Comms Dealer

CityFibre and HighNet are to collaborate on a project to transform Glasgow's digital connectivity and make it Scotland's third Gigabit City. CityFibre is to build an ultra-fast pure fibre network in Glasgow with HighNet, the Scottish ISP providing services to thousands of UK businesses.

The deployment in Glasgow city centre will kick off in early 2016 and support Internet connectivity up to 100 times faster than the UK average.

A dense network build in Glasgow city centre will be the first phase of deployment, and among the first businesses to benefit will be the customers of HighNet's channel partners.

Up to 15,000 businesses across the city will stand to benefit when the city-wide roll-out is completed, based on CityFibre's Well Planned City model. Other projects include Aberdeen, Coventry, Edinburgh, Peterborough and York.

"This design approach accommodates current and future capacity requirements from the business community, public sector, mobile operators and data centre providers," said Greg Mesch, CityFibre CEO (pictured above).

"Ultimately, the network could form a backbone for a future deployment of a gigabit-capable fibre-to-the-home access network.

"HighNet has made this project possible and its strong customer base and partner network will be crucial to its success."

Glasgow is CityFibre's third Gigabit City project in Scotland, and when complete CityFibre will have an established network presence in Scotland's four largest cities, making it the largest wholesale fibre infrastructure provider in the country after BT Openreach, claimed Mesch.

HighNet MD David J Siegel (pictured left) added: "This collaboration marks a step change in HighNet's evolution as a B2B ISP. Access to high quality, high capacity Internet capability can be truly transformational and we are leading the charge in Glasgow."

So here we go with the traditional review of the year that was, and consider what clues it offers for the year ahead, writes Clive Jefferys, Managing Director of telco recruiter JMA Network.

It was a strange year in telecoms recruitment as placements and revenues produced an exact reverse of the traditional hiring calendar.

Normally we expect peak flow between February and June of each year, but here at JMA and across the recruitment industry sales performance ambled along with no particularly outstanding months.

At the time, a lot of wise heads in HR and Recruitment (myself included) took this as a sign of growth petering out.

There was plenty of anecdotal evidence to support this, what with falling joblessness and an all-time peak in the employed workforce in the UK. There were a lot of tyre-kickers out there too, clients and candidates that looked, but didn't buy.

Then it all changed in July with double activity in interviews and cash, repeated in August, September, October and November.

A key factor had changed - the salaries secured for new hires went up significantly. It became apparent that many of our clients got sick of losing out to counter-offers.

So they upped the ante in advance and counter-offered the counter-offer, before the counter-offer even came about.

They demonstrated how much they really wanted the lucky candidate by taking into account the going rate for a job, not the salary a person was already on.

Here's the proof - our fastest growing clients this year have enjoyed short lead times to filled jobs because they offered the highest salaries.

This applies to billings, support, engineering as well as those pushy sales people.

Conversely, we still have January and February vacancies live on our books, with companies that have been less flexible with the cash.

So there's an important message in this about recruitment and growth plans for 2016. It's not rocket science, and I am not the one pulling the levers. As ever, it's all about you!

GENBAND has signed a global reseller agreement with SAP under which SAP will resell GENBAND's PaaS Kandy.

With GENBAND's embedded communications capabilities, SAP Real-Time Communicator will allow enterprises of all sizes to improve workflow and communications processes by helping to enable sales, service and business professionals to chat, videoconference and collaborate in real time with their customers and co-workers.

SAP Real-Time Communicator will allow enterprises to offer personalised engagement, and enable simpler collaboration capabilities for sales, service and business professionals using embedded communications within their business applications for presence, instant messaging, and voice and video chat/conference.

SAP Real-Time Communicator is integrated natively into SAP Cloud for Customer, and can be integrated with the SAP hybris Commerce solution.

Paul Pluschkell, executive vice president of Strategy and Cloud Services for GENBAND, said: "SAP Real-Time Communicator allows SAP to enhance its customer engagement model and continue to deliver solutions that empower its customers to work smarter and more efficiently."

Nayaki Nayyar, senior vice president of Cloud for Customer Engagement, SAP, added: "By embedding digital communications in SAP Cloud for Customer, we are able to offer our customers improvements in productivity to help make the experience richer, more contextual and highly efficient for managing vital relationships."

