Comms Dealer

A 'must attend' event for ambitious comms and IT providers looking to grow their business will take place in London on June 28th.

Organised by M&A Advisors Evolution Capital and hosted by Nat West, the evening symposium will bring together a team of experts offering advice and knowledge regarding the types of funding available to business owners expanding their ICT business.

Summarising the event, Evolution Capital, Corporate Finance Advisor Simon Kelson (pictured) told Comms Dealer: "Directors of businesses in the TMT arena looking to grow or ultimately sell their business must get an understanding of the sources of capital available, the attributes of high growth enterprises, how to get fit for finance and how to develop a winning investment proposition.

"Our event will provide the knowledge they need and give them an opportunity to meet debt and equity funders, network with like-minded peers and meet successful entrepreneurs who have experienced the pain and gain of business growth."

Included in a heavyweight line up of speakers at the 'Get Backed, Get Big, Get Bought' Seminar will be Nat West's Ian Mason, who will look at debt funding for high growth business; Hans Prottey from Coutts will discuss the process of gaining high net worth investment; Chris Hodges from the Business Growth Fund will explore the process of Venture Capital investment; and Duncan Gregory from Evolution Capital will explain how businesses should go about developing a strategy for growth and provide tips for developing a successful investment proposition.

Adept CEO Ian Fishwick will also provide the buyers' perspective, explaining what they look for when making investments and what in particular they are prepared to pay a premium for.

"Aimed at business owners or leaders in the TMT sector with a turnover of between £5m and £30m our seminar promises to provide real golden nuggets of information and advice for ambitious channel players and we are expecting places to go fast," added Kelson.

To register for the evening event, which will take place at the RBS Conservatory, 250 Bishopsgate, London on June 28th ,go to  http://www.evolutioncapital.com/register.

Audio conferencing firm Konftel rolled out the red carpet as a thank you to key business partners for helping to drive a sales towards potentially record breaking trading.

Representatives from Exertis and Trust Distribution joined global counterparts for the three-day gathering in the Swedish wonderland of Saxnas where over 50 guests were treated to snow mobile rides through forests, lakes and mountains. The conference provided insights into Konftel's roadmap, upcoming product launches and business strategies.

Konftel's Regional Sales Director Jeff May said: "With a series of new product developments in the pipeline this year is destined to become one of our most successful trading periods ever. We are already witnessing growth triple the industry norm and the five star trip was our way of saying thank you to our most prestigious business partners. With sumptuous dinners, an awards ceremony, hot tubs and axe throwing it was a trip to remember, mixing business with lots of fun and laughter."

Six Degrees Group (6DG) has announced its Giving Back Scheme whereby employees have the opportunity to get involved with local community projects and gain volunteer experience during their working hours.

The company has pledged to 'give back' the equivalent of a 6DG employee's full working year to local communities, equating to 260 days. Every member of staff will have the opportunity to apply for a full or half days 'community leave' each year.

6DG is openly encouraging all staff to get involved in the local community and volunteering opportunities with their own choice of preferred charities.

Susanna Brown, Director of HR, said: "In addition to giving valuable time and support to those in our communities who need it most, we recognise that participating in such activities can also help play an important role in employees' individual personal development. At 6DG, we are eager that our employees get the most out of working life."

The Giving Back initiative will run alongside 6DG's CSR programme, Six Degrees of Hope, through which employees raise money for WeSeeHope.

6DG has supported the charity since the company was founded, fundraising through a number of annual events and individual challenges.

Hot demand for cloud services drove a 27% increase in Exponential-e's total revenue for the year ending 31st January 2016. Revenues reached £77.3m and EBITDA rose by over 35% to £13.8m with pre-tax profits up 47% to £6.7m.

Underpinning this growth was strong customer acquisition with a 35% increase in new business sales for cloud services.
 
"Over the last year we have enjoyed particular success in targeting the C-level community," stated CEO Lee Wade. "The security offered with our private cloud network has been adopted by many clients in sectors such as legal, finance and media, that have some of the most stringent privacy, compliance and security requirements."
 
