Comms Dealer

Resellers are best placed to cross-sell energy and exploit falling prices but only if they act fast, according to telecoms entrepreneur Simon Payne. He urges resellers to add energy to their  service portfolio on a wholesale basis and is offering cash up front for deals won through his wholesale energy business Fidelity Energy.

Payne said: "My partner Alan Shraga and I have dipped deeply into the funds we generated from the sales of Cable Telecom and VNetworks to offer up front cash commissions on wholesale and direct energy deals.

"The industry norm is to receive commissions month-on-month over the life of the contract. We are offering as much as three years cash up front. In some cases, this can even be upon signing the order, which helps if the handover doesn't occur for a year."

Payne and Shraga, who now run Henley-based ICT service provider Fidelity Group, have made millions in the telecoms industry for themselves and their reseller partners over the last 15 years and have now negotiated deals with 14 of the UK's top energy companies to launch Fidelity Energy.

Payne says his new enterprise has generated £11.7m of energy contracts in just nine months by selling to the existing base of clients managed by Fidelity Group.

He says the net profit on this revenue is £920k and is now rolling out a wholesale energy model to enable other channel businesses to cash in fast on the current energy prices which are at an all-time low.

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has provisionally cleared BT Group's planned takeover of mobile phone network EE.

According to the CMA the £12.5bn takeover announced in February, was would not bring 'a substantial lessening of competition' in the UK.

The proposed acquisition would enable BT to accelerate its existing mobility strategy with seamless services that combine fibre broadband, Wi-Fi and 4G.

A newly designed website launched by Lily Comms boasts over 16,000 words of content with 12 different videos to help prospective and current clients learn more about the company and the products and services they provide.

The new design is intended to make the site easy to navigate for users with the opportunity to ask for more information or advice available on every page throughout.

A live chat facility has been enabled so that users can speak to a member of the Client Services team online in real time.

Among many updates, the About Us section has been developed to include both Lily Comms' green and charity initiatives, supporting the company's corporate social responsibilities.

Head of Marketing, James Waplington, is aiming for the website to play a pivotal role in helping the company double its turnover for a third year in row. "We're excited to see the trend in sales coming from online sources dramatically increase over the past year," he said.

"Due to this success we are now planning to put significant resource into various channels of digital marketing and the new website is central to our strategy.

"By combining modern marketing techniques with more proven, traditional activities we are confident that we can replicate what we have done over the last two years and double our turnover in the next 12 months."

TalkTalk has confirmed that all of its four million UK customers could have been affected by a data breach and the type of data accessed includes names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, telephone numbers, TalkTalk account information, credit card and bank details - some of which wasn't encrypted.

Justin Harvey, CSO of Fidelis, said: "The TalkTalk data breach will no doubt send shockwaves throughout the UK. The sheer number of people that will be affected by this breach, in a personal and business capacity, means that it will be one of the defining cyber attacks of 2015. The pivotal point being that, reportedly, not all of the data held by TalkTalk was encrypted.

"Cyber attacks are becoming increasingly common and despite daily headlines appropriate measures, such as encryption of personal data, are not being taken. What's more, when cyber attacks do happen, it is absolutely paramount that the breach is detected as early as possible and communicated to customers immediately."

Cloud Telephones is offering resellers that sign-up for hosted VoIP services a free one-year subscription to Gamma's Horizon service along with a free call bundle and Polycom VVX410 IP phone.

The services distributor wants more resellers to experience the benefits of the service for themselves as a way of encouraging and inspiring them to sell it to their customers.

John Carter, Managing Director of Cloud Telephones, is convinced that it will be an effective way of persuading more partners to take the hosted service to market.

"Once resellers have tried the Gamma Horizon service for themselves, they will want to sell it. We're giving them the chance to experience the advantages of having very low telephony costs and a totally flexible way of working. They will then be much better-placed to convince customers. It is a very simple way of giving them the chance to preach what they practice."

Many resellers are already successfully selling hosted VoIP services, he adds. "We are working with a growing number of resellers and we are generating more leads every day. Some of our partners have signed some very big contracts and they are seeing good recurring income as a result of that. There is more business out there and room for more resellers to get involved and start growing their business."

ShoreTel posted revenues of $90.2m for Q1 2016 (ended September 30, 2015), compared to $90.4m in the first quarter of fiscal 2015.

"In the quarter we rolled out ShoreTel Connect, reignited our cloud bookings growth, expanded our hosted gross margins and delivered record cash flow from operations," said Don Joos, president and CEO of ShoreTel.

