Comms Dealer

A cloud brokerage platform launched by NEC enables ICT service providers to offer SMB and enterprise customers business applications from the cloud via their own privately labeled one-stop marketplace.

Cloud Store is the latest expansion of NEC's services portfolio and builds on the vendor's previous cloud brokerage offerings first developed in 2009.

The new platform can be fully branded by NEC's channel partners, is managed by NEC in a Tier 3 data centre with all registering, ordering and billing capabilities included.

Cloud Store contains a growing catalogue of ready-to-use business applications including collaboration, security and productivity enhancing applications such as Microsoft Office 365.

"We see a great opportunity for our channel partners, integrators and service providers to expand their offering with cloud applications," said Paul Kievit, President and Head of NEC Enterprise Solutions in EMEA.

"Cloud Store enables them to compete with telco-OTT players without the need to invest in commercial negotiations with ISVs, application vendor boarding and the technical integration of marketplace settlement.

"NEC provides all of this off-the-shelf and ready-to-use. The low investment levels and flexible set-up of this open revenue sharing model make it an attractive proposition for even small sized ICT resellers."

Global smartphone sales hit 1.3 billion units in 2015, with an average price drop of 6% and overall market revenues stalling at $115bn.

Market forecaster GfK says smartphone growth in China is driving global demand while the emerging APAC and MEA regions continue as growth powerhouses.

GfK forecasts global smartphone demand to increase
7% in 2016.

In the full year 2015, 1.3 billion smartphone units were sold, an increase of 7% year-on-year.

However, this unit growth was partially offset by a decline in global average selling price (ASP) of 2% year-on-year, which caused revenues to increase on a slightly lower level of only 5% year-on-year to $399bn, says GfK.

Kevin Walsh, Director of Trends and Forecasting at GfK, stated: "Despite a record fourth quarter and a strong performance in 2015 in general, there are mixed results across countries.

"Local factors, rather than regional and industry trends, are increasingly driving markets. Diverging economic trends, device saturation, mass market adoption, politics, social change and even sport have an impact on smartphone demand and prices at country level."

Tech Data Europe has agreed a new Europe-wide agreement with Quanta Cloud Technology (QCT), a provider of hardware and integrated systems to cloud data centres.

Through the agreement, reseller partners across Tech Data Europe's footprint now have access to QCT's range of cloud data centre solutions, including servers, storage, network switches and integrated rack systems.

QCT is a subsidiary of Quanta Computer, a Fortune Global 500 technology engineering and manufacturing company.

"The addition of Quanta Cloud Technology to our vendor portfolio gives our customers access to a range of flexible and scalable solutions for the data centre environment," said Michael Urban, senior vice president, Broadline, Services, CE, and Procurement at Tech Data Europe.

"QCT's products not only enable our reseller partners to provide tailored solutions to address the needs of systems integrators, but also to diversify and expand their current offering in the cloud and data centre infrastructure fields."

US-listed Mobile TeleSystems PJSC, a telco in Russia and the CIS has partnered with BT, Deutsche Telekom, Reliance Jio Infocomm, Millicom, Orange, Rogers, TeliaSonera and TIM in a new Partnering Operator Alliance aiming to bring innovative products and services to customers around the world.

Vasyl Latsanych, Chief Marketing Officer of MTS Group, said: "These companies can reach a potential base of around one billion customers in more than 80 countries around the world.

"We believe in the positive synergy that this alliance brings to the global market.

"The joint forces of industry leaders create additional value for our customers and give us a chance to provide the latest innovations, best services, products and client experience.

"We are proud to represent Russia and CIS countries in the alliance and we are sure that it is wise to face global market challenges in an alliance of reliable partners from all over the world."

The Alliance focuses on exchanging best practices on how to bring partner propositions to the market, on joint efforts in partner scouting and will also exchange knowledge about upcoming trends and services amongst the group.

