Comms Dealer

Customer contact technology specialist Sabio has been recognised for a second successive year fir its 40% growth in sales of Avaya UC&C solutions, picking up Westcon Group's 2015 UK & Ireland Growth Partner award.

"Over the last two years Sabio has grown its provision of Avaya solutions through Westcon distribution by an impressive 88%, while at the same time continuing to innovate, particularly in key sectors such as the mid-market," commented Garry Boon, General Manager for WestconGroup UK Unified Communication and Collaboration Solutions.

"Sabio's success is a result not only of strong growth in its Avaya enterprise business, but also through a commitment to innovation - with sales of its Sabio OnDemand hosted solution based on Avaya's midmarket portfolio already achieving over $1m in just six months since bringing the new product to market."

Sabio Director Andy Roberts said: "This award also recognises Sabio's commitment to growing not just our traditional Avaya enterprise business, but also innovating in the mid-market sector where we were able to design, build and bring to market our hosted Avaya-based Sabio OnDemand solution in under six months. We look forward to building on this success with WestconGroup, as we target further growth from our long-established Avaya relationship."

Employees of True Telecom have raised £430 for the Kent-based charity SCAR Crockenhill.

Over the past three months employees have been donating £2 to leave their suits at home on the last Friday of each month, opting instead to wear their home clothes.

SCAR Crockenhill is a non profit animal rescue and re-homing centre, based in Crockenhill, funded entirely by donations and run entirely by volunteers.

Christie Fogden, Head of Community Fundraising at SCAR Crockenhill commented: "We would like to say a huge thank you to True Telecom, Dartford, for the amazing £430 they raised for us by having a dress down day and donating to us for the privilege!"

Stuart Griffiths, CEO of True Telecom added: "We've seen huge growth as a business over the past few months and nothing makes us come together more than supporting charitable causes in our local area. Supporting charity has always been a priority here at True, so it's a real pleasure to raise some valuable funds for the charity SCAR Crockenhill."

Distributor Northamber PLC reported a narrowed pretax loss for its most recently ended financial year and said it remains 'prudently optimistic' it will provide a profitable business for the future. Shares were marked down in London.

For the year to end-June the company reported a pretax loss of £886,000, narrowed from a pretax loss of £1.2m a year before, as revenue rose to £65.5m from £62.9m.

The company labelled its performance a year of 'contrasting fortunes', with a positive first half performance followed by a second half that was hit by disruption surrounding the release of Windows 10 software.

Microsoft announced the cancellation of Windows 9 in March and launched Windows 10 in July. This drove uncertainty in the commercial user sector, producing a 'strong hiatus' in otherwise normal anticipated demand run-rates, it says. After the release of Windows 10, reports of problems with the product led to this hiatus continuing.

"While commercial users continue to seek to fully understand the new operating system's exact capabilities, or limitations, and the effect on their established in-use legacy software and hardware, they are largely refusing to commit to further hardware or software purchases," the company said.

Northamber proposed a final dividend of 0.3 pence, which brings its total dividend for the year to 0.6 pence, in line with the previous year.

"Although remaining optimistic regarding the future of the company, at this point in time I am unable to forecast the immediate future with any certainty but will continue to use our very best endeavours to deliver change and continue to aggressively dilute our empty revenue exposure to the commercial impossibilities of the mainstream hardware based sector," said Chairman David Phillips in a statement.

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."