Comms Dealer

Unify, now known as the Atos brand for communications software and services, has announced the new OpenScape Contact Centre v9, designed to help businesses improve customer engagement.

"Successful businesses recognise that customer engagement and superior customer service are critical differentiators in today's competitive environment," said Peter Kuerpick, Executive Vice President, Product House, for Unify.

"More than ever, consumers expect to control and influence how and when their needs are met. OpenScape Contact Centre was designed and enhanced to make it easy for businesses to intelligently manage customer engagement across the enterprise for greater user and customer satisfaction."

OpenScape Contact Centre features a new user interface, modeled on Unify's Circuit platform. It also supports a 360 degree customer view, providing a contextual history of all details and contact with a customer, regardless of media channel, to ensure a streamlined and personalised customer experience.

Additionally, the solution provides embedded presence and collaboration tools so agents can easily connect with colleagues and managers to speed contact resolution.

"Contact Centres are focusing on both customer experience as well as agent experience. Unify's new OpenScape Contact Centre v9 provides enhanced capabilities such as a 360 degree agent view of the customer, enabling agents to better serve customers," said Blair Pleasant, President and Principal Analyst, COMMfusion LLC.

"Its workflow-style routing and call history analytics give organisations the actionable intelligence needed for real-time problem solving that employs the resources ideally suited to the task."

OpenScape Contact Centre v9 will be available in February from Unify and its global network of partners.

Sennheiser has embarked on an initiative to offer premium noise cancellation headsets for markets requiring high levels of customer data confidentiality, targeting vertical markets requiring secure solutions, such as healthcare, government, financial and legal sectors.

"The ability to efficiently handle sensitive patient or customer data in these sectors is paramount, so the ability of the hardware to make this possible is equally important," said Jane Craven, Sales Director IT/Telecommunications, UK & Ireland.

"If an agent can't understand responses and these have to be repeated or read back for confirmation, this can significantly increase the risk of a leak of sensitive information in a public setting."

Regulatory initiatives such as the Data Protection Act in the healthcare market, PCI compliance standards in retail, and obvious security concerns in sectors such as government and finance have forced many businesses to adopt strict compliance measures.

In several of these instances, companies are subject to fines if patient data and/or customer credit card information is not protected according to a stringent set of criteria.

"By ensuring that our headsets deliver the very latest in noise cancellation, voice clarity and transmission quality, these companies can ensure their operators are best prepared to deal with customer information and keep sensitive data private and secure," added Craven.

"It's important that the benefits of high-performance headsets are recognised to ensure that relevant security compliances can be adhered to."

Jabra has launched a promotion for UK and Ireland channel partners operating in the public sector to drive sales of professional quality headsets and speakerphones.

The promotion enables Jabra's partners to better support public sector organisations' increasing need for cost-effective, high-quality technology investments, claims the vendor.

The offer, valid until 31st March, will run across selected products within the company's headset and speakerphone portfolio, including the Jabra BIZ 2300, Jabra PRO 900, Jabra SPEAK 510 and the Jabra EVOLVE series.

Nigel Dunn, Managing Director, Jabra Business Solutions UK & Ireland, commented: "Communications technology plays a key role in the delivery of UK&I Public Services because it enables mission-critical customer service.

"For this reason it represents a significant portion of Public Sector spend. Providing our partners with offers to maximise this opportunity enables them to effectively gain incremental revenue to support their Q1 sales targets."

Outsourcing bounced back in EMEA with a strong fourth quarter. Outsourcing activity in the region grew 44% compared to the third quarter and ACV exceeded €3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2015 for only the third time ever. But contract values continue to decline.

The EMEA results echoed the strong global market performance, which posted the highest quarterly level in 4 years, says researcher Information Services Group with global annual contract value (ACV) rising 17% in the fourth quarter, to $3.1bn, fueled by the signing of five mega-relationships.
 
It was only the third time ever that the EMEA region surpassed €3 billion in ACV in a quarter, and the first time since the third quarter of 2012. For the full year, EMEA was unable to counter the effects of a sluggish first half.

Regional ACV declined 8%, to €9.4bn, while the number of awards fell 7%, to 601. This decline can be attributed to a sharp reduction in ITO (IT outsourcing) activity and values, as the number of large infrastructure awards dropped sharply and contract values were lower across the board. In stark contrast, BPO (Business Processes) ACV in 2015 surged 24% for the year, with contract awards up 11%, led by industry-specific, Contact Centres and Facilities Management work.

