Comms Dealer

Adopting new technologies at an excessive rate without a concrete strategy can disrupt the everyday working functions of a business, causing more harm than good, warned Andrew Smith, Technical Director at Annodata.

"There's a lot of pressure for organisations to keep up with the rapid pace of the digital economy," he said.

"Digital transformation is often held up as a nirvana as we hear stories of new digital challengers displacing traditional incumbents.

"However, it can often be difficult for organisations to know where to start on their path to digital transformation.

Organisations must not feel pressured to overhaul everything in their business at once on the path to digital transformation.

"Care must be taken to ensure that the technology follows the strategy and not the other way around.

"There are great gains to be had by working with multi-skilled ICT providers. Doing so will deliver true value to businesses, allowing them to react to changing requirements of today's digital world."

Former Head of Professional Services at Cobweb Chris Hoard has joined Westcoast as Head of Cloud Professional Services, a newly created role.

Mark Davies, Cloud Services Director, said: "Chris is an industry stalwart and his brief is to work closely with our partners to supplement and enhance their cloud-based skills, capabilities and offerings."

Hoard added: "Westcoast is the first distie to hit 100,000 CSP seats and I can't wait to start helping the company to grow even faster."

Intelisys Global is gearing for the UK roll out of its Super9 cloud training programme next June.

Two three-day courses will focus on enabling its Global Sales Partners to move from consultative selling towards what the company claims is a 'new cloud sales methodology'.

Delivered as part of the Intelisys Cloud Services University, the programme is targeted at telecoms agents with a recurring revenue model and VARs wanting to further develop their cloud business.

The course is followed by a monthly peer group component and collaboration with Intelisys' Global Cloud & Complex Bids team.

"With quarterly global cloud revenues fast approaching £5.5bn, getting cloud sales strategies right has clearly never been more important for the channel," said Stephen Hackett, Intelisys Global's lead in the UK.

Comms Dealer is sad to announce the sudden death of Jabra UK&I's Corporate Account Manager Fahad Quadri.

He joined Jabra in January 2015 as Team Leader for the newly created Inside Sales Team. He showed great promise and commitment from the very start and was quickly promoted to Corporate Account Manager within his first 8 months at the headset vendor.

Prior to joining Jabra Fahad worked at Outbound, Jabra's partner agency where the later part of tenure was spent working directly with Jabra channel partners to maintain and grow their audio device customer base.

Steven Whitehead, Jabra Corporate Account Director and Fahad's manager commented: "Fahad was an exceptional individual, an awesome colleague and a beautiful human being that I know will be missed tremendously by friends, colleagues and clients across the world."

Nigel Dunn, Jabra UK&I Managing Director echoed Steven's sentiments by saying: "Fahad was one of the most exceptional people I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with. One of our brightest stars has left us far, far too early. Our hearts go out to his family who adored him."

A charitable fund has been created by Fahad's family to raise money in his memory. For details of this please contact Jabra UK&I.

Pictured: Fahad (second from the left) accepting Jabra's award for Best End-Point Device at the recent Comms National Awards.

London Data centre co-location specialist Volta has seen a two or three-fold jump in enquiries since the Brexit announcement.

Jon Arnold, Managing Director, told IT Europa: "No-one is sure what will happen, so companies are looking at hosting in London along with a second site in Europe.

"I can understand why businesses would choose to host their IT infrastructure within a London data centre due to the growing uncertainty around EU data regulations."

Over the past 12 months Volta has seen fast growth and due to demand is now opening a new floor in its Great Sutton Street facility. This expansion will add an extra 11,000 square feet of space, more than 400 racks, and a further 1.5 Megawatts of power to customers on that floor. It has just announced the opening of its third floor there.

Arnold sees a particular advantage in a location 15 minutes from the City and having the power capacity for growth, which has proved a limiting factor in the area in recent years. The focus on location matters, he says, and is not impressed by data centres in Slough claiming to be London-based.

It is not just the financial services industry driving the growth, however: "We are seeing a particular boom in use by media companies," Arnold added.

He has just forged links with LuxConnect in Luxembourg connecting two strategically important communication hubs in Europe. The firm has four multi-Tier (Tier II, III & IV) data centres in the Grand Duchy certified by the Uptime Institute. Several global companies from finance, entertainment and online commerce are hosted at their facilities.

LuxConnect has been recognised for its exclusive use of green electricity sourced from sustainable sources and the subsequent low carbon footprint of its facilities. "Their data centres provide a stable environment for business critical hosting with low latency connections to the major European Internet hubs," said Arnold.

Carriers present in both data centres include BT, Level 3, Cogent, Verizon and Colt. Both companies have completed due diligence on each other's facilities which can now be extended to existing and new clients and both have fitted out space available ready for early occupancy.

"Luxembourg and London are fully complementary," said LuxConnect CEO Roger Lampach. "Volta will provide a useful offering to our partners looking for space for their clients in London."

IT and network management software company Ipswitch now has a permanent EMEA centre of excellence at Citypoint, Galway, Ireland.

The permanent office location signifies a substantial investment for the company and supports its EMEA growth strategy.

Twelve research and development, sales and technical support team members will initially move in with a plan to increase headcount up to 60 in line with the positions announced in March 2016.

The expanded EMEA core team, based in Galway, will provide local language and local time zone technical and sales support to their in-country partners and customers across Europe.

