Comms Dealer

ZEN INTERNET has announced a multi-million pound partnership with Chinese networking giant Huawei to roll out a new Next Generation Network across the UK.

Announcing the news at Zen’s annual partner conference at the Ham Yard 10 pin bowling hotel in London on November 24th, CEO Richard Tang told Zen resellers and dealers: "This continues our journey from an ISP to a carrier. This is great news for the channel and great news for the industry.\"

Named Project Plexus, Zen’s major network investment will see its number of Points of Presence (PoPs) in BT exchanges rise from 270 to over 400 in the next few months, and expand Zen’s robust, cost-effective on-net reach to well over 500,000 postcodes, covering nearly every corner of the UK.

Jon Bauer, Zen’s Technical Director for Network and Infrastructure, said: "We chose Huawei because it has a wealth of experience in building networks and offers the right technology to match our ambitions. With Huawei we’re creating a carrier-grade network that will, for channel partners, mean a more dynamic and flexible portfolio of products and services, alongside even greater resilience and performance.\"

"For channel partners it means a network that will, with Huawei equipment at its core, make their businesses more competitive now and in the future. It means we will be able to grow capacity more cheaply and quickly than our competitors, adding extra services and emerging technologies to our portfolio whenever the demand arises. In the short term it will mean major performance efficiencies, much better fault tolerance and more cost-effective solutions.\"

Included among those channel services will be: hosted VoIP in partnership with Vanilla IP (giving resellers the chance to rebrand the Uboss management platform); 500Mbps and 1Gbps Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC); G.fast (ultra-fast broadband over copper from the cabinet) from Jan 17; a 25-day turnaround service for wireless IGb wireless Ethernet in association with Metronet;  traditional calls and lines alongside connectivity and provisioning management specialist Imperatives;  100mg Ethernet in London covering 20,000 postcodes(which Zen claims will be 35% cheaper than alternative);  and a 3G mobile broadband back up service.

Ready to roll: Picture shows (left to right) Steve Warburton, Zen
Managing Director Channel Partners; Zen CEO Richard Tang; and
Shiweiliang, UK Managing Director Huawei - Photo supplied by Simon Wright Photography

Daisy has bagged Alternative Networks in a £165.3m cash deal in a move that builds on Daisy's acquisitions of Damovo and Phoenix IT in the managed services space. The acquisition also bolsters Daisy's mobile and fixed line portfolios. Daisy CEO Neil Muller said: "Alternative Networks is one of the largest independent providers of IT managed services and B2B communications in the UK and is a strong strategic fit with the Daisy Group.

"Having respected Alternative Networks for many years, we look forward to further enhancing our capability and scale across our chosen markets and we believe the combined group will be well positioned to increase its market share further and to continue to be the provider of choice for its customers and partners." 

Alternative Networks Chairman James Murray added: "Today, Alternative Networks faces rising demand from customers to procure, manage and support the complete chain of enterprise IT and communication solutions.

"The combination with Daisy will ensure that the company is best placed to capitalise on future growth opportunities. In particular, the strong complementarity and strategic fit will ensure our competitiveness and benefit our customers through access to a broader range of unified communications solutions."

Exponential-e has introduced a low-cost Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) connection offer available on its real-time pricing tool for channel partners, CloudPort.

Users also benefit from use of the automated platform for the pricing and ordering of cloud and networking services.

With a team of developers constantly updating the portal, channel partners of Exponential-e have access to live quotation tracking that delivers price protection to its customers.

John Kyrillou, Sales Director, Exponential-e, said: "Using the platform to create, price and order solutions tailored to meet their customer's needs, our channel partners are empowered to drive more business opportunities."

Exponential-e has unveiled its new SD-WAN offering to help organisations stay in control of their IT operations and drive performance.

Offered through Cloudnet, Exponential-e's self-service platform connects enterprises to business applications from wherever they are enabling organisations to utilise SD-WAN to separate the data and control layer into two parts.

This allows businesses to centrally assign and manage application-aware policies across sites to secure and control all network traffic. Organisations will also be able to turn bandwidth up - and down - in real time with no time delays.

"In today's digital world where business agility is critical, businesses can no longer afford to continue operating with WAN deployments that are isolated from the Cloud," said Chris Christou, director of engineering at Exponential-e.

"With Gartner predicting 30 per cent of enterprises will have deployed SD-WAN in their branches by the end of 2019 - up from less than one per cent in 2015 - gone are the days of traditional WAN-as-a-bottleneck mentality. Organisations are clearly ready to adopt agile, secure, flexible and scalable WAN solutions that are available at the drop a hat."

The UC team at Exertis has notched up record conferencing sales over the past year following a programme of partner education designed to help resellers attach more conferencing solutions to existing and new UC system installations.