"We are now in the third and final phase of our strategic transformation and we continue to operate from a position of strength with momentum and accelerating results."

Recurring revenues, which consist of all hosted and related services revenue plus support revenues, represented 51%of total revenue in the first quarter of fiscal 2016 and reached an annualised value of $184m, up 15% compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2015.

Hosted revenues of $29.6m were up 19% year-over-year and 4% sequentially.

The total number of installed customer seats increased 18% over the first quarter of fiscal 2015 to approximately 189,200.

NTA acted quickly to escalate the development of a hosted telephony dialler solution and launch it to the channel following prompts from partners.

"We received many requests to develop this solution so we prioritised the project with our in-house developers," explained MD Paul White (pictured).

"Predictive diallers can often connect calls before an agent becomes free, but our solution contacts the agent prior to making a call, ensuring there are no silences which can result in upsetting the prospective customer even before starting a conversation about a product or service."

White also noted that data from the Telephone Preference Service (TPS) and Corporate Telephone Preference Service (CTPS) can be uploaded into the dialler which checks online data seconds before the call is made. "Only checked numbers against the TPS database can be called," added White.

Other features that come as standard include appointment booking via the system and caller blacklisting.

In a separate development Romford-based NTA also launched a new Private Digital Subscriber Line service (PDSL) which is locked down for voice purposes only, promoting enhanced QoS when using hosted telephony services.

"The circuit itself has an internal IP address delivered by the NTA network meaning that no public IP address exists, and therefore no traffic is physically going over the Internet," explained White.

"This in turn makes the service less open to toll fraud and means that NTA can ensure continuity and reliability of the service end-to-end."

First port of call for Andrew Smethurst, the newly appointed Head of Channel (UC) at Gamma, was Fidelity Group's HQ in Henley-on-Thames where he presented MD Alan Shraga with a plaque to acknowledge the service providers new Platinum Partner status.

Shraga told Comms Dealer: "This recognition differentiates us from Gamma's 700-plus registered partners and enables our channel to be first to market with new Gamma products and have exclusive commercials."

The winners of the O2 Direct Partner Network Digital & Customer Excellence Awards met at Silverstone race track in Northamptonshire to celebrate following the re-launch of the O2 Direct Partner Network earlier in the year.

The new awards hailed the end of the outdated tiered system which has been used across the industry for many years, and are indicative of O2's new approach in rewarding partner's overall capability instead of grouping them by their scale and size alone.

The day kicked off with lunch in the British Racing Drivers Club over-looking the track, followed by the awards presentation.

Senior figures from O2 - Ben Dowd, O2 Business Director, Paul Lawton, General Manager SMB, and Jason Phillips, Head of Partners SMB - presented Excellence Awards to 21 of O2's partners, 11 of whom won both the Digital and Customer Excellence Awards.

As well as receiving their awards the partners got the chance to race each other on the world famous track, James Wright from Vivio being crowned Driver of the Day (pictured) on top of an award for Digital Excellence.

All winners receive new excellence award branding, additional commercials and further marketing, training and consultancy to help develop their business.

Pragma put in a another strong growth performance in its third year of trading with growth of over 50% and was named a finalist in the upcoming Comms National Awards in the Convergence Distributor of the Year category.

Pragma's main supplier, Ericsson-LG Enterprise, is also shortlisted as a finalist in three awards, and four of their top resellers have also secured finalist positions.

Ericsson-LG Enterprise were one of only four vendors to demonstrate organic year-over-year growth in the recent Gartner analysis of the Enterprise Telephony Equipment Revenue.

Ericsson-LG Enterprise saw an increase of 8.8% according to the report that reviews the top 10 Global vendors.

This performance is very much in-line with the UK results where Ericsson-LG Enterprise and Pragma continue to outperform the market and show strong growth.

Will Morey, Marketing Director, Pragma, said: "It is great to be working with such a strong global vendor and see the growth and success that this brings. Our resellers continue to deliver outstanding performances and help us to drive significant gains in the UK market for Ericsson-LG Enterprise."

To support this growth Pragma has continued to expand its team, adding more sales, marketing and technical specialists to provide class leading levels of support to their sellers.

Pragma also highlighted the upcoming launch of aplatform designed to offer a reseller focused cloud telephony proposition as well as a service provider proposition that offers PBX functionality in the cloud.

This new initiative will underpin its growth plans in 2016 alongside continuing to grow their on-premise unified communications business.

Tim Brooks, Managing Director, added: "The combination of another strong growth performance and Pragma being shortlisted for finalist positions at the Comms National Awards is one of the highlights of our year. We are looking forward to more of the same in 2016."