"It is encouraging to see such a strong finish to the year in EMEA. Enterprises in the region are actively seeking ways to revamp their processes around cloud, digitalisation and robotics, resulting in a shift to smaller deals, which also allow for flexibility and cost variability," said John Keppel, partner and president, ISG EMEA & Asia.

"This new approach to outsourcing looks set to continue; globally, we see more enterprises are sourcing than ever before and they're paying less for services, which encourages them to outsource even more."

By market, the UK, while making some gains on its third-quarter results, fell short of 2014 full-year values as ACV sank 19% in 2015. However, in keeping with the trend toward more awards of lesser value, the 234 contracts for the year was a record high.

DACH had its best year ever, matching its 2011 performance, as ACV surged 69%. However, the sub-region bucked the trend seen elsewhere by posting its lowest contract count since 2007. Its strong ACV increase was aided by mega relationship awards, including Siemens' large contract renewal with Atos.
France struggled in comparison with its stellar performance in 2014, when it reached record highs in both contracting and ACV.

Values fell by 70% during 2015, while contract volume dropped by 40%. This sharp decline may mark a return to normal activity levels after a standout year of intense activity, rather than a longer-term weakening trend. Both the Nordics and Benelux saw ACV gains in the fourth quarter but an overall decline in both ACV and deal counts for the year compared with 2014.

By sector, Telecom followed the broad trend of increased contract activity at lower values, as the number of contract awards reached record numbers despite a slight decline in ACV. Travel and transport also achieved new highs in contract numbers, while values decreased.

The region's powerhouse sectors, Financial Services and Manufacturing, finished close to their 2014 figures. Financial services ended the year with a relatively flat performance while Manufacturing bounced back to post an 8 percent gain in ACV over last year, although its deal count plunged by 26 percent.

Keppel concluded, "The return of mega relationships in the fourth quarter gave EMEA the boost it needed to reach the landmark figure of €3 billion. After a slow start, the final few months of the year have helped put outsourcing in a good place as we exit 2015 and enter 2016."

Azlan has been named a distributor for the full range of Dell Software solutions. Tech Data will be placing a strong emphasis on the company's Back-Up, Recovery and Data Protection suite as it looks to extend the Dell's reach.

Mark Ceraolo, Server and Storage Business Development Manager for Azlan stated: "While Dell is one of the best-known brands in the IT industry, many resellers are not fully aware of the extensive capabilities of the company's backup, recovery and data protection software and appliances.

"We are aiming to change that situation and make Dell a leading player in this fast-growing segment of the security market."

Azlan already offers Dell enterprise solutions and is a long-standing Wyse and SonicWALL distributor, so adding Dell's Data Protection, Systems Management and vWorkspace solutions is a logical next step, he says.

"For partners already selling Dell servers and storage, Dell Data Protection is an obvious and valuable add-on to their portfolio. Those resellers can now turn to Tech Data for the full end-to-end Dell proposition."

Privately-held Veeam has reported Q4 2015 results which indicate a 22% overall growth year-on-year, with a total of nearly $500 million in total bookings revenue.

This sort of growth means it is expected that the company will pass the half-billion dollar revenue mark in 2016 and expect momentum to continue, carrying Veeam toward its goal of $1 billion in annual revenue by 2018.

Veeam is dependent on continuing increases in virtualisation, particularly with VMware which has seen its growth fall back as it reaches high levels of penetration in the enterprise market and competition from cloud.

Recent results from 451 Research, which reported public cloud storage spend will double in two years, while legacy storage spend will fall by 17%.

The UK & Ireland also indicated strong growth once again, with an overall 17% increase in total bookings revenue year-on-year (Q4-2015 vs Q4-2014) and a 35% increase in Enterprise specific revenue (2015 vs 2014).

The UK & Ireland now has a total of 13,032 customers, and 2,440 ProPartners, it says.

PC shipments in EMEA reached 20.8 million units in the fourth quarter of 2015 - an 18.2% decrease year on year, according to IDC.

After a strong shipment push of devices under Microsoft's Bing promotion from summer 2014 to January 2015, the focus for hardware manufacturers and their channel partners has been to deplete stock, leading to an 18% contraction for 2015 with 76.3 million PCs shipped in EMEA.

In 2014 PC shipments were driven in commercial by the end of Windows XP support as well as the need to renew the first Windows 7 portables four years after their deployment, while in the consumer segment Bing successfully targeted the needs of price sensitive users.

The strengthening of the dollar also led partners to gamble on cheap products in the fourth quarter of 2014. But 2015 turned into a very costly year for all of them as inventory clearing not only took eleven months but also strong promotions and price reductions.