SSE Enterprise Telecoms has kicked off phase two of Project Edge, adding a further 33 BT exchanges to its existing 13,700km, 232 Point of Presence (PoP) UK-wide fibre network.

The deployment adds another 50,000 city centre business postcodes to the 200,000 introduced by phase one of Project Edge.

This latest initiative follows the success of the original network expansion announced in November 2013 that saw 54 new Exchange PoPs - many of which were in London - added to the SSE Enterprise Telecoms network.

With the additional PoPs and by interconnecting with other fibre network service providers in the UK, as part of Edge Plus, SSE Enterprise Telecoms initiated full UK-wide coverage.

SSE Enterprise Telecoms experienced a 250 percent increase in orders of its Ethernet services in the last 12 months, largely due to its investment in Project Edge and the Edge Plus services.

"Our most recent network expansion initiatives have focused on adding 31 commercial data centres in London and Manchester that can deliver 1Gb and 10Gb waves in a week," said Colin Sempill, managing director of SSE Enterprise Telecoms. 

"Edge 2 will see us invest once again in national Ethernet services to meet the clear demand for high quality Ethernet connectivity across the nation."

SIP profiles that match vendor PBX and SBC configurations are now top priority for a growing number of ICT buyers in the market for a SIP solution.

Comms providers with the capability to give customers what they want stand to win, those that don't are certain to foot the blame for any post-implementation issues.

While SIP is in the ascendancy interoperability remains an important challenge, according to a study by The SIP School. Encouragingly, the research states that 40 per cent of the organisations polled are leveraging SIP trunks in their business already. Another 18 per cent are researching or testing SIP trunking with two per cent poised to buy.

"SIP trunk adoption is one of the fastest moving trends in telecommunications for good reasons," said Graham Francis, CEO of The SIP School. "It offers benefits ranging from low cost calling, centralisation of lines into a business, fast disaster recovery (or failover) and much more.

"However, as the survey illustrates, PBX vendors, service providers and enterprise customers are finding that SIP is not always an easy service to implement and sometimes not easy to support if things go wrong, with an apparent change in emphasis this year on who owns the problem."

In previous surveys respondents spread the blame for deployment issues roughly equally between PBX vendors, service providers and SBC vendors. This year the balance has shifted to over 36 per cent of respondents placing responsibility at the door of the service provider.

"The IP PBX is possibly seen as a more continuous and less disruptive technology compared to the SIP trunk and therefore any problems are likely to be laid at the door of the provider," added Francis.

The survey's questioning of how problems are dealt with revealed various levels of success across the channel, with PBX and SBC manufacturers significantly outscoring service providers, hosted VoIP providers and resellers on their ability to fix. "Considering that respondents believe service providers now own the problem this indicates a clear development need," added Francis.

What can organisations do to ensure they get the most out of their SIP trunking solution? Interoperability testing is an important step in verifying that a SIP trunk solution will work with an organisation's comms infrastructure, while offering insights into ways of getting the most value.

"An independently verified configuration guide made available through a recognised interop programme offers assured support, a reduction in deployment issues and rapid resolution should they occur," said Francis.

Executives often view testing as an end of project task, something to check-off and show it actually works. But testing is central to the proposition and does more than just prove or verify that a solution can work. Testing delivers valuable insights in the form of independently verified 'profiles' that improve deployment success, explained Paul Cunningham of interoperability testing house tekVizion.

"An increasing number of PBX/SBC manufacturers as well as SIP trunking provider are independently taking this route," he stated. "Many responses to the survey point to problems for which there is technically no excuse. Things like codecs, audio paths and registration procedures are not rocket science.

"The causes of deployments not working are ultimately down to a lack of proper testing and documentation, thinly stretched technical resources, the sheer number of options and variations even within a single vendors' product offerings, plus the rate at which vendors introduce new features."

The proliferation of new features is not likely to slow down any time soon, nor can organisations rely on thinly stretched technical resources, so providers can, and should, be testing their solutions regularly to ensure a successful deployment that delivers maximum value, emphasised Cunningham.

