Comms Dealer

Start-up hosted UC provider TelcoSwitch has entered the fray with guns blazing, emphatically throwing down the gauntlet to established comms providers and driving a 100% channel focused push into the UK market. The company launched last year as a supplier of unified turnkey hosted telephony services to the channel and is currently onboarding three partners per week to resell its product suite including CallSwitch, SimSwitch, NetSwitch and SipSwitch, all designed for large and small businesses.

CEO Russell Lux has pinned his hopes on the 'intuitive and simple' nature of TelcoSwitch's platform and the strength of its partner programme.

"Organisations of all shapes, sizes and industries are waking up to the business benefits that can be gained by having an effective communication platform installed within their business network," stated Russell.

"TelcoSwitch has created a unified turnkey open standards hosted telephony platform and we believe its has the ability to shake things up and challenge established market players."

"We will not rest on our laurels and have ambitious, aggressive growth targets."

Distributor Northamber's shares fell as its pretax loss widened in the first half (to December 31st), and it does not expect to see a near-term turn to profit.

Northamber said its pretax loss for the period was £547k, higher than the £292k loss a year earlier.

Revenue fell to £32.5m from £35.7m, hit by slow commercial sector sales and disruption surrounding the release of Microsoft Windows 10 software.

Microsoft announced the cancellation of Windows 9 in March and launched Windows 10 in July. This drove uncertainty in the commercial user sector and, after the release of Windows 10, reports of problems with the product led to this hiatus continuing, it says.

Northamber said the uncertainty in the market at present made it difficult to forecast any near-term return to profit, though it remains confident on the medium and long-term.

Diva Telecom has launched an exclusive Republic of Ireland WLR and CPS service to channel partners.

Pauline Beattie, Diva's newly appointed Channel Manager, said: "The service will allow resellers to unlock opportunities for multi-site end users across the UK and Republic of Ireland."

Diva Telecom MD Erica Lewis added: "Diva Telecom has always been a niche player in the telecoms market. The Republic of Ireland WLR and CPS service offers a means to engage with customers on a new geographic level."

Chess Partner Services bagged an awards double at the O2 Partner Service Awards, collecting the Digital Excellence and Customer Excellence Awards.

Managing Director of Chess Partner Services, John Pett, said: "It was a great honour to be the only company that received both the Digital and Customer Excellence Awards this year.

"It is thanks to the effort of everyone at Chess and all of our partners over the last 12 months.

"There is an increasing customer demand for digital and new world products and it is therefore imperative that we all evolve to facilitate this demand.

"I am passionate about empowering our partners to help both their businesses and the service that they deliver grow."

Distributor Exertis has bolstered the channel facing resources in its growing AV business unit.

A new role of Commercial Manager, reporting to General Manager Ian Aitken, has been created to manage the AV business in the north, and two new Business Development Managers and a Samsung Commercial TV Business Manager are also recruited.

Sarah Bamford joins from Novatech to fill the Samsung role, and internal promotions see Ian Ainsworth take the Commercial Manager role, Adam Carson a Business Development Manager position covering the northern region, and Jordan Deemer assuming the role of Business Development Manager for Samsung Interactive displays.

Aitken said: "These new roles are a direct consequence of our sustained AV market growth over the last four years.

"We expect our total solution strategy to continue to drive our success with traditional AV integrators and IT reseller partners, while Sarah's appointment is testimony to our confidence in commercial TVs and strengthens Exertis' long-standing relationship with Samsung."

Exertis' AV business unit has experienced a CAGR of 29%, delivered via a solutions driven strategy that addresses the needs of the traditional AV and converged networking technologies market.

NetPay has teamed up with Southampton Solent University, School of Business and Law to deliver research marketing projects with undergraduate business students.

NetPay will be providing opportunities for students to participate in research and marketing projects within a commercial environment.

Sian Campbell, Senior Lecturer in Business at Solent University School of Business, said: "NetPay is supporting our students to gain valuable skills and insights that will enhance their employability and influence their future careers."

Cerri Killworth, Marketing Manager at NetPay, added: "It is great to be working in partnership with Southampton Solent University and be able to offer students the opportunity to work on real-business projects.

