Comms Dealer

Strategic moves made by Chess and outlined at last month's first Chess Partner Services conference got a big thumbs up from delegates with 98% of partners likely to take on new products and services.

John Pett (pictured), Sales Director at Chess Partner Services, said: "The industry is changing. Partners can no longer survive on just one product and have to acquire more of their customer's wallet share in order to grow their business.

"We take the pain out of adopting new services for our partners by providing them with the tools they need to go out and do what they do best - win business."

Formed in August 2014 following the merger of Chess Wholesale and Avenir Telecom's Airtime division, Chess Partner Services has 700 partners and £29m turnover, and has dubbed 2015 as the 'Year of Growth and Opportunity'.

The conference brought together expertise from all areas of Chess including voice, connectivity, networking, IT and professional services, and featured guest speakers from O2 and Microsoft.

The event included news on the ebillz billing solution which now sits under the Chess Partner Services umbrella and caters for all partners from start-ups to enterprise businesses.

A One Stop Shop for products and services was introduced alongside a new Elite Partner Programme launched with incentives and commercials.

"Partners with Chess now all have the opportunity to earn a further £16,000 each and every year with the new commercial bonus scheme, and will benefit from having £1,000s in cash, holiday prizes and tickets to the nation's biggest events," added Pett.

Poole-based VoIP Unlimited has supported its charity of the year, The Brain Tumour Charity, by taking part in Bandanas for Brain Tumours 2015.

In a mission to encourage awareness of the symptoms of brain tumours the team embraced casual Friday and donned bandanas exclusively designed by The Brain Tumour Charity as part of its Wear it out campaign and Brain Tumour Awareness Month, raising £86.

The key objective of Bandanas for Brain Tumours 2015 was to get the message to Parliament that diagnosing brain tumour patients earlier can save lives, as despite the government's commitment to early diagnosis of cancer it has provided no funds or resources to raise awareness of the symptoms of brain tumours.

Mark Pillow, MD of VoIP Unlimited, said: "VoIP Unlimited is dedicated to supporting The Brain Tumour Charity in its work to fight brain tumours and save lives through ground-breaking research, awareness and care.

"Taking part in Bandanas for Brain Tumours was a way to get behind the charity and spread the word about the incredible work it does, and to encourage the government to sit up and listen."

VoIP Unlimited also supports The Brain Tumour Charity's HeadSmart campaign, which aims to raise the awareness of brain tumour symptoms in children and young people.

Planet Hippo, part of The Network Selector Group, has launched a new reseller hosting solution. The company is also seeking to acquire additional hosted services businesses to extend its reach across the UK.

Darren Lavender, Managing Director of Planet Hippo, said: "This new hosting service takes care of server maintenance including backups, security, software installations and more, allowing resellers to concentrate on growing their businesses instead of supporting their own hosting service.

"The investment we have made in building new data centres can be leveraged by resellers to provide clients with a value-added service."

Planet Hippo offers Linux-hosted solutions across dedicated, cloud and shared networks enabling the delivery of a reliable and resilient hosting service. "With no minimum-term contracts and a 30-day money back guarantee, this new service presents a risk-free option for resellers looking to switch ISPs," added Lavender.

"We have experienced a significant expansion over recent months with a 100% growth month on month as an increasing number of digital agencies outsource their web hosting operations to Planet Hippo."

Ingram Micro has revealed details on its European participation in the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) program.

The program allows partners to provision, bundle, invoice, manage and support Microsoft Cloud offerings including Microsoft Office 365 and Windows Intune subscriptions.

The first Ingram Micro European countries to participate in the scheme include Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK, with central and eastern Europe to follow.

"Ingram Micro was one of the first to join the Microsoft CSP program in the United States and has seen early success," said Carl Alloin, executive director, Cloud Europe, Ingram Micro.

"Our goal is to differentiate Ingram Micro's Microsoft CSP offering by providing the cloud solution plus the migration services and a 24/7 customer-facing help desk for partners that choose not to staff a support organisation."

A new SLA launched by Fluidata offers customers a higher level of compensation if their service is down.

Customers will receive a monthly performance report which details any downtime with information on tickets and performance of the business as a whole.

Any payment owing will be automatically calculated as a percentage of the monthly fee and repaid.

"High speed Internet access is essential for businesses to operate," said Piers Daniell, Managing Director.

"Companies want assurances that they won't have any disruption to their service, which could cost them heavily. We can give that assurance, and our SLA+ is proof of our commitment to customer service.

"Service levels like this are essential now in our industry especially around measures like Jitter, Packet Loss or Latency."

Fluidata's standard SLA has also been improved, offering higher compensation (in some cases up to 40% higher than previously) for downtime.

Fluidata's SLA and SLA+ offer clients on annual contracts the option to cease their service early if they have consecutive breaches to their SLA.

Virgin Media Business has joined forces with Outsourcery to launch its first UC product for start-ups and smaller companies.

Multi-Tenant Lync can be scaled up or down each month and the cloud-based tools include instant messaging, web conferencing and IP voice.

The solution is accessible through a single interface, regardless of where employees are or whatever device they're using.

Mike Smith, Director of SoHo/SME at Virgin Media Business, said: "Small businesses are a driving force for our economy but without the right connectivity and tools in place they are not always able to realise their potential.

"We are offering them a simple, flexible solution so they can better communicate and challenge their biggest competitors."

Piers Linney, CEO of Outsourcery, said: "Multi-Tenant Lync is a great example of different technologies working together to help users share and communicate with each other.

"Our Cloud service will underpin this development for smaller businesses and we are delighted to partner with Virgin Media Business to develop such a tailored solution for their SME customers."