"An increasing number of organisations are independently verifying SIP trunking and other elements through third party testing," he added. "Leading SIP trunking suppliers are coming to us to perform interoperability testing and we provide detailed documentation for various PBX/SBC configurations. In many cases this is on top of the basic testing they may perform in-house. They recognise the value of having their SIP trunk configurations independently and extensively verified."

Understanding these issues helps companies to focus their efforts on improving the 'failing' elements, and also ensures that they understand what to do when things go wrong so they can fix problems quickly.

"It's not ideal having a service that's feature packed if you can't rely on it to work as expected," commented Francis. "The issues identified in the survey can and should be solved by appropriately skilled and certified staff performing proper interoperability testing that is independently verified.

"Without this, providers are activating trunks and hoping the 'good luck' quoted in one survey response will make it work. Enterprise customers and service providers alike need to rely on more than luck if the benefits of SIP and related applications such as UC are to be realised."

Onyx Group is to provide Newcastle United FC with a fully managed solution including a resilient network containing no single point of failure.

The club will be able to guarantee maximum availability and uninterrupted connectivity for media professionals and staff on match days.

Neil Stephenson, CEO of Onyx Group, said: "We have a long-term relationship with Newcastle United stretching back many years and we are delighted to renew the services of such a prestigious client.

"The longevity of our relationship speaks volumes of the exceptional work being carried out by our team and we are looking forward to working together for many years to come."

Daniel Bailey, Head of IT at Newcastle United, said: "As the club continues to grow on and off the field it is vital that we have an IT strategy in place that enables us to maintain the excellent levels of service that we expect at the club."

The growing ability of leading comms providers to stage their own powerful 'customer persuasion' events was aptly demonstrated at Twickenham Stadium on November 12th when Britannic Technologies staged its 12th annual Convergence Summit.

The Twickenham summit, supported by major vendors such as Mitel, Avaya, Gamma, Jabra and Polycom, was well attended by current and potential Britannic customers. The line-up of speakers was impressive and a busy exhibition hall and full spin-off seminar rooms were testament to the reseller's long standing reputation for imparting knowledge and sharing ideas with its clients and partners in a compelling networking environment.

In a packed seminar room delegates listened attentively to presentations from futurologist Mark Brill, Avaya Managing Director Simon Culmer and Vice President Ioan MacRae, Mitel Chief Technology Officer Jorgen Bjorkner and Microsoft UC Strategist for Skype for Business and Office 365 Robert-Jan Gerrits.

These were industry heavyweights, underlining the status of the event and the content they delivered was informative and thought provoking. The common strand running through all the messages delivered was that the digitalisation of communications is now happening at a pace, driven by millennials (employees born between 1980 and 2000) who, as Gerrits put it, are 'always mobile, always moving, collaborate early, often and always and have grown up on social networks'.

Britannic undoubtedly throws a lot of its own cash, resources and partner marketing development funds at the Summit which illustrates how vendors are now happy to take a supporting role in the mechanics of customer engagement and persuasion. Alternative Networks' Fusion Live event has had the same impact since launching a couple of years ago and, as one vendor representative at Twickenham put it: "I am frankly surprised more of our reseller partners don't go down this route as we are happy to put funding behind any event that ultimately brings business to us."

Britannic Sales and Marketing Director Jonathan Sharp conceived and founded the event in 2003 and it has been the mainstay of the company's annual marketing activities since then. For the first time the event was also duplicated for northern customers and partners at Old Trafford on November 26th.

In between delivering his event summary keynote and announcing one of many competition prizes, Sharp sat down with Comms Dealer to outline the genesis and aims of the event. "Many years ago we were introducing CTI technology and it scared the hell out of our salespeople," he said. "It was in the data world, it was all about integration and they weren't overly keen to take it out to market.

"I really wanted to force their hand so we set up a seminar and brought together partners, prospective customers and sales people and we promoted how CTI could help organisations become more efficient, which created interest and demand. Customers were speaking to salespeople saying they loved it, so it was all about creating a need around new technology.

"On that basis I ran CRM workshops for two years and then one day I was talking to our BT account manager who asked what we do to market ourselves. I explained that we ran a few events and he said 'have you ever thought of doing a bigger one?'. I said that sounds interesting and he made a call there and then and within a minute he said 'BT Tower in six weeks, it's yours. We'll pay for the lot but you have got to run it, promote it, get the speakers and get the audience there'.

