Comms Dealer

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."

Enghouse Interactive has signed up IP Integration as an EMEA partner, extending a long-term existing relationship.

IP Integration will sell, market and deliver a broad range of Enghouse Interactive solutions including the company's flagship contact centre platform, the Enghouse Interactive Communications Center (EICC).

Although the two companies have a long and successful history of working together, this new partnership formalises and deepens their relationship.

IP Integration is witnessing major changes in the UK contact centre market and, as it grows its customer base and continues to service some of the largest contact centres in the UK, it has identified the need to expand its core contact centre platform capability to address all contact centres, cross-platform.

Gary Bennett, Channel Sales Director, Enghouse Interactive, said: "The IP Integration team can draw on a blend of technical, sales and consultancy skills which complement the rich functionality and open standards architecture of our contact centre solution."

Neil Boxer, Chief Technology Officer, IP Integration, added: "With the complexity of contact centres today, it is essential to make sure the core platforms are fit for purpose. However, it is ever more critical to deliver 100% of the client's requirement which often requires us to develop specific applications, integrated into the core IT environment. In addition, all of this capability is increasingly required to be delivered in the cloud, which this partnership enables us to do."

Exponential-e has opted for NewVoiceMedia's ContactWorld for Sales solution to improve its sales operation.

Exponential-e's sales staff are now using the ContactWorld for Sales solution to help them interact with prospects through its integration with Salesforce.
 
Using the 'click-to-dial' functionality, staff can now make calls directly from within Salesforce. Customer records are then automatically updated to leave a complete history of interactions, and a facility helps create follow-up activities so that no lead is lost.

Inbound calls are dynamically routed to the appropriate team member based on information held in the database and the company can prioritise calls from key customers or prospects to improve handling time and customer satisfaction.
 
Chris Yerrill, Academy Sales Manager at Exponential-e, commented: "By monitoring and delivering data on individual performance, executives can develop a dynamic picture of the overall pipeline and sales performance. This includes a breakdown of data on number of calls made, length of conversations, conversions to meetings and eventual conversions - all tracked using Salesforce dashboards."

Darren Boyce has left Maintel having completed a one year term following Maintel's acquisition of Proximity Communications in October 2014.

Boyce, who was previously CEO of Proximity, had been appointed to the Board of Maintel Holdings as a non-executive director with effect from 24 November 2014.

He has now resigned from this position but will continue to advise the company as a consultant.

Webroot reported growth across all business segments driven by strong customer demand for Webroot SecureAnywhere solutions and a substantial increase in channel and MSP partnerships.

The addition of new customers fuelled double-digit, year-over-year growth across the company's target markets. Bookings from new business grew 29% in the OEM segment, 46% in the business segment and 16% in the consumer segment compared to the first fiscal quarter of 2015.

This new business resulted in the addition of over 1.3 million new home users, over 453,000 new business endpoints, and over 700 new MSP partners during the quarter.

"Our first quarter double-digit revenue growth demonstrates a significant shift in the industry to adopt our Smarter Cybersecurity approach," said Dick Williams, Webroot CEO.

"Building on the record growth we posted in FY15, we have started FY16 with strong results in all segments and in all regions. We enter this quarter with solid pipelines in all segments and with new product offerings that will enable us to ramp up throughout the remainder of the year."

Webroot also introduced the IOT Security Toolkit which enables Internet of Things (IoT) and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) solution designers and system integrators to integrate cloud-based threat intelligence services to protect critical systems against modern malware, zero-day exploits and other external threats and internal vulnerabilities.

Tech Data has reported Q3 net sales of $6.4bn, a decrease of 5% from $6.8bn in the prior-year quarter.

In Europe, net sales were $3.9 billion (60% of worldwide net sales), a decrease of 6% from the prior-year quarter. On a constant currency basis, net sales grew approximately 6%. Gross profit was $314.8m, or 4.90% of net sales, compared to $335.0m, or 4.95% of net sales in the prior-year quarter.

Gross profit improved approximately $9 million, or 3% year-over-year.

"Continuing our positive first half momentum, I am pleased to report that Tech Data delivered another solid quarter in Q3 of fiscal 2016, said Robert M. Dutkowsky, chief executive officer.

"On a constant currency basis, we posted good top line growth, improved non-GAAP operating income by nearly twice the rate of sales growth, and grew non-GAAP earnings per share by 19% to a record Q3 level.

"Additionally, for the first nine months of the fiscal year, we grew non-GAAP earnings per share by 31% on a constant currency basis, generated $221 million of cash from operations, and completed $147 million of share repurchases.

"Tech Data's performance through the first nine months of the fiscal year is a testament to our company's strengths, namely, our diversified customer and product portfolios, strong vendor relationships, state-of-the-art global IT platform, and our teams' ability to effectively respond to the demands of the ever-changing IT market."

Mobile security specialist Lookout has embarked on a cross-European reseller hunt.

David Helfer, VP of Worldwide Channel Development, says there is a deep consultancy business in enterprise mobility for VARs and integrators.

With some 20 partners in Europe and working through distributor Exclusive Networks, he says the mobility area requires a different set of skills from general enterprise security.

"Enterprise mobility is all about risk assessment," he tells IT Europa. "And security channels have to have the right skills sets and be more forensic in approach".

Legacy security methods by themselves are not sufficient to protect against advanced mobile threats, he argues. Signatures can't scale with the pace of malicious software development and behavioural analysis lacks the context to consistently identify true risk, often creating noise amid which real security signals can be lost.

Lookout bases its predictive technology on its Global Sensor Network which monitors the worldwide population of millions of mobile devices, including 70 million users with 11 million applications, a list which is growing by 20,000 new apps every day.

Having recently named Jamie Andrews as Lookout's EMEA Partner Director, the company is looking to add partners, particularly those selling to 2,000-3,000 seats in the enterprise, though obviously the solutions scale up and down.

It raised $200m last year specifically to build the business globally and now claims to have over 350 staff.

While mobility channels have experience in that market, they are not necessarily right for this area, which require the ability to talk to CIOs and CSOs.

Not that the channel for Lookout will be vast in number, because of the skills and relationships with users that are required - probably no more than 50 in total across the region.

Converged systems are now established as go-to platforms for customers' mission-critical workloads.

According to the Technology Business Research (TBR) Converged Systems Market Landscape, converged systems continue to displace traditional, stand-alone infrastructure, establishing the market as critical to the future longevity of data centre hardware OEMs.

Market maturity and saturation will result in a more well-informed customer base, with decisions extending outside the IT department to include line-of-business executives. For vendors, working alongside partners to deliver messaging balancing technology-driven workload expertise and improved business outcomes is critical to maximising adoption, it says

"The evolution of converged systems represents a landmark in the history of data centre infrastructure," said Christian Perry, a TBR principal analyst and practice manager. "Customers are overcoming internal resistance to IT change and deploying these systems rapidly at the expense of traditional servers and storage arrays."

Converged systems are in a period of mainstream adoption, rendering the market crowded and competitive. Differentiation is becoming challenging as capabilities across competing systems increasingly overlap. In this climate, vendors are beginning to balance their portfolios between comprehensively serving general-purpose workload needs and accommodating specific workloads such as analytics requiring high performance and reliability with purpose-built systems.

"Converged systems vendors continue to drill down into customers' most resource-intensive and mission-critical workloads," said Krista Macomber, a TBR data centre analyst. "This creates opportunity not only for increased converged systems sales, but also for consulting, add-on software and add-on hardware sales."