Comms Dealer

ShoreTel Mobility has been revealed as among the first UC applications available for the Apple Watch.

The application enables businesses to integrate iPhones and iPads with their existing enterprise phone systems.

"Wearable technology is a fascinating frontier for the mobile professional," said Pejman Roshan, vice president of product management at ShoreTel.

"By extending ShoreTel Mobility to the wrist, accessing your enterprise UC system is literally as simple as checking the time."

Apple Watch owners can stay connected with ShoreTel Mobility on the go, without taking their iPhone from their pocket.

The ShoreTel Mobility home screen on the watch allows users to access commonly used UC functions, such as viewing any unread instant messages, accessing favourites, and joining a meeting.

The Glance view reveals ShoreTel Availability State, missed call and IM indicators, as well as Notifications alerts, and allows the user to act on incoming calls and messages.

The UK is fast becoming the entrepreneurial hub of Europe and Cambridge is one of the cities flying the flag, according to a new survey.

Research released last month from Barclays and Business Growth Fund showed that 8.6 per cent of 18 to 64-year-olds are involved in start-ups.

Due to growth in crowdfunding, incubators and accelerators, it is easier than ever for start-ups to get off the ground.

Cambridge finds itself at the centre of the boom, bringing in an impressive £135 million in investment funding in 2014 second only to London according to Business Zone.

Government policy is also increasingly placing entrepreneurial innovation as a top priority, especially within technology. The 2015 budget announcement made by George Osbourne pledged £500 million towards next generation technologies, an indication of just how much value is placed on the technology sector's potential future contribution to the UK economy. Included within the announcement was a promise of review on regulation which is inhibiting innovation within disruptive technology.

"The typical timeline from taking a high-tech product from inception to market has been reduced substantially in the last decade," said Benedikt von Thuengen, CEO at Speechmatics, a young speech recognition company.

"These shorter product lifecycles coupled with low entry barriers means that technology start-ups are booming, but as a result it has become a crowded marketplace with a lot of background noise making it more important than ever to stand out from the crowd."

More than 500 businesses in digitally deprived pockets of the UK have signed up to broadband services being offered by superfast infrastructure firm ITS Technology Group.

In the last two months uptake has accelerated from just 25 customers to more than 500 businesses signing up and utilising the government's BDUK (Broadband Delivery UK) voucher scheme designed to get 95% of the UK connected to superfast broadband by 2017.

With the first 100 customers now receiving services, ITS is connecting businesses at a rate of 80 a week, and more are signing up all the time in a bid to finally get access to a superfast service.

With many located on purpose built business parks across the UK, and having struggled to access speeds of up to 2Mbps, it goes to show that digital deprivation isn't limited to the rural population.

Roy Shelton, Group CEO of ITS, said: "Digital exclusion is more often associated with rural not spot locations, but in the course of our business, it is just as apparent in urban locations.

"Many of the businesses that have just signed up with us, have been over promised and under delivered to by a number of broadband suppliers; and with the only alternatives being to lease dedicated lines, put up and make do, or relocate, they have felt hard done by.

"ITS' services not only offer them a cost effective solution, but as the connection is subsidised by the government's BDUK voucher scheme, it means that superfast broadband is now accessible to businesses of all shapes and sizes that fit the criteria.

"These services are transformational in that it allows these businesses to take full advantage of what connectivity has to offer including access to a plethora of cloud-based services which will help them to collaborate and improve."

A cross-sector survey of UK employees by Phoenix seems to turn common perceptions about the extent of home working on their head.

According to the study half of UK workers work from home less than once a month, with over one third (36%) not working from home at all.

This is despite the fact that over three quarters (76%) of companies have a remote working policy in place, according to a separate survey conducted by Phoenix with 100 CIOs and IT decision makers across the UK and from a range of different industry sectors.

This survey also underlined the slower rate of adoption of remote working, with 62% of participants responding that just 30% or less of its company's employees work remotely more than once a week and 91% of CIOs and ITDMs said that 30% or less of those employees work from home full time.

Alistair Blaxill, Managing Director of Phoenix's Partner Business, said: "Remote working is often seen as a key ingredient of the successful business of the future but currently the reality is very different.

"Many companies have put remote working policies in place but that does not always mean it leads to adoption. Companies' intentions of increasing remote working is sometimes not being fully realised because the legacy infrastructure and IT support base is not as developed as it needs to be to implement it.

"We believe it is vitally important for businesses to address this in the future as mobility is seen as one of the most significant driving forces for the IT sector and an increasing number of workers will expect to be fully connected to work all of the time."

Claranet is to work with VMware to develop new cloud and hosted services as well as bolstering joint product, sales and marketing initiatives across EMEA.

