Comms Dealer

Azure is migrating its comms to the cloud following a deal with 8x8 that enables the vacation ownership company to transform its customer service operations in its Malta-based head office where the UK and Scandinavian membership is supported.
 
Azure specialises in offering luxury holiday properties at the Golden Sands Resort and Spa in Malta. With plans to expand its member base in Europe to include Germany, Norway and Italy, Azure called on 8x8 provide a platform that will grow alongside the business.
 
8x8 will also be upgrading Azure's customer service offering with its 8x8 Virtual Contact Centre solution.
 
The new system will support all 250 of Azure's staff in its Malta and UK offices and is estimated to deliver cost savings of 35% on telephony.

Marthese Vella, Chief Information Officer, Azure, said: "We're looking forward to working in a more unified and coherent way as an organisation and give our customer service agents the tools they need."
 
Kevin Scott-Cowell, UK MD of 8x8, added: "A truly unified communications platform that can offer everything from mobility, flexibility and scalability through to presence management, advanced call forwarding, ring groups and analytics is vital to Azure's continued success."

A bikeathon and company car wash event staged by Bamboo Technology Group at its Cheltenham offices has raised over £500 for local charity Deaf Direct which supports the deaf and hard-of-hearing in Herefordshire, Oxfordshire and Worcestershire.
 
During the bikeathon, which took place on Cheltenham's hottest day of the year, 32 staff members did nine minute stints each on a fitness bike clocking up 107 miles between them. Other staff cleaned their colleagues' cars for a £10 donation.

MD Lorrin White said: "With one-in-six people in the UK being unable to hear this was a worthy cause which affects us all in some way."
 
Deaf Direct CEO Philip Gerrard added: This year is Deaf Direct's 90th anniversary and we are pleased that local businesses are supporting our work.

"Hearing loss is invisible, but we make sure the person isn't and are thankful that Bamboo has helped to change the lives of deaf and hard of hearing people."
 
If you would like to make a donation please visit -
www.justgiving.com/fundraising/Bamboo-Bikeathon.

SOS Communications has added Cisco's new IP phones to its hosted telephony solution Premier-Cloud.

According to SOS MD Colin Hepher the move brings 'greater differentiation' to his proposition as Cisco bids to claw back market share in the competitive IP phone space.

"Hosted telephony is no longer in its infancy even though penetration has only reached a small percentage of the potential market, yet most resellers are offering very much the same platform base and features," stated Hepher.

"Not so long ago Cisco had over 50% of the market share and intends to regain this space as soon as possible."

Hepher says SOS Communications will play a key role in helping Cisco advance its strategy believing that the infrastructure and methodology that supports Premier-Cloud along with attractive commercials will tip the balance.

"What really counts is resilience," added Hepher. "Most adopt a model where 'identical' servers are located in two separate data centres. One is designated as active and carries all the live traffic. The other is either a hot or warm standby and is normally inactive.

"Failover between the two at network level is relatively straightforward. But there are a number of serious weaknesses to this approach leading to customers suffering long delays, sometimes days, in the event of failover."

Following the Cisco distribution deal Hepher has grasped the megaphone and is amplifying his 'alternative' message to the channel.

"There is another way," he stated. "Our telephony service (phones, portal, SIP trunks and APIs) is supported by two resilient data centres that are fully operational, always carry live traffic and have capacity to scale.

"Our customers are evenly distributed between them and each facility uses the native IP ranges of the data centre provider.

"Since all data centres are active in the event of a data centre failure the only thing that changes is the amount of traffic they carry."

It is not always possible to protect all calls in play during a data centre failover, but Hepher emphasised that IP phones such as Cisco's and resilient SIP trunks can failover significantly faster than BGP.

In what Hepher described as 'another attention grabber', SOS is offering free SIP trunks to channel partners.

Resellers can find out more about SOS's channel propositions during three roadshows next month - 4th July in Manchester, 11th July in Horsham and 18th July in Leeds. 

MSP Streamwire has followed up its 2015 acquisition of Event Computer Services with the purchase of EACS, boosting revenues to almost £20m.

Kevin Timms, who co-founded Streamwire with Anne Stokes, will become CEO of the combined company which will trade as EACS.

Stokes will remain on the board and lead the transition, but will also continue the development of wider business interests already underway.

Timms said: "Our acquisition of EACS provides the platform to take our business to the next level, expand into the cloud and cyber security spaces and take on the established IT suppliers."

Never be stumped for a response to the needs of a customer, urges Number Supermarket Director Darren Hughes, who made sure all bases were covered when he established the company in 2014 having secured access to over a million numbers across every different UK range from the outset.

"The aim was to ensure that all clients always had their needs met," he stated. "I've been in telecoms for over 20 years and in that time seen the shift towards more automation, but we insist on making service all-encompassing, personal and around the clock. It's what partners expect."

Number Supermarket has kicked off a reseller recruitment campaign and turned up the volume on what it believes to be key differentiating factors that will catch the attention of potential partners, including its customer-first strategy, white label web portal and management systems, rebate generating numbers and live cloud-based reporting.