Despite 75% of IT decision makers wanting to procure all cloud services from a single provider, the majority have purchased offerings from three vendors, resulting in a complex cloud environment that may be hindering their agility and speed to market.

So finds a new report from Telstra, and according to Martin Bishop, Head of Network, Applications & Services, with consumers more in control of their purchasing power than ever before, a flexible and scalable cloud infrastructure has become increasingly critical to an organisations' success or failure.

"We are living in a buyers' market and our research suggests that in an effort to satisfy diverse customer expectations, many businesses initially turn to multiple cloud vendors to meet their various infrastructure needs. The result can be a complex cloud environment that is hard for the business to manage, integrate and control.

"Despite this, our research also reveals that pooling resources into a single private cloud isn't the ideal end-state either, with the majority of IT decision makers arguing this model fails to deliver the flexibility required for the varying types of processes, services and workloads that global companies must support.

"In a move away from the private clouds of yesterday, the trend in 2015 appears to be towards a hybrid approach, delivered by a single partner, fully accountable for an organisations cloud services end-to-end.

"In fact, our research shows that 72 per cent of IT decision makers would prefer a single provider or broker for all cloud services, then go through the challenge of managing multiple vendors."

According to Telstra's research, the flexibility and scalability associated with a hybrid cloud are what local IT leaders consider the most appealing benefits of this model.

Bishop added: "The market has shifted and customers now have the power to do what they want, when they want and how they want. Technology is clearly at the centre of this enablement and organisations that can align the power of hybrid cloud with customer demands are well placed to create what we're terming the Customer Centric Cloud - enabling more agile development and testing of applications, faster decision making and overall, an enhanced customer experience."

Carrier neutral data centre and network connectivity provider LDeX Group is to launch a second UK data centre in Manchester in Q2 2015.

The new data centre will feature 'best in class' colocation facilities with a capacity of 4MVA, network carriers and global Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) as well as offering 24x7x365 customer support.

Similar to LDeX1, the new 20,000 sq. ft. facility in Trafford Park will have an onsite satellite farm and will provide connections to content delivery networks, OTT players and cloud platforms, enabling customers to broadcast large scale events and stream content over multiple hosted platforms.

Customers can also look to expect energy efficient facilities which will have a 100% uptime SLA and offer 24x7x365 disaster recovery and remote hands support services.

Rob Garbutt, CEO of LDeX, said: "As a growing technological hub Manchester is a great strategic fit for us in expanding our customer orientated data centre portfolio. We look forward to investing in the economy there and providing employment and IT services to the local market."

Maintel has reported revenues up 35% to £41.9m (2013: £31.1m) in its preliminary results for the year to 31st December 2014. Adjusted profit before tax is up 16% to £6.1m (2013: £5.2m), with adjusted earnings per share up 24% to 46.7p (2013: 37.6p).

The proposed final dividend per share increased 29% to 11.6p, implying total full year dividend of 20.9p.

The company significantly improved its cash generation with net cash flow from operating activities of £6.1m (recurring revenues of £30.5m make up 73% of total Group revenue).

Eddie Buxton, CEO, said: "This has been another significant year in the development of Maintel. We have delivered a strong financial performance, with pleasing organic growth in a challenging market, complemented by the acquisition of Datapoint in 2013 and Proximity in 2014, which has brought additional strengths in the areas of unified communications, contact centres, design authority, data networking, security and wireless.

"Our confidence in the progression of the business is reflected in the 29% increase in the final dividend.

"We remain committed to considering further acquisition opportunities where these can be seen to add shareholder value. In addition, we continue to grow our expertise in evolving technologies, such as hosted environments.

"We've already made encouraging organic progress in this area, including the recent launch of the Maintel Cloud unified communications and contact centre proposition".

Maintel is also growing internationally, working with a number of global businesses operating across multiple countries. The Group now has a contracted managed service base of £25m per annum.

The telecoms industry has put up with Government inaction on the road to digital transformation for too long according to the Secretary of State for Media Sajid Javid.

Speaking in the Churchill Rooms at the Houses of Parliament where he was guest speaker at the launch of Channel Telecom's own 'manifesto for telecoms', the minister said: "Seventy years ago Winston Churchill said 'I never worry about action but only inaction'.

"For too long Government inaction is what your industry has had to put up with. As the world accelerated away down the long digital highway, the authorities here in Britain, stood on the hard shoulder and waited for the private sector to do all the hard work.

"For example, back in 2010 less than half of UK premises had access to superfast broadband and that simply wasn't good enough. It is a vital piece of infrastructure, just like roads, canals, railways or telegraph wires - so is the information super highway, today, a vital piece of our infrastructure."

The minister applauded the enterprise of private companies in the telecoms sector for building the road to digitalisation, especially the roll out of 4G, and promised Channel Telecom's partner guests at the event that any Government he was part of in the future would be 'committed to working with business leaders in driving forward Britain's economic recovery'.

Javid added: "We can be certain that Britain's telecom industry is a serious business, one that must be supported. Channel Telecom's own figures say that the sector is worth £38 billion to the economy and employs over half a million people. That is an incredible contribution and one that I want to thank you for tonight.

"We have canvassed your views on our digital communications infrastructure strategy which I'll be publishing shortly. And that's why, for example, we will be consulting with industry on the electronic communications code so that it can be fit for the future."

After the minister's speech, Stephen Yates, Channel Telecom's Head of Partners, unveiled Channel Telecom's own manifesto which calls on the Government to stamp down on telecoms fraud, improve the UK connectivity infrastructure by ensuring a more competitive market and widening Ofcom's regulatory powers.

Pictured (l-R): Clifford Norton, Sajid Javid and Eleanor Laing, House of Commons Deputy Speaker.