Comms Dealer

Chess has consolidated its ICT division and instated a new management team. The move builds on its acquisition of IT solutions provider Lanway which has offices in Burnley that have been refurbished and reopened to house new-look Chess ICT. Other acquired IT service providers including Pinnacle, Parachute IT and PowerC IT join Lanway as part of the single structure.

Former Lanway MD Andrew Henderson leads Chess ICT's sales operation while Tamar Waite, who also came to Chess through the acquisition of Lanway, has been appointed Head of Technical Operations.

Councillor Mark Townsend, leader of the Burnley Council, attended the ribbon cutting ceremony alongside Chess CEO David Pollock.

"We are passionate about delivering technological advantage to our customers," said Pollock. "Together we have the talent and technology needed to deliver truly integrated solutions across enterprise, mobile and cloud environments."

Townsend added: "Chess ICT has exciting growth plans and we are keen to support them. Chess is joining a successful business community in Burnley, with the latest official figures showing our private sector job growth rate is double that of the north west and national average. We've also just been named the friendliest place in Britain!"

The restructure was led by newly appointed COO Steve Cox (pictured left) who joined Chess from the Technology Service Group where he was a main board Director. His first job was to assess the individual businesses and their systems prior to creating a consolidation strategy.

Under the new set up, a team of 50 Chess people based in Burnley, Borehamwood and Queenslie will service over 1,500 current customers with ICT solutions.

Cox said: "My vision was to build a single national IT service provider with a local presence built on the foundations of passionate people delivering quality service.

"My number one goal is to achieve our shared vision and strive to make Chess a great place to be a customer. To do that we have to get our structure, the interaction with our customers and our systems right."

Tollring has declared its intent to tackle telecom fraud head-on by joining the Internet Telephony Services Providers' Association (ITSPA), the Telecommunications UK Fraud Forum (TUFF) and the Association of Fraud Examiners (AFE).

Fraud and Credit Management are the latest additions to Tollring's iCall Suite analytics platform, delivering an intelligent 'spot and block' capability in real-time on hosted voice and SIP trunking platforms.

The system protects against significant financial losses from fraud attempts and includes credit and spend limit management which prevents customer bill shock, reduce bad debt and decrease customer churn.

Tony Martino, MD of Tollring, said: "Telecoms fraud costs the industry billions of pounds each year, with the average fraud attack costing the end customer many thousands of pounds, enough sometimes to bankrupt organisations.

"It's a massive challenge in cloud telephony and these industry organisations are playing a major role in raising awareness.

"We are also helping our service provider partners and their resellers to take a more proactive role so that their end customers are equipped with the latest technologies and approaches to combat call fraud, to ensure company policies are enforced and to achieve agreed levels of service."

Service providers and resellers can mitigate fraud using iCall Suite's in-built proprietary rules engine which validates the authenticity of each call made.

The real-time Detect Dashboard monitors any fraud rule or credit limit breaches and based on a desired course of action, further calls can be barred or notifications activated.

Live notification alerts can be delivered to a mobile via text, email or on via the dashboard. Detailed call type, usage, black-list and incident reports deliver business-critical information to service providers and resellers for ongoing monitoring.

Channel veterans Steve Mackervoy and Mark Hayes have teamed up to launch a new venture to help the UK heath sector make savings and improve efficiency.

Their new venture 'Health in Touch' will be selling a full range of services to GP surgeries, the wider NHS, opticians, dentists, private hospitals and vets designed to help teams communicate more effectively with their communities.

The duo unveiled their offering at the Best Practice exhibition at the NEC last month.

The products range from basic WLR3 through to hosted voice linking with Oak's Patient Connect product.

"The interesting part for the channel is that there will also be electronic communications including secure email, file sharing/collaboration and other products to help the NHS get rid of outdated technology like fax machines," said Mackervoy.

"We will use video conferencing and mobile comms to help doctors assess more patients more quickly and cover the extended opening hours required of them by the NHS.

