Comms Dealer

telent Technology Services has been awarded a three year contract by Network Rail (High Speed) to maintain the station management systems for three international stations along the High Speed 1 rail route.

These include St Pancras International, Stratford International and Ebbsfleet International station, along with two engineering depots.

telent will maintain the station communications assets including customer information, help point and public address systems, access and security, local area and wide area networks, CCTV and station management systems on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link, a 109 kilometre high speed line linking London with the Channel Tunnel.

The company will also provide a 24 hour presence at St Pancras International with a dedicated team of engineers available to ensure the maintenance and reliability of systems.

"telent's strong engineering bias and rail industry credentials in both systems development and maintenance were important factors in our selection process," said Kevan Collins, Property Works Manager at Network Rail (High Speed).

"HS1 infrastructure is highly prestigious and we cannot afford any slip in standards. Our partnership with telent allows us to achieve our customer service and reliability targets."

Reg Cook, Director of Asset Management at telent Rail, added: "With over 45 million passengers passing through annually, St Pancras is a busy, iconic London station and a major gateway to Europe. We are looking forward to playing our part in ensuring continuity for travellers.

"This contract is about applying technology to help reduce failure rates and increase asset reliability in the stations along the route.

"In addition our remote monitoring capability will enable proactive maintenance in order to ensure reliability and quality of service."

European cities are leveraging their data sources in order to address high priority objectives - to reduce traffic congestion, improve energy efficiency, engage citizens, and present government as accessible and accountable.

However, the approach today is typically project-based, and more integration across organisational silos will be needed to achieve their longer-term goals such as economic growth and development of an indigenous tech sector, according to Frost & Sullivan.

New analysis from Frost & Sullivan, 'Real-Time Cities Survey', finds that municipalities aim to do much more than simply make existing information and transactions accessible online. They are embracing open innovation and experimenting with advanced applications such as 3D mapping and Virtual Reality (VR) to reduce the cost of urban planning functions.

The survey asked leading real-time cities about their data-centric strategies and initiatives. Responses from 27 cities in East and West Europe are represented in a Heat Map that highlights longer-term progress towards commercialisation.

"Public sector information (PSI) is being published on open portals and used internally to improve the efficiency of public sector services," says Principal Analyst for Information & Communication Technologies Europe, Sheridan Nye.

"Cities are also collaborating with academic partners and ICT vendors to build governance best practice into data transactions. This is the necessary foundation for commercialisation of data-enabled services in the near future." ??In a related report, 'Open Data Strategies of Real-time Cities', Frost & Sullivan profiles four leading European cities - Milton Keynes, Grand Lyon, Helsinki and Dublin.

Each sees an opportunity to stimulate economic growth by opening up their substantial sources of data to digital services innovators.

In return, applications developers and Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) suppliers benefit from access to the city as a live test bed, both for R&D and as a high-profile, proof of concept.

"Cities are saying they want suppliers to engage with local priorities rather than promote one-size-fits-all, end-to-end solutions," says Nye.

"However, the danger is that the market fragments and vendors struggle to build the economies of scale."

Longer term, multiple opportunities exist for vendors as cities prepare to integrate ICT into core operations. "Early investors can get a head-start in developing these data-centric solutions to try to become the Google of real-time cities," added Nye.

"As projects reach the end of their funding, typically 3 to 5 years, managed services providers will tender for a lucrative and wide-ranging role that will be central to the city's development."

Cloud security vendor CensorNet is working with software distributor Blue Solutions, aiming to use channels to reach SMB customers.

"As the modern business ecosystem diversifies, organisations are struggling to meet the needs of an increasingly mobile workforce as existing web security solutions are generally on premise," said Mark Charleton, co-founder and director of Blue Solutions.

"With more organisations moving to the cloud, it's becoming increasingly difficult to monitor and control what users are doing online.

"CensorNet's next generation web security solution, together with its in-built cloud application control (CAC) functionality, will give our resellers the opportunity to generate additional revenue streams.

"This will provide their customers with better visibility of what cloud applications their employees are accessing regardless of whether they are authorised or unauthorised."

Blue Solutions is focused on supplying to a diverse spectrum of resellers and MSPs across all vertical sectors.

"While we are strong in end-point security, we've been looking for advanced web security technology and CensorNet combines traditional web security and cloud application control in one single solution," added Charleton.

Ed Macnair CEO at CensorNet said: "This partnership marks an important step in our plans to grow aggressively in the UK by offering SMBs our enterprise-class web security solutions."