In the pipeline is enhanced automation and orchestration of hybrid cloud services on an enterprise level, based on the latest VMware technologies, including VMware NSX, vCloud Director and vRealize Orchestrator.

VMware will provide Claranet with the technical expertise to assist with service design, deployment and support for Claranet's service offerings.

Neil Thomas, Claranet's Product Director, said: "Our respective expertise in working with enterprise-level customers will allow us to open new doors that would otherwise remain shut.

"Claranet's recent drive to supply application-led hosting services requires increased levels of automation and orchestration, from code and deployment to the infrastructure level.

"Working closely with VMware will enable us to supply a broader range of services, and keep up with the demands of our customers, which are quickly pushing beyond the confines of managed services providers' traditional operations."

In a move to motivate more Ethernet sales Zen Internet is giving away a series of prizes to customers who place the most orders.

Up for grabs is an Apple Watch (launched 24th April) with the runners-up scooping iPads, a five-star meal, and more.

Steve Warburton, Zen's Managing Director for Indirect Markets, said: "We're seeing increased demand for Ethernet as a result of improved coverage, falling prices and government funding with more businesses than ever now taking services from us.

"We're keen to extend our Ethernet provision along with our portfolio of other services across the market and will continue to run incentives like this well into the future."

The competition closes on 30th June 2015.

In its Q3 2015 results Avnet Technology Solutions reported sales of $2.5bn, an increase of 4.3% organically on a constant currency basis.

In constant currency, Avnet Technology Solutions' sales growth was led by its EMEA region, which grew 6.0%, and the Americas, which grew 4.9%. At a product level, Avnet Technology Solutions grew year-over-year in software, storage, and networking and security, it says.

Patrick Zammit Global President, Avnet Technology Solutions, says the growth in Europe has been down to good management and strong demand. "The team has been focusing for a few quarters on the market and on the customers. We also have powerful relationships with our manufacturers.

"Demand in Europe is good at the moment, indeed you have end customers basically upgrading the IT infrastructure and we're taking advantage of it."

AppSense, the expanding desktop virtualisation and management vendor, is boosting its channel in Europe to reach further downmarket.

It follows a two year plan for simplifying its software, and the release later this year of its version 10 which will be the easiest yet to use and setup, it says.

"We are driven by the customer experience," says Jed Ayres, newly appointed SVP channel marketing, in London for the two day EMEA AppSense channel event, which saw over 100 partners discuss the products and share best practices.

AppSense depends on channels for around 70% of its US sales, targeting 85% now that the product is more stable and has better out of the box functionality.

But it tends to have partners who are closer to systems integrators in approach, and having taken a lot of the complexity out, wants them to drive downmarket in size as well as pitching for the multi-million euro deals.

With changes last year to the partner programme, the desktop specialist is prepared to back its channel with more MDF and encourage them into the smaller projects with shorter sales cycles.

He says that it is doing well in financial services, healthcare and government, where the larger roll-outs tend to be, but these take time to uncover and deliver, so he wants to invest ahead of revenue with 10% more MDF.

With these verticals, and a fast growing market in retail, AppSense is doing well in the UK market and to certain extent in France, but wants more from the Netherland and DACH regions.

Not that it needs to add too many new partners, he says. "We don't need to expand the partner base; we have some very good partners, but we need to them to work at scale," said Ayres.

Some of the growth it wants may depend on its cloud component, also expected later this year, since it finds itself competing with cloud workspace virtualisation vendors.

It has had to adjust to a wider range of involvement by people at the customer now that department heads have more of a say in which IT they buy, and who may be attracted by the cloud systems.

But the double digit growth last year shows what can be done, and leveraging the relationships with Citrix and VMware resellers may yet deliver in Europe.

Arrow has signed an EMEA-wide agreement with Taiwan-based AIC Systems.

AIC's OEM/ODM server and storage solutions will offer customisation with storage options and a range of interfaces.

"We identified the need to collaborate with a leading OEM solution provider to grow our business in key market sectors in EMEA," said Jeff Lin, vice president sales, AIC.

The AIC OEM/ODM portfolio offers storage solutions including Direct-Attached Storage (DAS), Network-Attached Storage (NAS), and IP-SAN storage solutions.

Hats off to the STL sales team for completing the beastly Monster Race in Cornbury Park, Oxfordshire. Their blood, sweat and mud endurance test was rewarded with almost £400 raised for SpecialEffect, a charity that helps people with disabilities to play computer games.

Led by Sales Director Phil Donigan, the STL team encountered 25-plus obstacles over the challenging 5k course which they completed twice.

Donigan said: "It was a great example of teamwork as they guys helped each other over some of the more challenging obstacles and kept going to the very end."