Year on year comparisons were therefore unfavourable during 2015 and the introduction of new technologies such as Windows 10 or new CPUs failed to reverse the trend. But it is not all bad news- as there are some signs of stabilisation and 2015 results will support a more positive comparison in 2016.

"The market contraction was to be expected," said Chrystelle Labesque, associate director, IDC EMEA Personal Computing. The combination of various economic and political factors led all three sub-regions to contract in 2015Q4. Western Europe declined by 13.1%, while in line with expectations, Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) contracted 24.7%.

In Western Europe, the UK consumer market reported the best result, while in the commercial segment some public spending in particular in Austria and Italy supported shipment volumes.

A sharp decline in oil prices together with currency and political instabilities affected the CEMA region in particular, while the slowdown in the Chinese economy is worsening the business outlook in export-oriented Western European countries.

Looking at the full 2015 performance, Western Europe was down by 13.8% over 2014, and market consolidation becomes more obvious as the top 3 players (HP, Lenovo, Dell) accounted for 54% of the market in 2015 vs 50% in 2014.

"2015 was clearly a very difficult year for the PC market. Demand remained weak across all four quarters with double-digit contractions in CEE and MEA," said Stefania Lorenz, associate VP, IDC CEMA. "The CEE region contracted by 26.4% year-on-year in 2015. The region was negatively affected by the devaluations of local currencies and high PC inventory levels left from 2014.

"The worst impact on purchasing power was felt in the Eastern part of the region: Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan as well as the Rest of CEE subregion. Other factors that prevented the market from rebounding in the commercial space included government budget freezes."

"In Q4 2015 the PC market in the CEE region was in line with the forecast at -24.7% year-on-year," said Nikolina Jurisic, product manager, IDC CEMA. "Viewing the country mix, the "star" was Hungary, with a positive result of 11.5% growth year-on-year thanks to last minute deals in the public sector. The other countries in the CEE region reported PC market declines.

In many cases the unfavorable comparison with Q414 (and the Bing push) resulted in a sharper decline for Poland, Czech Republic, Bulgaria, and Croatia.

Entanet has slammed plans announced by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) and Ofcom to impose new restrictions on broadband advertising that doesn't take account of how smaller ISPs operate.

The company says that the plans to force broadband suppliers to advertise costs that include the line rental will put smaller resellers at a disadvantage.

Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing, said: "Our main concern and disappointment is that once again the ASA/Ofcom strive to apply 'one size fits all' type proposals to solve a market problem that has arguably been caused by the larger mainstream providers.

"Many smaller ISPs in the UK broadband channel provide the broadband service without requiring their customers to take line rental in the same package."

He notes that in some cases consumers may want to buy line rental and broadband from different suppliers. The new rules suggest that ISPs may be forced to offer both and if this is the case, it will restrict customer choice.

The company also highlights that in its joint study of the market, the ASA and Ofcom have based their findings on views taken from just 300 consumers, when there are 23.7 million fixed broadband lines in use in the UK today.

VIA and Speakerbus have launched a cloud-based trader voice solution for the financial sector, called VIA Trade, which removes the need to operate an on-site telephony solution, reducing on-site equipment and cutting the amount of costly storage space within offices.

The solution combines VIA's cloud-based infrastructure with the Speakerbus iTurret dealerboard.

On installation, a direct and exclusive network connection is established between VIA's data centres and the client's office. This dedicated link, when connected to the iTurret devices, allows organisations to trade and record calls whilst guaranteeing unrivalled levels of security and resiliency.

By taking the intricate elements of a traditional trading system and hosting them in the cloud, VIA Trade reduces on-site communications equipment by 90%.

Alex Tebbs, Director, VIA, said: "Combining the expertise of both VIA and Speakerbus, VIA Trade ensures users can benefit from a highly resilient and secure solution, while also achieving significant cost savings through low setup costs and a substantial reduction in on-site equipment."

VIA Trade also integrates with VIA Voice, the company's fully hosted unified communications solution, which has already been deployed by more than 250 businesses globally.

Tebbs added: "We have ensured that VIA Trade works hand-in-hand with VIA Voice, so both traders and non-traders within a company can benefit from joined-up communications."

Ofcom's Broadband Business Code of Conduct is a vital step to ensure that every business has access to affordable, reliable and sustainable broadband connectivity, according to TalkTalk Business.
 
"TalkTalk Business has been working on the code with Ofcom for the last 12 months and were delighted to sign the agreement in December 2015," stated Jon Nowell, Head of Product at TalkTalk Business.

"Connectivity is increasingly the lifeblood of business and we had no hesitation in signing up to Ofcom's new Business Broadband Speeds Code of Conduct."