The announcement follows CensorNet's launch of its new Secure Web Gateway product which bridges the gap between web security and Cloud Application Control, aiming to offer the ability to discover and analyse cloud application use in a single solution.

Homes and businesses in York will be able to take TalkTalk's new ultrafast broadband at no extra cost.

The service, called Ultra Fibre Optic, will come as standard with TalkTalk's three consumer packages, SimplyBroadband, Essentials TV and Plus TV, as well as TalkTalk's Complete Business Broadband package for small to medium sized firms.

With gigabit speeds, households will be able to download a HD movie in less than 30 seconds, 100 photos in less than 5 seconds or an entire album in a second. The step change in connectivity will also boost businesses, improving efficiency and provide a competitive edge - all at no extra cost.

TalkTalk will use a new pricing model where customers will pay an all-in monthly price instead of splitting out a headline cost and line rental.

TalkTalk and its joint venture partners Sky and CityFibre are also testing techniques to drive local engagement. Residents and businesses in the Huntington and Groves areas of York have been invited to vote to say they want the pure fibre network, which is independent to BT Openreach's infrastructure, in their area. With enough votes, the joint venture will also provide Ultra Fibre Optic to nominated good causes in the local community free of charge.

Dido Harding, Chief Executive of TalkTalk, commented: "The UK has lived with broadband infrastructure that has suffered significant underinvestment for too long and we lag well behind the rest of Europe when it comes to rolling out pure, ultrafast, fibre networks. We need this kind of investment in superior fibre infrastructure to make this a reality.

"Ultra Fibre Optic will revolutionise the broadband experience in York by giving consumers and businesses access to all the speed and bandwidth they could ever need, future-proofing the city and making York better off."

The first customers are expected to be connected this autumn and homes and businesses currently with TalkTalk will be able to receive a priority upgrade to Ultra Fibre Optic.

Content Guru's Dutch team and Benelux network partner, KPN, have signed a storm deal with Chubb Fire and Security to deliver multi-channel cloud contact centre services to power multiple sites across the Netherlands.

Founded in 1818, Chubb (a global player in the provision of security and fire safety systems for businesses and heavy industry) employs circa 48,000 people worldwide and has annual sales of £1.6 billion.

Despite the large size of its operations in the Netherlands, Chubb had previously only operated a single, centralised contact centre to service all of its customers.

However, the company needed to decentralise this single contact site in order to facilitate closer relationships with operational departments.

This has to result in an higher level of customer satisfaction, especially for large and special accounts, and also has to provide more localised services to its SME customers, said the firm.

With its existing central site powered by on-premise communications equipment, Chubb was not only facing substantial capital expenditure to establish contact centres at its six new contact sites, but also faced the challenge of multiple disparate sites with no way of effectively interoperating.

Chubb chose a storm cloud contact centre solution, enabling the company to rapidly roll out the solution at all seven sites, migrating the existing PBX infrastructure to the cloud and delivering iACD (intelligent Automated Contact Distribution) across all locations.

By provisioning local numbers for SMS and voice, and by using location-based routing for web channels, the storm CONTACT solution ensures that Chubb is able to engage with customers on a localised basis, enhancing service levels.

Real-time and historical reporting provide granular insight into the effectiveness of each centre.

Mr Bas de Beer, Project Manager ICT, Chubb, commented: "Because of storm's cloud-based model, we are able to rapidly roll out the solution and deploy multi-channel capabilities at all of our new sites in weeks rather than months.

"The platform's intuitive service creation applications simplify every aspect of the deployment, from setting up completely new sites without any hardware, through to rapidly constructing all contact centre routing pathways.

"All of our contact centres are also linked through the cloud and we can manage the entire estate from a single location, providing us with agility in how we respond to changing customer demands."

BT Wholesale and NEC in the UK have completed interoperability testing to certify the use of NEC's communication servers on the BT Wholesale SIP Trunking (WSIPT) platform.  

WSIPT is a secure, cloud-based IP voice solution, used by businesses of all sizes.

The certification confirms NEC as an approved equipment vendor for the WSIPT platform and covers the SL1100, SV8100 and SV9100 award winning communication servers.

Gemma Hutchins, Senior Product Manager at BT Wholesale, said: "This opens up a huge area of the market to our resellers as NEC are one of the major communication vendors in the UK."

WSIPT is built on BT's strategic ISDN replacement platform within the heart of the BT 21CN core network and has the capacity to handle anything from one to 10,000 SIP channels.

Atos has bolstered its Big Data and security portfolio with the acquisition of German firm Blue Elephant Systems.