The alliance is an open network of like-minded operators worldwide with complementary geographical footprints. It is covering all relevant product categories within an operator's business, mobile as well as fixed, B2C as well as B2B. The Alliance will be expanding to additional operators soon, it says.

Avnet has picked up the Juniper Networks Distributor of the Year UK award for the second year running, and has been crowned EMEA Distributor of the Year 2015.
 
Anthony Webb, MD Partner and Commercial Sales UK&I at Juniper Networks, said: "Avnet has delivered a solid performance during the past year and has demonstrated continual commitment driving programmes that support our mutual business priorities. The collaboration between our organisations has become stronger."
 
Christian Curtis, Sales Director, Avnet Technology Solutions, UK, added: "We've made significant investments in our security and networking business over the past year, and the success we've achieved with strategic partners such as Juniper Networks shows we are on the right track."

ITSPA has accepted the proposed revisions made to the Investigatory Powers Bill as a useful next step in the process of passing the legislation.

The changes, published today follow on from three recent parliamentary committee reports which called for improvements to ensure that the Bill was fit for purpose.
 
Eli Katz, the Chair of ITSPA stated: "While ITSPA generally accepted the main principles of the Bill on its original draft publication in November, we did agree with the three Parliamentary Committee reports that more needed to be done to ensure the balance and proportionality around security, privacy and feasibility were maintained.

"The devil will be in the detail but we welcome some of the changes that have been included to help in resolve some of the concerns.
 
"Specifically, the addition of six codes of practice to set out how security services will use powers in the Bill is a welcome inclusion. Additionally, the clarification that a pragmatic approach to encryption, whereby communications providers will only be required to decrypt communications that they have added themselves and only when practicable, is welcome. What happens in practice still remains to be seen."
 
In principle, noted Katz, ITSPA has always understood the reasoning behind the proposed Bill and in many circumstances there will be no changes to what our members currently do to assist law enforcement agencies in tackling crime.

ITSPA has welcomed the principles of developing stronger oversight mechanisms and streamlining the current legal powers, which have become extremely complicated and unwieldy for communications providers to understand.
 
Katz added: "The Home Office's approach to this Bill has been much improved since its predecessor in 2012 and they have generally communicated with industry in an effective manner.

"We do now urge Government to continue that engagement process to address remaining areas of ambiguity in the Bill and stress the need for enough Parliamentary time to ensure the legislation is reviewed properly."
 

Ingram Micro has reported worldwide Q4 sales of $11.3bn, down 19% in dollars and down 13% on a currency neutral basis, when compared to worldwide sales of $14bn in the 2014 fourth quarter.

"We had a solid close to a strong year of execution, and we are pleased with the progress we are making against our strategic initiatives," said Alain Monié, Ingram Micro CEO.

"We are excited about our pending transaction to join HNA Group, as we will have the opportunity to better serve our vendor and customer partners and help them achieve their business objectives.

"Upon the closing of the transaction we expect to have the ability to accelerate our investments, both organically and through M&A, to enhance and add to our capabilities in high value IT solutions, mobility lifecycle services, commerce and fulfillment solutions and cloud, while also continuing to extend our geographic reach."

The Mobile World Congress edition of the Ericsson Mobility Report reveals the impact of different levels of network performance on smartphone users and their perceptions of mobile operators and digital content providers.

Neuroscience technology was used to objectively measure emotional responses to varied smartphone experiences. 

Delays in loading web pages and videos under time pressure caused mobile users' heart rates to rise an average of 38%.

Six-second delays to video streaming caused stress levels to increase by a third. To put that in context, the stress incurred is equivalent to the anxiety of taking a math test or watching a horror movie alone, and greater than the stress experienced by standing at the edge of a virtual cliff. Once a video begins, an additional pause can cause stress levels to increase dramatically.

In the study, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) of an operator increased significantly when associated with a delay-free experience - by 4.5 points.

This finding was also reflected when measuring emotional engagement using a neuroscience-based motivational index.