Exponential-e is transitioning its business into a global IT brand and will focus on its core network and platform stack, investing in automation - SDN (Software Defined Network) and NFV (Network Function Virtualisation) - to drive a better customer experience and enable organisations to scale and deliver services more quickly.

"Moving forward, we will be looking for opportunities to build our capabilities in data centric services, machine learning and proof-of-concepts for artificial intelligence," added Wade.
 
Exponential-e aims to achieve 23% growth in its next financial year and will recruit an additional 60 staff. Last year staff numbers increased by 20%. 

UC provider Zest4 has launched an M2M Partner Programme following its link-up with Arkessa late last year.

The programme was unveiled at a Chester Races launch event and is designed to help partners fully address the growth opportunity in M2M and IoT services.

The package delivers education and technical support, training via the Zest4 partner academy, marketing support, optimised tariffs and competitive commercials.

"The launch day was a success and many partners are now seriously considering taking their first step into the M2M arena," stated Mandy Fazelynia, Zest4's Operations and Business Development Director.

"The M2M package that ourselves and Arkessa have made available to partners will help them unlock new revenue opportunities now and for the future."

Abzorb has bundled a PBX maintenance service with its UC and mobility portfolio following a link-up with maintenance partner CSR.

Called PBX Cover, the white label service will be officially launched at Comms Dealer's MiVAD event on June 9th.

The end-to-end service combines PBX system maintenance cover (99% of systems are supported), smartphone systems (Mitel Office 400) and the Money Box SIP gateway which enables SIP to be deployed on legacy PBXs.

According to Abzorb the proposition unlocks the potential for resellers to upgrade legacy kit with next generation products and services and further lock-in customers with a maintenance offering.

The 24/7 system maintenance and support service includes all fixed handsets as standard, response within one hour to all faults, quotes raised within eight hours, nationwide coverage for support, and resellers could earn up to 40% margin on Abzorb's annual pricing, said the firm.

PBX Cover also includes pre-sales and training via the Abzorbplus partner programme.

"With our smartphone systems, services such as SIP and hosted telephony can be accessed without the traditional stumbling blocks often encountered," said Mark Riddell, Head of Indirect Channel.

"Maintaining customers' PBX adds value and helps to strengthen loyalty on PSTN, CPS and SIP connectivity, while generating ongoing annuity revenue from maintenance and updates."

Abzorb's long-term partner BT Wholesale has welcomed the launch and predicts greater uptake of its hosted Centrex and Wholesale SIPT propositions as a result of resellers adopting PBX Cover.

Dave Axam, Director of Hosted Communications at BT Wholesale, stated: "By adding its PBX Cover service, Abzorb is able to deliver a complete end-to-end solution including configuration, installation and support."

Marketing firm Blabbermouth has rolled out a 'Transformation Initiative' designed to optimise the sales and marketing performance of businesses in the channel.

Blabbermouth's MD Elizabeth Sparrow (pictured) said the initiative responds to a general lack of integration between the sales and marketing functions of many businesses, stunting their ability to realise their full selling potential.

To put things right, Sparrow said Blabbermouth's business transformation process begins with a company health check, strategic planning, discussions about the true nature of a company, its identity, growth ambitions and long-term goals.

"We then put in place a joined up marketing campaign to deliver new opportunities," she explained.

"But this is only part of the solution. No department should operate in isolation, especially sales and marketing which go hand in hand."

Blabbermouth plans to position businesses for growth by preparing them for seamless customer acquisition, and the man at the centre of the company's new campaign is incoming consultant David Sparrow (pictured) who joins Blabbermouth from TalkTalk Business where he was Head of Corporate and Enterprise Sales and played a leading part in the creation of this high performing division.

Previous roles include notable stints at Freedom Communications, Virgin Media and T-Mobile.