"We will also offer hybrid mail services to invite patients to attend a consultation and help our customers use SMS to remind patients of upcoming appointments to improve 'did not attend' rates."

The Health in Touch email, file sharing/collaboration and hybrid mail services will be available to the channel under the Webpost brand.

"All of these products are available to our chosen market today, but not from a single supplier and not on a single bill with clear tariffing," commented Mackervoy.

Mackervoy sold his Beyond Communications business to TMS earlier this year and Hayes has previously worked for Cable&Wireless, Cable Telecom, Universal Office Automation and Commsolve.

Against a background of a stagnant IT market and declining hardware sales, software and solution sales remain buoyant and are currently keeping the European IT industry afloat.

New research by IT Europa reveals that in the last year, Europe's top 500 Solution VARs have increased revenues by 7%.

The results support recent findings from Gartner which forecast that worldwide spending on software will increase 6.0% in 2016 against a backdrop of an overall decline in global IT spending of -0.3% and with spending on devices declining -7.5%.

IT Europa's latest database report, Solutions VARs in Europe - the Top 500, provides detailed profiles of Europe's top 500 Solution VARs which last year racked up combined revenues of €34.11 billion ($38.15 billion).

In terms of revenue increases across geographic markets, the best performers include: Lithuania (47.8%), Slovakia (37.6%), Slovenia (23.9%), Belarus (23.1%), Turkey (17.6%), Russia (14.8%), Serbia (13.5%) and Croatia (12.6%). Amongst the largest markets, Germany and France performed strongest with 11.3% and 8.0% growth respectively. The UK showed more modest growth at 1.2%, while Spain showed another slight fall of -1.8%.

The report shows strong demand for software and solutions across all major verticals with the greatest focus amongst major VARs on the Public Sector (62.8%), Banking/Finance (55.6%), Retail (55.6%) and Healthcare (41.4%). In terms of types of software the hottest sectors were networking/security software (79.2%), followed by CRM software (45.8%), ERP software (45%) and internet software (45%). Another notable development is the surge in the proportion of Solution VARs which offer managed service-based solutions which has now reached 77%, an increase of more than 40% over the last two years.

"With continued downward pressures on hardware sales and even infrastructure technologies becoming commoditised, software and solutions sales represent a ray of hope for the European IT sector," said Alan Norman, Managing Director, IT Europa.

"The demand for software and solutions is continuing to rise and Solution VARs, ISVs and increasingly Managed Service Providers will all play a major role in how these are developed and delivered in the face of fast evolving customer demands."

www.iteuropa.com

Exertis has sealed a distribution agreement with SY Electronics, a manufacturer of control systems, video switching and video extension products.

Chris Godsalve, Exertis, AV and collaboration business manager, said: "Our partnership with SY significantly strengthens our solutions in digital signage, video wall and collaborative technologies, providing a one stop proposition for our resellers and systems integrators.

"SY has built a reputation for providing products that are an integral part of an AV solution, complementing our existing range, and meeting the increasing demands by end users for collaboration and digital signage across a variety of vertical markets."

Broadcom's purchase of Brocade will further consolidate the chip and data centre systems markets and heighten competition in next-generation workloads says Krista Macomber, Senior Analyst at researcher TBR.

Macomber says Broadcom aims to access Brocade's Fibre Channel storage-area network (SAN) switching capabilities to capitalise on the shift to more commoditised and converged underlying data centre infrastructure with more comprehensive storage connectivity capabilities.

Chip vendor Broadcom's intention to acquire networking provider Brocade is another development in a steadily churning data centre market increasingly characterised by substantial - and in some cases radical - business model evolutions from major long-established vendors.

If approved, Broadcom's $5.9bn deal with Brocade would result in a semiconductor organisation positioned to address evolving and critical storage connectivity requirements more effectively and the release of a networking systems and software organisation for acquisition by a larger OEM poised to address customers' shift to converged and software-defined data centres more comprehensively.

Next-generation technologies such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence (AI) require new and more tailored processing capabilities.

