedom's sales function. Meanwhile, with this deal representing at most a third of the new £50m M&A fund, we fully anticipate more GCI acquisitions this year.

8x8's cloud-based Virtual Contact Centre and Quality Management solutions will be key to ensuring Bluecrest Health Screening attains a much valued quality management standard, according to Kevin Scott-Cowell, UK MD of 8x8.

"It's important that companies like Bluecrest can rely on their chosen technology to work effectively and improve customer service in a sensitive space," he said.

"We're looking forward to working with Bluecrest to improve service standards and support its bid to achieve ISO 9001 accreditation."

Bluecrest Health Screening needed one unified platform with cloud-based analytics to track the success of marketing campaigns.

Angela Rodbourne, Contact Centre Director at Bluecrest, added: "Bluecrest uses more than 100 non-geographic numbers as part of direct mail campaigns and the ability to record call volumes and responses has been crucial in evaluating their effectiveness.

"It's important as a provider of healthcare that the level of service we provide in screenings is not only first class but also consistent, which is just as important when our customers reach out to speak to us.

"We're hoping to achieve ISO 9001 to demonstrate our ability to provide excellent services to customers."

Aerial Business Communications has staged an Apprentice-style team building challenge in aid of Portsmouth-based charity The Roberts Centre (which supports families struggling with homelessness or suffering the impact of a relationship breakdown).

Teams from each department were tasked with sourcing a number of items on a festive shopping list and they sang carols in pubs to raise extra funds.

At the end of the challenge all of the items were packaged into hampers and taken to The Roberts Centre.

Aerial Business Communications raised over £1,700 for the charity.

Paul Davis, MD of Aerial Business Communications, said: "While the team building aspect is great fun for the staff, knowing that our event helped to make some families' Christmases just a little bit better makes it all the more worthwhile."

Melanie Goddard, Family Services Manager at The Roberts Centre, said: "Christmas can be a great financial strain on many of our families and this amazing team building idea will mean that for some of our families this worry will be greatly reduced. 

"This will mean that families can stop worrying about the cost and simply enjoy being together as a family."

 Pictured above: The winning team 

Jola has taken its list of standard features for Premium Broadsoft seats to over 50 with the addition of UC-Business, Integrator and Auto Attendant.

Andrew Dickinson, MD, Jola commented: "We have thousands of end-users on JolaPhone and most of them want advanced hunt groups, multiple devices on a single licence, screen-pop and click-to-dial. Furthermore, the stigma around having an automated attendant has gone away.

"SMEs know they can handle calls more efficiently, appear bigger and more professional. Previously, only larger corporates could afford systems with such features."

Dublin has been ranked in third place in a list of the top cities in the world for attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), displacing Hong Kong to move up one place in the Financial Times' magazine's 'global cities of the future' rankings, coming in behind Singapore and London.

The bi-annual index looks at the success of individual cities and their government in attracting overseas investment.

The Irish capital was placed third in both the economic potential and business friendliness sub-categories as foreign direct investment into the Republic rose by 4% in 2015, a year in which the number of FDI projects into Europe fell by nearly 9% and a wave of Brexit-inspired uncertainty hit London.

Shanghai, New York, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Dubai, Paris and San Francisco round out the top ten cities overall for foreign direct investment.

According to the report, Singapore is far and above the best city for FDI globally with 1,907 inward projects reported between 2011 and 2015, the highest number of investments of all locations reviewed.

According to the report, global foreign direct investment has been steadily declining after reaching a high in 2011 when 15,000 projects were recorded. Last year, 12,882 FDI-linked ventures were reported worldwide. China was home to six of the top ten emerging market cities globally.

Worldwide shipments of 3D printers rose +25% in the first three quarters of 2016 thanks again to shipments of low priced personal/desktop 3D printers, according to figures from researcher Context.

This represents a 27% year-on-year growth for this sub-category compared to a decline in shipments of -12% YTD in the Industrial/Professional segment which saw only 7,726 units shipped through the first three quarters of 2016.

While the market is still largely defined by the shipment of Industrial/Professional printers - which accounted for 78% of the global revenues - the market is settling into two distinctive segments says Context.

Claranet has acquired Brazilian cloud services provider CredibiliT Tecnologia, which was founded in 2009 and pursues a public cloud adoption strategy and is one of two providers with AWS Premier Consulting Partner status in Brazil.

CredibiliT has also created an Azure practice and reached Silver Cloud Platform competency.

It has an annual turnover of circa £7.5m, employs 40 staff and serves 100 clients from a wide of sectors including Pepsico, Webmotors, Smiles, Editora Abril and TV Globo.
 
The Claranet Group has grown steadily in Europe, both organically and by acquisition. The Group has annual revenues of over £215m, employs more than 1,250 staff and works with over 5,800 customers across the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands and Brazil.
 
Charles Nasser, founder and CEO of the Claranet Group, said: "Brazil is an exciting high growth market. Despite operating platforms for our clients globally for many years, this is our first acquisition outside of Europe. The combination of CredibiliT and Claranet will create a stronger competitor in the Brazilian market and establish new avenues for growth."
 
Daniel Galante (CEO) and André Guerra (CFO), both founders of CredibiliT, will stay in the enlarged business as key senior executives of Claranet in Brazil.

Onecom has been awarded Mitel Gold Partner status.

Nick Aikman, Channel Sales Director at Mitel, said: "Onecom's knowledge of Mitel technology is matched by its long and successful track record in helping organisations of all sizes benefit from Mitel unified communications solutions."

Darren Ridge, Onecom CEO, added: "I am delighted that our expertise has been recognised with this Gold award."

Alongside its headquarters in Whiteley, Hampshire, Onecom has centres in London, Cambridge, Shoeburyness, Cardiff, Southampton, Plymouth, Leeds, Telford, Norwich and Brighton.