His main purpose is to help sales and marketing leaders escape from the straitjacket of siloed working by creating more scope for professional chemistry between departments.

"Business assessments can often be complex and sensitive," he said. "But we provide a tactful and uncomplicated review of capabilities, processes, structures and strategies within the sales department before establishing best practices and integrating these with the marketing effort.

"Our aim is to assist a variety of businesses with their growth plans and help them unlock new market potential and large flagship opportunities.

"The best businesses are those rooted not in a fractured departmental mode of operation but in a unified framework based on joint targets, measurements and processes that maximise on the benefits of sales and marketing integration."

Blabbermouth's auditing and assessment know-how also enables it to report back on the complete customer journey.

In other company news, Blabbermouth has appointed Cath MacLeod and Leticia Fonseca as Marketing Account Managers and Rico Green as Marketing Administrator.

"These high calibre appointments demonstrate ongoing investment in our strengthening team," said Elizabeth Sparrow.

MacLeod brings significant B2B and B2C marketing experience while Fonseca joins from BT Wholesale where she was Marketing Manager.

In a response to the Queen's Speech ISPA Chair James Blessing said: "ISPA is pleased that broadband and technology had a prominent place in the 2016 Queen's Speech. The Digital Economy Bill contains a number of measures that will impact on ISPA members.

"ISPA is pleased that the Government has put the digital economy front and centre of its upcoming legislative programme.

"The Internet industry has invested significantly in making the UK 'a world leader in digital provision and will continue to do so and so we support government action to remove barriers to rollout.

"We further support the principle of universal broadband, but there remain a number questions surrounding the USO that still need to be addressed, including funding and the impact on the market, so that the benefits of broadband can be felt as widely and effectively as possible.

"We await further information on consumer measures, including automatic compensation, including how this will fit with the existing consumer redress framework.

"Finally, ISPA notes the Government's plan to legislate on its manifesto commitment on age verification for sites offering adult content. ISPA responded to the consultation and will now work with Government and members on this challenging and technically complex area."

Microsoft is partnering with European software giant SAP on the use of SAP's popular Hana in-memory database.

It's often used for performance intensive analytics and transaction processing work, and competes with the in-memory features of Microsoft's SQL Server database on Azure's cloud infrastructure.

A single Hana instance on Azure will support up to 3TB of RAM, with 32TB supported over 16 instances.

SAP already supports Hana on Amazon Web Services, as well as through its own cloud platform.

The companies have partnered to integrate several SAP product lines - its Ariba procurement/B2B software, Concur travel/expense management software, SuccessFactors HR software, and Fieldglass people-management software - with Office 365.

And Microsoft's Intune mobile device management (MDM) software will be able to manage apps from third-party developers that rely on SAP's Hana Cloud Platform (this lets developers build cloud apps running on top of Hana).

Separately, SAP has updated Hana to include graph data processing and capture & replay support. The former helps companies better understand and visualise patterns involving people, places, and things, and the latter helps IT workers evaluate and assess the impact of changes made to Hana workloads.

Distributor Avnet has announced a new UK partner enablement programme as part of its converged infrastructure practice.

The practice supports channel partners delivering pre-architected IT infrastructure solutions and includes regular Avnet-hosted channel briefings and a centre of excellence, The Resource, located in Avnet's newly upgraded UK demonstration venue.

Miriam Murphy, Senior VP, Avnet Technology Solutions, North region, EMEA, said: "The IT landscape is changing rapidly with the continuous innovation of new technologies.

"We have designed our next channel briefing to bring clarity to converged infrastructure and to address how it is evolving and the value it can bring to our business partners and their customers.

"The event underlines Avnet's investment in this priority area and its support for partners. Our aim is to simplify the delivery of converged infrastructure solutions and to enable partners to take advantage of this growing market."

The next channel briefing is being held at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), London, on Thursday 26th May 2016 and involves the following vendors: Cisco, Commvault, F5, HDS, HPE, IBM, NetApp, Nimble, Veeam and VMware.