However, the operator's NPS dropped on average four points with moderate time-to-content and rebuffering delays.

Interestingly, moderate delays result in a double negative for mobile operators: decreased engagement with their brand and increased engagement with competitors.

Other highlights from the Ericsson Mobility Report - Mobile World Congress edition, include:
• Social networking is second only to video for driving mobile traffic growth. Over the next six years total social networking traffic will be around 12 times that of the previous six years.
• 68 million mobile subscriptions added in Q4 2015, India added the most (21 million), followed by China (6 million), the US (5 million), Myanmar (5 million), and Nigeria (3 million).
• Total number of mobile subscriptions in Q4 2015 reached 100% penetration at around 7.3 billion - the same number of mobile subscriptions as people in the world.
• Global mobile data traffic grew 65% between Q4 2014 and Q4 2015.
• There are now one billion LTE subscriptions worldwide, with approximately 160 million additions in Q4 2015.

The productivity and employee engagement benefits that remote working can bring to businesses can only be realised with strong UC tools in place, emphasised cloud UC firm Outsourcery.

According to a new study by Vodafone, 75 per cent of companies worldwide have now introduced flexible working policies, enabling employees to vary their hours and working locations. Respondents believed that employee performance had increased as a result of flexible working, with 61 per cent saying that profits have increased and 83 per cent reporting improvements in productivity.

However, the productivity and efficiency benefits promised by remote working policies can be further enhanced by businesses that use UC tools.

Jon Seddon, Head of Product at Outsourcery, commented: "As this survey found, businesses that enable their employees to work from multiple locations experience great benefits to their efficiency, employee satisfaction and industry reputation as positive places to work.

"With the rise of millennials in the workplace, remote working and flexible hours are becoming more commonplace and suitable systems need to be implemented in order to ensure the benefits are realised.

"The effective collaboration and teamwork between employees working remotely is one that an integrated UC tool can greatly benefit. With voice and video calls, instant messaging and conferencing all enabled in a UC solution, workers are contactable regardless of their location, ensuring the business still runs efficiently.

"The ease of contact that a UC solution brings can also address the concerns of some managers who would prefer their people to be in the office. Team collaboration can be maximised with easy conference call set up across video, voice and mobile devices with powerful screen and document sharing built in.

"In addition, features such as 'presence' that enable office based employees to see the 'free/busy' status of colleagues working remotely mean that managers can maximise team engagement to ensure everybody is working productively. Modern UC products can record calls for customer facing employees, allowing performance to be measured from any location. Businesses are also able to manage contact centre staff in remote locations now that these features can be integrated."

Provider of cloud-enabled Wi-Fi networks Xirrus has rolled out an enhanced MSP partner programme featuring CommandCenter, a new control function that simplifies the ability of MSPs to offer Wi-Fi-as-a-Service (WaaS) to their customers.

CommandCenter, included free of charge with the Xirrus Management System for MSPs, simplifies and speeds up the activation and provisioning process for new customer installations to maximise revenue generation and reduce deployment cost and overhead, claimed the firm.

MSPs can create customer accounts instantly without the need to stage customer networks prior to provisioning. This reduces time to deployment and inventory levels. 
 
MarketsandMarkets forecasts the managed services market will grow from $107 billion in 2014 to $193 billion by 2019, which creates significant opportunities for MSPs to acquire new customers, expand the markets they service and increase revenue.

"Cloud-managed IT and enterprise-wide mobility ushers in a new set of challenges for businesses who need to design, deploy and manage fast, reliable Wi-Fi networks. More than ever, businesses rely on MSPs to support their mobility needs with Wi-Fi-as-a-Service," said Jillian Mansolf, chief marketing officer and vice president, channel sales at  at Xirrus.

"CommandCenter is designed specifically to deliver next generation Wi-Fi services with speed, security and flexibility. This ultimately enables MSPs to increase revenue streams without the need to add significant resources."