"We are enabling them to gain practical real-world experience and the opportunity to see their work used in a commercial environment.

"I am confident that the work that we do together will give students career opportunities and skills that will benefit them when they begin their working life."

Endpoint detection company Confer has formed a UK&I distribution agreement with Distology.

"Confer is already protecting endpoints in more than 60 countries and we have seen a marked increase in demand for our platform in Europe since last year," said Mark Quinlivan, CEO, Confer.

"With an expanded presence in the region we can accelerate our market strategy and provide local support to our customers and partners with endpoint security technology, enabling them to deliver on the promise of secure business."

Confer's Converged Endpoint Security platform integrates prevention, detection and incident response using a 'lightweight' sensor, enabling businesses to secure all types of devices.

Fluidata has begun beta trialling a new SIP platform prior to a full launch in May 2016.

The platform has been designed to support a variety of dedicated and hosted phone systems and builds on Fluidata's track record in data and connectivity.

Piers Daniell, MD, said: "We have no existing voice revenue to cannibalise so we are being disruptive in our approach to delivering low-cost call routing.

"We have a simple design and package to ensure customers will see savings by routing calls via our SIP platform."

The platform will initially support over 300,000 SIP sessions and is supported in multiple data centres simultaneously.

A US-based specialist in enterprise information management solutions (EIM), M-Files, has secured a $36m round of Series B funding led by Partech Ventures along with the Finnish Industry Investment and Draper Esprit.

Capital earmarked for accelerating existing sales and marketing operations will also help expand the company into new markets in North America, the EMEA and APAC regions as well as strengthen its global partner network which currently includes 450 organisations in over 100 countries.

Jim Geary, executive chairman of M-Files, said: "This funding will enable us to build on our success, as well as further develop our professional services organisation and expand local teams in the UK, continental Europe and APAC to better support our customers and partners."

Bruno Cremel, General Partner at Partech, added: "Partech Ventures invested in M-Files because we saw a vision for a new generation of solution beyond traditional document management and enterprise content management (ECM) that has the potential to transform the market."

Partech, which is based in France, specialises in international investments across the high growth digital and ICT companies with three types of fundings - seed capital, venture capital and growth capital.

New data from Juniper Research has found that app advertising, using context and location targeting, will exceed $44 billion by 2020, up from an estimated $13 billion last year.

As the mobile advertising landscape matures, the simple geofence is being usurped by contextual data such as a user's interests, real-time location and even political leanings.

The new research - 'Context & Location Based Services: Advertising, Retail & Emerging Technologies 2016-2020' - found that social applications are providing a highly accessible pool of rich user data for advertisers.

Indeed, Facebook's recent earnings call highlighted the tremendous growth opportunity of this sector, with North American ad revenues per user rising by 60% over the last 12 months.

Meanwhile, players such as Pinterest are developing tools that serve to reduce the intrusiveness of adverts, with user-friendly approaches seen as crucial in avoiding a rising tide of ad-blocking utilities.

According to Juniper Research, in terms of ad revenues, the leading social applications using mobile location data to target users are: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WeChat, and Sina Weibo.

The research found that social apps are beginning to incorporate a wide range of capabilities beyond their core function as peer-to-peer communications tools.

"This trend has been highlighted by apps such as WeChat in China, while Facebook Messenger has recently partnered with Uber to deliver ride hiring services," said research author, Steffen Sorrell. "This means that social apps are transforming into platforms themselves, offering even more data for ad campaigners."

Additionally, the research found that several factors are creating a 'perfect storm' for the commercialisation of indoor location services.

Bluetooth beacon deployments, improved Wi-Fi services, and the re-emergence of UWB (ultra-wide band) as an enabler of location based services are all likely to combine in the near-term to offer proximity marketing opportunities as well as commercial asset tracking capabilities. 

Other key findings:
• Commercial asset tracking and telematics is likely to be boosted significantly by the ISO approval of the AEM/AEMP Telematics API Standard.
•Big Data and the emergence of prescriptive analytics will play an increasingly important role in the commercial telematics and precision agricultural industries.