Comms Dealer

ShoreTel has expanded its Innovation Network and renamed it TechConnect.

The revamped programme builds on the recent launch of the ShoreTel Connect solution for onsite, cloud and hybrid UC deployments, and the foundation of ShoreTel's Innovation Network which contains 1,500 developers and 110 technology partners.

ShoreTel TechConnect brings enhancements over the previous programme including a more efficient certification process, new remote test and preparation capabilities, no membership fee for technology partners self-validating with the third-party test firm, and additional marketing opportunities as well as advance notification and sponsorship priority for the ShoreTel Champion Partner Conference.

ShoreTel has also deepened its relationship with an independent third-party testing and services firm.

This relationship will increase test capacity, resulting in faster time to market, and provide new remote test preparation capabilities via the cloud.

"With the new ShoreTel TechConnect programme we are building a vibrant ecosystem of partners that will extend the value of the ShoreTel Connect solutions," said Mark Roberts, CMO of ShoreTel.

"We are seeking complementary solutions with a focus on vertical applications, and are focused on creating greater value for our customers through interoperability and integration with tools and
applications they use daily.

"With the new programme we have intensified our attention on go to market efforts with member partners and on providing additional training and marketing resources."

The TechConnect programme has three member tiers - Developer, Technology Partner and Technology Alliance Partner.

Distributor Steljes has become an exclusive distribution partner of Nureva, a Canadian provider of software and hardware solutions for education, and signed two UK resellers, Rapid Technologies and Smarter Interactive.

Rapid is a specialist in interactive technology and digital signage dedicated to classroom and meeting rooms and operating across schools, colleges, corporate and public sector organisations, while Smarter Interactive provides audio visual consultancy and services. Both Rapid and Smarter have been working with Steljes for more than yen years.

"We wanted to appoint the most competent resellers as quickly as possible to serve customers throughout the UK," said Martin Large, CEO, Steljes.

Toshiba Business Communications Division (BCD) is withdrawing its primary telephony products from the UK and Irish markets in early summer but pledged to continue a tech support operation.

In December last year Toshiba stated that it expected to report a record 550bn yen ($4.5bn) annual loss and axe 6,800 jobs amid restructuring efforts. The company also said it had overstated profits for six years.

A spokesperson for the vendor said: "After careful consideration, Toshiba has decided to move its IP Edge and Strata CIX products into technical support phase on the 1st June 2016 for the UK and Irish market.

Toshiba is committed to providing ongoing technical, licensing and spares support to its partners and customers and is already in communication with relevant parties regarding this decision to assist in their current and future planning." 

The loyalty of UK partners to the Toshiba brand has not been repaid with the expected levels of support for five years, believes Colin Hepher, MD of Toshiba distributor SOS.

"This is very disappointing," he said. "There is bound to be a backlash from large companies, county councils and schools to name but a few that have been loyal to the brand.

"This has nothing to do with the financial declarations recently admitted. It's more a question of local management and channel commitment rather than the fault of Japan."

Toshiba's announcement that it proposes to withdraw the existing Strata CIX and IP Edge from the UK is not unexpected given the relatively small portion (<1%) of market share it has held in the past few years, and its desire to focus activities on areas of greater opportunity, observed Stephanie Watson, General Manager, MZA. 

"Importantly, Toshiba will offer technical support to existing customers and channels, and naturally those customers and channels represent an opportunity for other vendors," she said. 

"It's important to note that Toshiba has a much stronger position in the US market and has already introduced cloud solutions in that territory.

"As Toshiba rounds out its global portfolio, one cannot discount that it may choose to bring an appropriate cloud solution to the growing UK hosted market."

Excalibur Communications has expanded its IT service with the acquisition of Chippenham-based IT firm Devision for an undisclosed sum.

Excalibur CEO James Phipps commented: "The acquisition brings us new customers in some exciting new sectors, together with highly skilled members of the Devision team."

