Comms Dealer

Venus Business Communications has teamed up with Video conference company Videonations to host an event at London's Polycom Executive Experience Centre to demonstrate how businesses can easily communicate locally and internationally via video conferencing, reducing the need for expensive or inconvenient travel.

Brian Iddon, Director Venus Business Communications, said: "One of our key client bases is the media industry, a fast paced environment where highly visual presentations to clients are a part of the working day.

"Resistance to using video conferencing in the past has been high with concerns about quality and reliability. Our demonstration shows videoconferencing has come of age with state of the art connection speeds and high quality equipment.

"Working with Videonations, we will show businesses how to create a meeting room experience without the need for attendees to move from their offices.

"We are seeing more and more businesses realise that they can improve their efficiency, reduce their carbon footprint and save thousands of pounds a year through video conferencing.

"Productivity also increases as associates and partners come together, building strong business teams, while reducing the overheads associated with travel."

PSU Technology Group has secured a significant six figure cloud communications contract with automotive outsourcing company All Fleet Services.

The platform is built on Mitel's MiCloud Enterprise UCaaS and SIP technology and the deal will help meet All Fleet's demand for scalability and greater reporting functionality. It will also enable the firm to maintain high levels of customer service.

Michael Lounton, PSU Managing Director, said: "Cloud-based communications are growing rapidly, with the MiCloud solution already powering 33 million connections daily. All Fleet recognised the benefits of our monthly pay-as-you-go billing model which removes the majority of upfront capital expense and makes ongoing costs more manageable and predictable."

The new MiCloud platform contains a range of features to help All Fleet drive team efficiencies and performance. These include collaboration tools and live and historic reporting.

IT and comms provider Alternative Networks has consolidated its group companies and unified its brands under one name - Alternative.

The company has also moved to new offices over two floors in 240 Blackfriars Road in London, bringing together a number of separate sites to create a London-based HQ and a hub for customer collaboration.

The project follows the acquisitions of a number of businesses in the past five years, most recently ControlCircle and Intercept IT in 2014.

"It was essential to bring these companies together under the Alternative brand, while consolidating people and places to integrate our broadening portfolio and secure fully aligned, incorporated, sales, customer services and operations functions," said Mark Quartermaine, Alternative's COO.

"Having recently moved into the new premises, we are already realising many operational and cultural benefits."

As part of the consolidation of its operations, Alternative has made significant upgrades in its own IT infrastructure, shifting all its legacy on-premise IT infrastructure and hosted services into state-of-the-art managed secure data centres.

It has also upgraded and enhanced resilience as an essential part of its expansion of on-line cloud services.

Alternative's new headquarters also houses the Customer Service Centre, central to which is its NOC (Network Operations Centre) facility, providing round the clock coverage of customers' technology estates.

Ed Spurrier, Alternative's CEO, stated: "Alternative continues to grow and deliver robust results and strong cash flow, all in line with our strategic objectives.

"Our growth needs to be matched by enhanced working environments and technology and our new premises and IT infrastructure provide Alternative with a sound platform for future growth, providing more and better space, greater flexibility, increased opportunities and an organisation more efficiently resourced."

Manchester-based UC firm Lapdog for Business has taken up residence at MediaCity following a period of growth.

Founded by former Vodafone and Outsourcery executives Simon Howitt and Adam Cathcart, the company launched in late 2014 and has grown to 14 employees in six months, prompting the firm to relocate to The Landing in MediaCity.??Cathcart, Sales Director, said: "MediaCity has already attracted a number of exciting, tech-based start-ups, and we're excited to join them.

"Our location will be a key to attracting Manchester's brightest young professionals as we recruit more staff through our Sales Academy."

David McTear, Operations Director at The Landing, added: "Lapdog for Business relocating to The Landing is another example of how our services, facilities and tenant mix continues to attract dynamic and successful businesses.
 
"It also emphasises how creating a successful digital enterprise hub is not just about bringing together creative agencies, designers and developers, it is about an entire supply chain of service providers and companies that complement each other."

Tyneside-based Synergi IT's Director Justin Short has collected a top accolade at Microsoft Ignite in Chicago.

The five-day conference brought together more than 23,000 IT people from around the world to train and hear about the latest Microsoft and partner technologies.

Short was awarded the title of Nintex Virtual Technology Evangelist (VTE), one of two in the UK to achieve the recognition and among 17 in the world.

Short, already a specialist in Microsoft Cloud, Office 365 and SharePoint, is also a skilled user and adviser in Nintex, a workflow platform and third party tool for SharePoint and Office 365.

Short said: "To be named among the inaugural Nintex VTE class recognises our ability to develop and deliver innovative client solutions, helping businesses take the work out of workflow processes, using technology to make business systems easier to use."

Virgin Media Business is to sell Unify's OpenScape UCC software to public sector clients following a link-up that brings a sharp focus on the government and healthcare sectors.

Duncan Higgins, Marketing Director, Virgin Media Business, stated: "Public sector organisations are striving to offer their employees new and more flexible ways to remain connected.