Atos aims to grow its business in IT lifecycle management, digitalisation, industry 4.0, Internet of Things and remote services and it will leverage Blue Elephant's systems such as the MIDAS product lines.

"The integration of secure R&D development and operating environments is a continuous requirement of our customers. The technology of Blue Elephant Systems complement our solution spectrum," said Pierre Barnabe, Chief Operating Officer Big Data & Security Atos.

Polycom's shares have tumbled to eighth-month lows as analyst William Blair's Jason Ader has downgraded the business to Underperform.

He points to weak videoconferencing product demand and sales execution, partner alienation on account of a recent overhaul of Polycom's channel partner programme, growing competition from both Cisco and videoconferencing upstarts such as Lifesize, and questions about Polycom's Microsoft partnership (which revolves around Microsoft's Skype for Business/Lync unified communications platform) following the software giant's introduction of a high-end videoconferencing product.

In Europe, Polycom recently pushed through price rises of up to 30% citing the effect of the strong dollar against the euro.

A study of 100 senior corporate executives by global law firm Reed Smith, in partnership with Mergermarket, reveals that 84 per cent of technology, media and entertainment (TME) companies expect to see more cross-sector M&A convergence deals over the next two years.

The report, entitled Wired up: The convergence of technology, media and entertainment, explains the changing M&A landscape for TME firms. This is being driven by an increasingly fierce battle fought by TME firms who are attempting to gain a competitive edge in the market. 2014 saw new levels of convergence deals amounting to US$34.5 billion, with this trend predicted to increase further.

The report reveals that cross-sector convergence varies widely across the TME sectors. Entertainment businesses are the most willing to branch out, with more than 33 per cent planning non-entertainment purchases. This willingness has the potential to put acquisitive businesses ahead, but they must be aware of the potential risks involved in cross-sector acquisitions.

Gregor Pryor, Reed Smith partner and co-chair of the firm's global Entertainment and Media Industry Group, explains: "One major challenge for cross-sector acquirers is understanding a new area of business. This can be a steep learning curve. If you are a big tech company, the biggest challenge is just understanding the space. Film doesn't operate in the same way as music or the same way as computer games. Companies need to learn about a new sector."

The report also shows that TME companies that are seeking growth are increasingly crossing borders, with 57 per cent saying their next acquisition is likely to be outside their home market. Of those businesses in search of cross-border opportunities, 37 per cent say they are most likely to target Asia-Pacific, followed by Western Europe (23 per cent) and North America (17 per cent). These expectations must be set against the need for firms to understand the political and regulatory risks in the target markets.

This desire to converge is not limited to the global giants in the industry. There has been a recent upsurge in so-called 'quad play' deals, in which telecom providers seek to become a one-stop shop for TV, broadband, fixed and mobile telephony.

Michael Young, corporate finance partner at Reed Smith, explains: "With increased cross-border convergence activity, companies must be prepared for the regulatory challenges that will result as they move from one jurisdiction to another. Local guidance, whether that be legal, commercial or financial, thorough due diligence and thoughtful deal structuring is critical to the success of these transactions."

Nick Cheek, global managing editor of Remark, the events and publications division of the Mergermarket Group, adds: "In the face of aggressive and agile competition, trusted business models can no longer be relied on. For many companies, survival increasingly hinges on developing capabilities beyond their traditional core."

Ten colleagues from Hove based comms provider Cellular Solutions have completed the latest leg of their cycle challenge across France which aims to raise £250,000 for children's charities.

Starting in Orléans, the event took place over three days within the midst of an unexpected heat wave. With stops on the way in the beautiful Indre-et-Loire towns of Amboise and Loches, the team arrived in Poitiers in Central West France, having covered 265km with the temperature reaching 38°c for much of day two.

The leg was sponsored by network provider Gamma and is on track to raise over £30,000, taking the total raised so far to in excess of £140,000.

Back in the office, fundraising efforts included a 1,000km static bike ride and a charity raffle with kind donations from local businesses plus corporate donations from O2, HTC and Samsung.

The money will be divided between 12 charities whose work ranges from caring for sick babies, looking after children with multiple disabilities and caring for children and adults who are terminally ill.

Damian Mottram, Managing Director of Cellular Solutions, said: "It has been a real challenge for the staff, both in France and Hove but their dedication and commitment to the cause was second to none.

"The event has been even more successful than any before. The support of our customers, suppliers and our headline sponsor, Gamma, is massively appreciated and I am extremely proud of what has been achieved for such worthwhile causes."

Donations were also gratefully received from friends and family of the participants as well as clients and suppliers of Cellular Solutions.