Previous moves to build on its unified solutions capabilities saw Excalibur acquire IT businesses Bridge Solutions and Emnico Enterprises.

Nimans is staging a brace of NEC SL1100 training days this month with more to follow.

The half-day courses, which are free, have been designed by Nimans to better familiarise dealers with the comms platform's attributes with an emphasis on ease of installation.

John McKindland, Nimans' Head of Systems Sales, said: "We will be discussing all the tricks of the trade which are not always documented in instruction manuals to make SL1100 installations quick and easy.

"The course goes down to grass roots level and covers the installation basics as well as more sophisticated advice and expertise."

The Institute of Telecommunications Professionals (ITP) will officially declare this year's Apprentice Awards open for entries during National Apprenticeship Week (14th-18th March 2016).

The awards (now in their ninth year) are open to all apprentice members of the ITP including those on the ITP's own Apprenticeship Scheme which was launched in 2013 in response to the demand for specific telecoms apprentices.

The event will take place on the 7th December at The Radisson Blu Hotel, Portman Square.   

The scheme helps organisations to recruit, train, mentor and support apprentices throughout their career journey.

Since its launch the scheme has created more than 50 jobs in the telecoms industry and past apprentices have gone on to be nominated for national apprentice awards, Freemans Guild awards and have undertaken further training to degree level with the support of their employer.

The ITP awards recognise those who have excelled as part of the Apprenticeship Scheme. Categories include Apprentice of the Year in four categories - SME Apprentice of the Year, Intermediate, Advanced and Higher Apprentice of the Year, and The Christopher Mills Award.

Other categories on the night include Mentor of the Year and The Chris Seymour Award for Women in Telecoms.

SME Apprentice of the year 2015 winner James Tuck said: "My greatest achievement before winning the award was finding an apprenticeship in the industry I love with a brilliant company, surrounded by an excellent team of people who want to help me succeed. Winning the award is just the icing on the cake."

Mobile analyst firm Juniper Research has released its Q4 and full year smartphone market assessment for 2015, revealing that Samsung shipped an estimated 317 million smartphones (representing less than 1% y-o-y growth); Apple posted its slowest ever y-o-y iPhone growth, but with record profits; with Microsoft's phone shipments declining 57% y-o-y to 4.5 million devices.

Global smartphone market slowdown has begun to impact all players, with the slowest Q4 market growth since 2008. This has begun to impact even the usually impervious Apple, which reported a 0.4% YoY growth in iPhone shipments for the quarter. However, successes early in the year gave the California-based company a more comfortable 20% year-on-year growth.

Samsung continued as market leader in 2015, shipping an estimated 317 million devices and producing a YoY increase in smartphone shipments in Q4 thanks to the moderate success of the Note 5 phablet and A-line and J-line releases to developing markets. However, this is only a mildly upbeat finish - while the company's revenue mix is increasing, the company is falling behind the market as a whole in terms of shipment growth, according to the report.

Ambitious Chinese smartphone vendor Huawei defied the quarter's trend and posted a YoY gain of 35%, shipping over 32 million and comfortably exceeding its 100 million shipments target for the year. Meanwhile Xiaomi ceased its meteoric rise and missed its revised 80 million target, shipping just over 75 million smartphones for the year, in spite of expanding to Brazil in H2 2015.

A spokesperson for Juniper Research said: "From these results, it is clear that there is no ecosystem that will insulate vendors from the slowing market. As features become 'good enough' everywhere and subsidies end in the US, Juniper expects the market to slow further as Asian markets become saturated and American customers have to pay the full cost of their smartphones."

The Smartphone Quarterly Report gets under the skin of the latest market developments, analyses their implications, and forecasts how they will affect the overall market size.

Redwood Technologies Group has gained the highest level of PCI DSS compliance, version 3.1 certification, recognised by the PCI Security Standards Council.