"As the UK workforce continues to become increasingly mobile, Virgin Media Business is helping its customers find the right technologies to achieve this. This agreement with Unify complements our existing core UC portfolio."

Following his record-breaking success winning the Porsche Carrera Cup Championship last year, 21-year-old Josh Webster, son of Nine Wholesale MD Nick Webster, has had his first taste of victory this season at the Spa Francorchamps track in Belgium.

Josh won the first race on Friday 1st May and achieved second place in the race the following day.

Tens of thousands of fans flocked to the 7km circuit to watch the third race of the 2015 season.

Spa Francorchamps, set in a forest with challenging elevation changes throughout, is well known in the racing world.

It is a demanding circuit and particularly affected by weather conditions as the trees can make the track alternately damp in one place and dry in another.

Josh flew into the history books in 2014 by becoming not only the youngest champion, but also the first Porsche GB Scholar in history to win the championship in his first year of racing.

He is sponsored by Nine Group and supported at every race by Nine's Wholesale Partners who join Nick Webster. His next race is Oulton Park on 6th/7th June 2015.

Jabra has introduced Intelligent Call Transfer functionality for Skype for Business into Evolve, its noise-cancelling headset series.

This allows users to keep the headset on and the conversation going while moving the call from softphone to mobile phone.

"The Jabra Intelligent Call Transfer feature is a natural evolution to the Jabra Evolve feature set," said Nigel Dunn, Jabra UK & Ireland Managing Director.

"The headset series' primary functionality remains to create that personal 'concentration zone' in open, loud and distracting workspaces, and the upgrade extends end user confidence of being in control of their device environment as they bring their 'concentration zone' with them."

The UK cloud adoption rate has climbed to 84% finds research by the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), with 78% of cloud users having formally adopted two or more services.

With the end of support for Windows Server 2003 later this year, the industry body expects the adoption and penetration of cloud services to show sizable increases over the course of 2015.

Alex Hilton, CEO of CIF, said: "Cloud computing has come a long way in just a few short years. When we commissioned our first major research project into the UK cloud market in 2010, just 48% of organisations had consciously adopted a cloud service.

"According to our latest research, that figure today stands at 84%. During this time, cloud has moved from the edge of the IT estate to its centre, and it is now largely regarded as just another way that we do IT.

"Importantly, it is, by and large, delivering the benefits the industry promised it would deliver. We know that 90% of organisations using cloud are satisfied with it, 70% expect to up their usage over the coming year, and that 56% believe that it has provided them with competitive advantage."

But, cautioned Hilton, cloud isn't yet all things to all men and will continue to sit alongside on-premise solutions for some time to come.

"Although more organisations than ever are committing to a 100% cloud environment, the vast majority are a long way from migrating their entire IT estates. Just 15% consider their primary IT model to now be cloud, and around half of businesses cannot foresee a time when they will move all of their IT to the Cloud - instead managing a blend of IT delivery models.

"Looking to the year ahead, we have every confidence that the cloud's momentum will be maintained, helped in no small part by the retirement of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Microsoft Small Business Server 2003.

"While first-time adoption is likely to slow somewhat, penetration of Cloud services within organisations, which appears to be happening at a faster rate than we had anticipated, will continue unencumbered. Assuming, that is, that Cloud Service Providers can effectively put forward the business case for adoption and build further confidence amongst end users by improving levels of accountability, capability and transparency."

UK IT leaders are the most challenged in Europe, but also the most optimistic about the future, according to a study by Claranet.

While many of these challenges are expected to lessen over the next five years as IT services providers start to manage more of the IT estate, the extent to which they can be solved will depend on how effectively IT leaders can work with their partners, reckons Claranet. 

The pan-European research report, which surveyed 900 IT decision-makers from the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Portugal and the Benelux, from a range mid-market organisations, found that the biggest challenges facing UK IT departments are security and compliance (selected by 53% of respondents), optimising IT (50%) and increasing complexity (48%).

They do, however, predict the sharpest drop in terms of the challenges that they expect to face by 2020, which will bring the UK's figures in line with, or below, the European averages.

For example, 50% state that that improving/optimising IT is a challenge today, but just 32% expect it to remain one in 2020. Similarly, the proportion today that expects enabling collaboration across the organisation (39%) is expected to half within five years.

Michel Robert, Claranet's UK MD, said: "It's clear that IT leaders in the UK face, and will continue to face, a wide range of challenges as they look to manage an IT estate that is growing in complexity.

"And while it is encouraging that those in the UK expect these challenges to reduce over the next five years, the degree to which they will can be tackled will depend heavily on the relationships that they can cultivate with their IT services providers. The breadth and depth of the issues currently faced will make trust a critical factor in navigating them.

"Interestingly, improving and optimising IT appears to be a greater focus in the UK than in other parts of Europe, highlighting the opportunity for service providers, like Claranet, to help businesses run their current IT estates and freeing up time to work on aligning innovation options and market opportunities."