Jola has added O2 SIMs to its JolaMobile portfolio, meaning that partners can now order voice and data SIMs for devices from either Vodafone or O2 and control them via a single management portal.

Lee Broxson, Sales Director, commented: "At Griffin we launched 'ISP in a box,' a white label provisioning system for resellers to manage their own Internet connectivity from multiple carriers.

"With Jola we have developed a similar system to manage mobile SIMs. With the increasing demand for 3G and 4G connectivity and 5G in the future, resellers need something to manage burgeoning mobile estates.

"Our white label portal communicates in real-time for adds, moves and changes and can be used by resellers and their end users.

"And the overage protection feature allows resellers to bar SIMs when they reach their data limit to avoid the risk of bill shock from higher, out-of-bundle tariffs."

BNP Paribas rising star Jean-Michel Boyer has taken over the UK operation as CEO following former chief exec Tristan Watkins' appointment to Programme Manager of the BNP Paribas North America Growth Plan, a joint initiative with Bank of the West to expand the Group's equipment finance business in the US and Canada over the next three years.

Boyer will be responsible for providing leadership and management for the 450-strong team and overseeing key customer relationships.

He has worked with the BNP Paribas group for over 30 years, starting in 1986 at UFB Locabail, the equipment leasing arm of Paribas subsidiary Compagnie Bancaire.

Boyer has held several senior managerial, sales, and business development positions within the Agriculture, Technology Solutions, and International Business Lines Equipment & Logistics Solutions (IBL ELS) divisions.

Boyer joined the French division of BNP Paribas Leasing Solution in 2009 as Head of Equipment and Leasing Solutions before becoming General Manager of BNP Paribas Rental Solutions Trucks in 2013. In December 2015, he was appointed Business Development Director of the IBL ELS and President of CLAAS Financial Services SAS.

Boyer said: "There has never been a dull moment in my long career within the BNP Paribas Group, and I'm very much looking forward to the next chapter in this journey.

"Last year, BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions UK advanced in excess of £1.25 billion to over 100,000 British businesses. In my role as CEO, I hope to play a key role in exceeding our ambitious growth targets year-on-year and strengthening our reputation."

Mitel's new 'digital transformation strategy' allows companies to use existing investments, migrate to the cloud at their own pace and access productivity applications 'to compete in the emerging digital business landscape', stated the Canadian vendor.

Mitel said that its strategy also unlocks the power of the Internet of Things (IoT), effectively giving machines a voice with Mitel's call routing technology.

"One of the biggest challenges customers face today is how to keep up with the pace of change, and what they should do first, at a time when digital transformation is recasting traditional business models," said Rich McBee, President and CEO, Mitel.

"Our reference architecture provides a pragmatic, practical roadmap for customers to begin the journey today, no matter the starting point. It also opens the door to the opportunities associated with giving voice to 20 billion IoT devices with more than 450 million voice endpoints."

A new Automated Speech Transcription solution introduced by Liquid Voice helps contact centres and control rooms to more effectively locate and replay stored recordings when used in conjunction with the company's interaction recording and quality monitoring platforms.

Andrew Barrett, Technical Director, said: "The system will also help organisations to comply with the stringent GDPR standards that become mandatory in May 2018."

The solution enables recordings to be searched via any word or phrase and results can be viewed in seconds, eliminating the limitations of traditional phonetic-based systems, said the firm.

Search results can include inbound/outbound calls, emails, SMS and letters sent to customers, and are ranked by relevance and displayed as text summaries with search words automatically highlighted.

Liquid Voice (UK) MD Chris Berry said: "Automated Speech Transcription also makes 100% quality monitoring realistically achievable by enabling organisations to focus on outliers rather than just taking an average view.

"This provides the fullest picture of contact centre performance and revolutionises the way that contact centres can acquire and use speech technologies to improve customer satisfaction at every touchpoint."

The core European co-location hubs of Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam and Paris had a 'strong' start to the year, with 26.6MW of take-up and 38MW of new supply in Q1 2017, according to research from global real estate advisor CBRE.

London was responsible for 17.5MW of take-up, which equates to 60% of the European total. "The market saw significant further activity by the hyper-scale cloud players, which resulted in London's second-largest quarterly total on record," said CBRE. In contrast, Amsterdam (3.5MW), Frankfurt (3.2MW) and Paris (2.3MW) were relatively quiet in the first quarter.

While continued activity from cloud service providers has again been the bed-rock of a strong first quarter, CBRE expects an increase in activity from corporate and enterprise occupiers as the year goes on, which will provide a "more balanced take-up".

Andrew Jay, executive director, data centre solutions at CBRE, said: "We predicted a strong 2017 in the European markets and Q1 has certainly delivered. Given the momentum built up in 2016 we weren't surprised to see a strong start to the year. The key question is whether 2017 will surpass last year's record breaking 155MW. Our view is that we will have another really strong year of at least 100MW, which is astonishing considering that the record take-up prior to 2016 was 78MW."

Q1 came very close to reaching a milestone of 1000MW of supply across the four markets, ending the quarter on 996MW. "We expect a substantial amount of further new supply to come on board during the course of the year, including new entrants in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and London," said Jay.