Group companies Redwood Technologies and Content Guru initially achieved PCI compliance in 2012. They process large volumes of financial transactions for clients through the mass automated payment solution, storm LOCK, and its extension PADLOCK, which delivers agent-assisted payments while ensuring that no sensitive data is kept on the platform.

The latest iteration of the global PCI standard accredits companies which exhibit the highest standards of security across the transmission, storage and processing of payment card data on all card-based payment channels, including telephone, online and point-of-sale transactions.

Sean Taylor, CEO of the Redwood Technologies Group, commented: "Increasing numbers of our clients are now choosing to run mission critical payment services through our storm platform, and it is essential that we can continue to demonstrate that our processes conform to the foremost standards of industry recognition."

Ingram Micro has bagged the Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) division of RRC Group, a distributor in CEE and CIS countries.

RRC CEE Division, with its headquarters in Poland, Warsaw, brings a suite of service offerings including logistics, education and technical and marketing support, as well as a portfolio of solutions focused on networking, security, IT infrastructure and auto identification products and services from technology partners including Cisco, IBM, EMC, Zebra and Avaya.

With operations in Poland, Hungary, Serbia, Romania, Czech Republic, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia and Albania the acquisition will significantly increase Ingram Micro's presence in the region and is expected to contribute more than $250m in annual revenue.

The transaction, which is subject to customary regulatory and other closing conditions, is expected to close in the first half of 2016.

Ingram Micro CEO Alain Monié commented: "The addition of RRC is well aligned with Ingram Micro's global strategy to broaden our reach into higher margin, value-add and services businesses.

"In addition to bolstering our European portfolio of value solutions, we expect to leverage RRC's established brand in Central and Eastern Europe to increase revenue and profitability throughout this strategic territory, which has been a focus of expansion for Ingram Micro."

Cisco's Q2 results saw total revenue of $11.8bn, up 2%, with product revenue growth of 2% led by growth in security, routing, and collaboration.

A 4% decline in switching was largely driven by macro weakness in the campus business, which Cisco puts down to volatile times and customers pausing on spending decisions.

The routing business grew 5%, driven by double-digit growth in CRS platforms, with particular strength in mobility and web-scale service providers.

Geographically, Americas was flat, EMEA declined 1%, and APJC grew 17%. Total emerging markets grew 7%, with the BRICs plus Mexico [BRICM] showing strength at 17%, with China up 64% and India up 23%.

Total emerging minus the BRICM countries was down 3%. In terms of customer segments, enterprise declined 2% and commercial grew 4%, both of which were impacted by macro uncertainty. Public sector was flat and service provider grew 5%, it says.

Collaboration grew 3%, driven by 17% growth in WebEx, partially offset by some slowdown in the Unified Communications business.

Deferred revenues showed continued strength, growing 15%, but a data centre decline of 3% was driven by a slowdown in spend, it says.

Security remains the most critical priority for customers. "As the largest security provider, we have been focused on driving the growth of this business, while at the same time migrating our model from a primarily hardware business to a software and services business.

In Q2, not only did our security business grow 11%, but our security deferred revenue grew 26%," says CEO Charles H. Robbins, who also referred to the cloud transition.

"Double-digit growth in our cloud-based SaaS businesses, specifically WebEx, Meraki Cloud Networking, and security. You are seeing us move more of our portfolio to be delivered in both on-premise and cloud-based models, and we are aggressively driving this transition."

Cisco is using M&A to augment internal innovation in key growth areas. "In the last 12 months, we have added critical capabilities and talent in the growth areas of cloud, security, SaaS, IoT, and analytics.

"Our recently announced acquisition of Jasper combined with our other capabilities is a strong example of how we will play unique and strategic role in unlocking the value of IoT.

"We will enable our customers to monetize the data from the billions of sensors and connections with the security, speed, and reliability they have come to expect from Cisco.

"The Ericsson partnership has an immediate opportunity with it, and we have begun to close transactions together. I would not translate that to a significant impact to any of the numbers that we put out there today because we're literally in the handful stage right now, but we do see that accelerating."