Demand for all kinds of conferencing solutions, from traditional audio conferencing to high end video conferencing and collaboration, reflects the estimations of industry analysts who forecast the global video conferencing market to grow to over $6bn by 2020.

Michael Thompson, Head of UC Devices, said: "Conferencing is at the heart of modern UC&C solutions. It has to be the centrepiece of any enterprise strategy and there is a growing need to integrate audio and video conferencing devices into the overall communications solution."

Key growth areas include a number of vertical markets including education, where distance or web based learning adopt video as part of the delivery mechanism; healthcare for remote patient monitoring and consultation and media industries where the streaming of interactive events is in ever increasing demand.

Exertis has also witnessed increasing demand for a new breed of products for remote meetings, the personal speaker phone, a portable unit designed for mobile workers who need to attend online meetings 'on the go'.

On-premise system sales at Nimans continue to gain momentum, up 10% year-on-year against an industry decline of 3% in the sub-100 extension segment.

"Everyone is aware that the impact of the cloud and an uncertain economic outlook is biting into the traditional comms space - but not at Nimans," said Paul Burn, Head of Category Sales.

"As an industry we shouldn't get too obsessed by the cloud verses on-premise scenario. The mindset around deployment rather than functionality and solution sales needs rebalancing.

"Hence we have a strong PBX portfolio, our own hosted offering and also hybrid solutions."

Channel Telecom has introduced one-click instant access to Ethernet pricing from multiple carriers following the launch of OPTIC (One Portal To Intelligent Costing).

Clifford Norton, MD, stated: "The portal provides options from 10/100 through to 1,000/1,000 simultaneously which means that a price request needs only to be run once as opposed to the industry standard all too many of us have become used to."

Three men have been arrested in connection with a big data breach at mobile network Three.

Michael Hack, Senior Vice President of EMEA Operations, Ipswitch, commented: "The Three data breach demonstrates that perimeter defences are not enough.  Any organisation that handles customer data is at risk from insider threats. 

"The way that files are managed, monitored and shared is key.  An authorised login will enable someone with malicious intent to download data to a disc or USB key, unless there are safeguards built in to the infrastructure that flag this movement of data.
 
"Under new proposed EU data protection law (GDPR) fines for this kind of breach are set to increase drastically for private sector organisations to up to 4% of global turnover.

"Organisations can't take chances when it comes to IT security and must make sure critical information is kept safe. By automating, managing and controlling all file transfers from a central point of control, employees can easily send and share files using IT approved methods.

"The IT department also gains complete control over activity. It's no longer good enough just to have the right policies in place for secure data transfer, an organisation must ensure it has the right file transfer technologies, security systems, processes, and most importantly, staff training."

NTA's fourth annual karting event staged at Lakeside Karting Centre in Essex on November 16th also put partners on track for two new initiatives launched by the company - a partner incentive scheme and new bundled £4.75 per seat licence fee including 5,000 free minutes to 01, 02 and 03 numbers and UK mobile networks.

Justin Blaine, Channel Sales Manager, commented: "We have successfully sold against the per seat license fee for many years and pushed our flexible simultaneous calls model to the industry. However, we have listened to our partners who asked us for a bundled option.

"Adding the new per seat licence model to our existing portfolio, running the two models in parallel, is our response."

Blaine also lifted the lid on NTA's latest incentive scheme and explained that 'easily achievable' targets will ensure that a number of winning resellers will fly to Cyprus in May 2017 and stay in a 5-star hotel with activities such as spa days, golf and sailing all included.

The incentive runs from 1st December until 30th April 2017.

NG Bailey's IT Services division witnessed sales growth of 7.8% for the first half of 2016 (March to October), reflecting its successes in securing more than £23m worth of new contracts for its structured cabling, electronic security and DAS (Distributed Antenna Systems) services.

The company has won more than 30 new IT contracts since February and experienced organic growth through contract extensions, bringing sales in the 2016-2017 financial year to £38.8m so far, up nearly 8% on the same period last year.

Bob Dunnett, MD, NG Bailey's IT Services division, said: "Our focus on positioning ourselves to deliver technical solutions in response to increasingly complex and demanding project briefs is paying great dividends.

"Clients are increasingly realising the benefits of partnering with suppliers like NG Bailey that can deliver tailored and cost-effective solutions.

"The emergence of new technologies has enormous potential to change the way buildings are designed, managed and used.

"We've already seen examples of this in IP security and smart buildings and expect to see further disruption to companies as the IoT and smart cities shake up the market."

NG Bailey IT Services is a subsidiary of NG Bailey group, the independent engineering, IT and facilities services business.

Group results in 2015-2016 showed it tripled operating profit over the previous year to £6m, and increased sales by 12% to £408m.