As customer demand for these capabilities rises rapidly, the semiconductor industry grows unstable, with vendors applying a series of large-scale deals to maximise their future profits and longevity in this quickly evolving market.

For example, Broadcom was just acquired by Avago Technologies in February for $37 billion, one of the largest technology acquisitions in history, to drive scale and better serve customers' mobile connectivity needs. Avago Technologies subsequently adopted the Broadcom name.

Qualitel has rebranded as elitetele.com mobile and confirmed that it's business as usual for customers as all current account teams and contacts remain in place along with Mike Ridgway at the helm of the division.

Elitetele.com acquired Qualitel in April 2014 and the move catalysed Qualitel's fastest growth period which was recognised this summer when it was crowned Platinum Partner of the Year by Vodafone.

Russell Horton, COO, Elitetele.com, said: "To give clear messaging to our customers we have rebranded the division so that all telecoms services and contact points across the group are elitetele.com branded.

"As an award winning team with great depth of experience in Vodafone, O2 and EE, Qualitel complements our UC and managed IT offering."

Middle East and Turkey-based distributor StarLink has opened a central London office as part of its planned investments to expand across the rest of EMEA. It is looking to recruit security specialised resellers.

StarLink's entry into Europe has been timed with the evolution of the region's threat landscape, as organisations invest more in building stronger defences against cyber-attacks and in ensuring that they can recover quickly when breaches happen.

Founded in 2005, StarLink says it is rapidly growing with a presence in 11 countries. StarLink has grown organically at an average rate of 60% year-on-year, and now has a $145m turnover.

StarLink sells through a network of over 250 IT security VARs and systems integrators.

Avinash Advani, StarLink's SVP strategic alliances & international markets, whose responsibility is to spearhead the company's European expansion, commented: "Our plan is to drive our European expansion by replicating our 'True VAD' business model into the UK, and then progressively covering the rest of Europe over the coming months."

VoIP Distributor ProVu is teaming up with Cisco to host a reseller launch event in Manchester on Thursday 24th November.

Taking place at Cisco's Manchester offices, the event is aimed at resellers who wish to find out more about Cisco's newest range - the 7800 and 8800 series of multi-platform SIP phones.

ProVu MD Darren Garland commented: "Having launched the new Cisco 7800 and 8800 series last month we have seen a lot of interest around these phones. By teaming up with Cisco to host a launch event, attendees can come along and see the range for themselves and be among the first to hear about Cisco's upcoming plans."

TeleWare has acted to reduce the impact of mobile notspots with Business Anywhere, a UK multi-network SIM that allows customers to switch between networks and keep working on-the-go.

It is reported that there are 525 locations around the country with non-existent coverage and around 17 million people who are unable to use mobile devices at home.

And foreign visitors to the UK may be in a better position than local workers. Overseas SIMs with roaming equipped are not tied down to any one network. They can therefore switch to find the strongest signal.

Steve Haworth, CEO at TeleWare, said: "We're pleased that the seriousness of the mobile notspot issue is being recognised by Parliament and we're supportive of the work being done by the British Infrastructure Group, led by the Rt Hon Grant Shapps MP.

"There would be a national outcry if businesses had to choose their offices based on where they could gain access to critical IT systems and it shouldn't be the case that being unable to connect via mobile affects agile working habits either. It's also amazing that people visiting the UK may be able to work more efficiently than the businesses that form the backbone of our economy.

"We're doing our part to make sure that businesses can stay connected and continue working-wherever they are. By using Business Anywhere, companies can rest assured that they will be available to take and place crucial calls."

Business Anywhere combines a number of TeleWare's products including cloud call recording and instant conferencing.

Customers can also access Office 365 to maintain access to all-important documents, mobile apps and cloud services.

Andrew Fawcett, Product Manager, TeleWare said: "It's a stark fact that businesses are losing out due to areas where they just can't connect.

"Notspots are a national problem and we're happy to be providing a solution that can help alleviate their impact and facilitate efficient and seamless mobile working."