"Of course I said yes and when he left I thought, oh hell what have I done? But we put it on. We got other partners to come and we got some great speakers. I think we got 40 people at that first event but we signed a big order on the day and I remember standing up and saying in my intro, welcome to our first ever convergence summit. It was only when I sat down that I realised what I said and we have done it every year since."

Aside from giving the Britannic brand greater awareness and providing a platform for the introduction of new technology and networking, the Summit is about sharing strategy and vision as Sharp explained: "The morning presentations are about the state of the nation, how we see things from a global perspective and where the industry and market is going. Beyond that the exhibition and break out seminars give people the chance to drill down in more detail.

"Ultimately, the event gives us a bigger market outreach, unearths new opportunities and enables us to share what's possible. And as a spin off we run 10 to 12 smaller seminars and customer workshops with partners on more specific subjects across the year."

Staging an event at venues like Twickenham or Wembley, where the 2013 event was held, are not cheap. Sharp budgets around £50K for the event each year, but he does get support from partners and he never find it difficult to justify the expenditure.??"The types of organisations that attend are of the highest level, we are pitching at a the top level too so the sales values are high and we use it as a mechanism to cross-sell and up-sell," explained Sharp. "We have won multi-million pound deals at the event so the RoI is always easy to measure."

Clearly, marketing the event is crucial to its success and Sharp uses social media, You Tube, Twitter and a separate website to promote the summit and achieve a 'following'. "If you do it right and give people what they want they'll keep coming back," he added. "You don't know what you don't know. My role is share the art of the possible."

Gamma's Group Marketing Director Richard Bligh has been promoted to Chief Operating Officer, reporting to Bob Falconer, Chief Executive Officer.

Bligh joined Gamma in 2004 and has over 20 years experience in telecoms in a variety of marketing and business development roles.

Falconer commented: "Richard has made a significant contribution to the successful development of the business for over 11 years. I am delighted he will now bring his considerable knowledge and energy to the Board as COO."

Bligh added: "We've come a long way since I joined Gamma, and I am looking forward to 2016 and beyond. There's no let-up in Gamma's plans and ideas, and it's great to be a part of it."

Entanet has welcomed the prospect of a new 10Mbps Universal Service Obligation (USO) for all broadband services being introduced by 2020, but sounded a note of caution on the move, saying many questions need to be answered before the industry and Internet users can be confident that the new promise of fast broadband for everyone will be fulfilled.

Darren Farnden, Head of Marketing at Entanet, points out that the plan is already being interpreted in some quarters as a 'get out of jail' manoeuvre by the government and a step towards passing the buck for enabling the UK's hard-to-reach areas for broadband onto ISPs.

Farnden stated: "We think the concept of a new 10Mbps USO is great news for the industry, channel and customers alike and we hope that it's not used as an excuse by government to pass off the responsibility of connecting the final 5per cent to incumbent providers who may not be able to deliver the most suitable technology."

The proposed USO would be legally binding and thus force BT or any other service providers to deliver at least 10Mbps anywhere in the UK.

According to Farnden the issues of how the USO will be defined and monitored, the potential impact on competition, and what impact it might have on the decision of whether or not to split BT from Openreach, will all need to be addressed.

"Most industry players, Entanet included, are calling for the BT/Openreach separation to go ahead as they believe it will allow better services and fairer competition," he said.

Maintel has partnered with customer engagement solutions vendor Interactive Intelligence to provide customers with an omnichannel contact centre environment and bring cost reductions to the enterprise.

Interactive Intelligence is a global provider of business communications and contact centre solutions. It provides software and cloud services for customer engagement, unified communications and collaboration.

As Interactive Intelligence's solutions can be overlaid onto legacy systems, the partnership will bring additional benefits to customers transforming their business, including cost effectiveness, flexibility and scalability. The solutions will be tailored to meet the needs of the mid to large enterprise.

John Bell, channel development director at Interactive Intelligence, said: "This new relationship will enable Interactive Intelligence to satisfy the demand and support needs for our on-premises and cloud-based contact centre solutions. It will also open up major new business opportunities for both of us in the public and private sectors."