They will also provide central support for the company's in-country teams across Germany, UK, France, Italy and the Middle East. The centre will host a dedicated partner and customer demonstration suite for sales, which will facilitate events and training.

Ipswitch plans to hire skilled employees from within the local community to facilitate its growth. The company is partnering closely with both the National University of Ireland Galway and Galway Mayo Institute of Technology Business & Computer Science faculties for graduate opportunities.

Michael Hack, SVP of EMEA Operations commented: "In October 2015 we set an aggressive target to double our EMEA business by 2018. We're on track and seeing double digit growth. Then in March 2016, when we first set up a support and operations centre in Ireland in shared offices where we planned to hire nine people by the end of 2016.

"Under John McArdle's leadership, Ipswitch EMEA Channel Director, we're already well ahead of plan with 12 employees within several functions including R&D, technical support, sales and technical writing roles.

"We have a further two additional positions approved to hire this year, which will bring the office to 14 employees or 55% higher that our original plan.

"This fast track growth now means that Ipswitch needs a permanent office space that we can expand into. We plan to create the announced 60 jobs that will be based in the new Galway office over the next five years."

Yorkshire-based Lily Comms is celebrating an Ericsson-LG first as the only company in the world to win the vendor's Best Partner of the Year award four times on the trot.

The award was presented to MD Chris Morrisey and founder Adrian Jackson at the Ericsson-LG Global Partner Conference in Bangkok, Thailand.

Lily Comms was also the only company invited to present to conference delegates.

Morrisey spoke about the success and growth of Lily Comms within the UK communications space and its Strategy for Success (S4S), a blueprint designed to guide Lily's growth journey.

"It was a great honour to firstly present to the Ericsson-LG GPC delegates, and secondly to win Best Partner for the fourth year in a row," said Morrisey. "Being the only company to ever do this is a real achievement for everyone involved with Lily Comms.

"In everything we do our core company values of performance, passion and integrity as outlined in our S4S guide our thinking and doing.

"As a business we must perform to the best of our abilities at all times. We must have passion for everything we do, and we must display uppermost integrity during our day-to-day activities.

"These are the three values we live and breathe. They have helped us to get to where we are now, and they will help us to get where we want to be in the future."

Jackson added. "An extra special thank you goes to Pragma Distribution which has provided us with the support we need to be successful in a competitive marketplace."

Juniper Bridge has been awarded DrayTek Advanced Network Partner status in recognition of its expertise and investment in remote router management.

Juniper Bridge has invested in research and development in DrayTek equipment over the past few years to optimise the usage of SMTP features within Sonar, the new configured connectivity monitoring software that manages and monitors any IP device, on any network, anywhere in the world.

This investment has enabled Juniper Bridge to launch Sonar 2.0, the new version of the monitoring platform that provides the ability to set specific policies by technology or customer type through an active alerting dashboard.

The software also provides visibility of the connectivity status of all client live UK and global sites in real time, including bandwidth utilisation and specific LAN user performance.

Sonar works by utilising an operational dashboard that displays geo locations of client UK and global sites and can use ICMP, SNMP or Web protocols.

Central administrators have visibility and the connectivity status of all live sites in real time.

If any of these sites go down, proactive email and SMS alerts are automatically distributed to key personnel to get these sites up and running as soon as possible.

Sonar can be used for both any data connections with any provider and is fully scalable allowing for additional sites and employees for monitoring purposes.

Julian Hubble, Sales Director for DrayTek, stated: "We have been successfully working with Juniper Bridge for several years and, with this higher level of accreditation, are looking forward to strengthening the relationship further."

Stephen Larkin, founder of Juniper Bridge, added: "Becoming an Advanced Networking Partner is the perfect recognition for our ongoing relationship and we look forward to harnessing DrayTek's technology for Sonar 2.0."

Maintel has won a contract from Derby City Council to provide a managed service for its Cisco and Mitel contact centre telephony platforms.

Maintel will provide proactive monitoring and a service delivery manager for the 4,000-seat estate, as well as 24/7 support and vendor software assurance, to drive efficiencies and increase flexibility.

Derby City Council supplies a range of services for 230,000 people across the city of Derby.

The Maintel managed support service will in part replace a facilities management contract, which the council decided to terminate in order to bring the responsibility for letting the contact centre support back in house.

Over the past few years, the council has been investing in its IT infrastructure to allow it to work more effectively and quickly. It identified that bringing its contact centre support in-house would provide more flexibility to allow it to better interact with and more effectively help its citizens across the city.

Maintel's CEO Eddie Buxton said: "We've long been a trusted partner in the public sector, and it was our expertise in part that won us this contract. Our technical skills in particular can support public sector organisations to adapt to the changing needs of the public who rely on their services."

Nimans has taken its Reseller Training Academy on the road for the first time enabling resellers in the midlands and north west to undertake the company's one day Introduction To Telephony course, which looks at mobile networking, IT services, convergence, UC and VoIP as well as general telephony.

Nimans' Learning & Development Officer, Matthew Broadbent, said: "This was the first time we had rolled out our internal staff training course to the wider reseller community off-site and both courses were a success.

"According to feedback 95% ranked the course as excellent with the remainder describing it as a good way to boost their industry knowledge and help them clinch more sales.

"We are looking to expand into other areas such as sales and management training."