Comms Dealer

A new breed of data specialist is set to empower big businesses by bridging the gaps between data, people and technology.

The emergence of Chief Data Officers (CDOs) underlines the strategic value of data, and according to a survey of CIOs by Experian (the global information services group) the requirement for such people appears urgent, with 61% wanting to see a CDO hired within the next 12 months.

Alongside the CIO as the point-person for guiding the use of data within the business, the CDO will be expected to navigate an increasingly complex landscape to deliver the best results for both brands and customers.

Experian's study, called Dawn of the Chief Data Officer, concluded that 90% of CIOs believe that data is transforming the way they do business, and 92% suggested that a CDO is best placed to define data strategy, with CDOs tipped to become senior board level players by 2020, reckons Experian.
 
The study also suggests that 2015 is set to be the year where this new 'data force' takes the lead in overseeing the use of data within organisations.

Boris Huard, Managing Director of Experian Data Quality said: "The 'data force' will have a key role at the heart of businesses. We can add Chief Digital Officer, alongside CDOs and Director of Insights, as emerging new roles which have come about in response to the pressure and opportunity presented by big data.
 
"What is particularly encouraging is that companies are increasingly switching on to the value of data. They are realising that more emphasis needs to be placed on data management and strategy to ensure that they are able to satisfy burgeoning customer expectations, both now and in the future.
 
"This new breed of data professionals will have wide-ranging impact on the way that brands interact with customers. Regardless of what industry you are operating in, your marketers are only ever as good as the data that underpins their plans, ensuring data quality is one important element of getting your interactions with the consumer right."

The plug has been pulled on a deep pool of workplace talent and this drain on professional experience is damaging to UK businesses, according to Clive Jefferys, MD of telecoms recruiter JMA Network.

He cited a new report by Business in The Community (a charity backed by the Prince Charles) which states as many as one million over-50s have been forced out of the professional workforce during the last five years.

Jefferys condemned the development as 'prejudice against older workers' and called on all industries to reverse the trend. With hackles raised he stated: "This is a crazy situation and has to change.

"The  UK economy is short of a million workers, but companies are unwilling to acknowledge that improved life expectancy has added at least another ten years to most people's effective working lives.

"It would seem that the stigma of having grey hair is still able to curtail most people's employment, in any profession, regardless of their abilities.

"We need to stop throwing away talent and experience. No-one expects a sportsperson to be at the top of the game forever, so why can't we help people to move into less onerous roles to keep them productive?

"Forcing the over-50s to leave professional jobs is a total waste of resources."

Node4 has completed a multi-million pound investment in its core infrastructure including the install of its own Dense Wavelength Division Multiplexing (DWDM) network.

The company will be able to offer its own high-speed connections directly to customers, slashing deployment times by at least 50%; and offer businesses 10Gb Ethernet or 8Gb fibre channel connections in its core network with minimal deployment time, says the firm.

Paul Bryce, Business Development Director at Node4, commented: "Organisations today rely on robust and secure high-speed connectivity, which is why we are continuously upgrading our capabilities to ensure that we meet the ever-increasing needs of businesses."

HP is to acquire Voltage Security, a provider of enterprise encryption, tokenisation and encryption key management software for emails, documents, payments data and other content. The terms of the deal were undisclosed.

Voltage's offerings will complement HP's Atalla data/payments security software. The IT giant praises the ability of Voltage's products to 'allow enterprises to use protected data in applications without having to re-architect their applications or adopt fragmented frameworks',with technologies such as format-preserving encryption and stateless tokenisation help.

Security spending has been easily outpacing broader IT spend, and that trend is expected to continue in 2015 as companies invest heavily in cybersecurity following a slew of high profile breaches. However, fast-growing upstarts such as Palo Alto Networks, FireEye and Fortinet have been taking share at the expense of IT giants.

Fujitsu has appointed Colin Smith as Head of Enterprise Servers and Converged Systems.

With over 20 years of experience, Smith has joined Fujitsu from Computacenter where he held the post of HP Alliances Director for two years and was previously HP Category Manager for over six years.

Prior to joining the corporate reseller business, Smith worked in a number of channel-facing roles both within distribution - at Tech Data and earlier at Metrologie - and at vendors Symantec and LG Electronics.

His remit is to help strengthen Fujitsu's growing channel support team.

Boston Borough Council has saved more than 40% of is annual telephony costs by transitioning to an IP comms system provided by systems integrator Foehn.

As well as achieving significant financial savings, the Council has been able to make efficiency gains, introduce flexible working, better measure and improve call centre performance, and now has in place a more robust and resilient disaster recovery plan.

Serving the borough of Boston in southeast Lincolnshire, the Council began a transformation of its ICT that included reviewing its ageing onsite legacy telephony system.

"The move to hosted IP telephony became an important part of the transformation, especially when the Council realised that significant cost savings could be made, but not to the detriment of service delivery," said Matthew Clarke, Strategic ICT advisor to Boston Borough Council.

Foehn's IP telephony solution, which followed an initial pilot and now caters for over 200 users across the authority, including three virtual contact centres, is based on the Open Source Asterisk platform.

No additional network infrastructure has been required, apart from the provision of Power over Ethernet units to power the new handsets.

"Rather than tie itself into a proprietary big brand technology, the Council has married good quality open standard SIP handsets with the Open Source Asterisk telephony platform delivered by Foehn," said Clarke.

"This offers the Council great flexibility when considering future development plans, and the pay-as-you-go contract via G-Cloud ensures there is no big capital asset to maintain, upgrade, or replace in the uncertainty of the years ahead."

Previously the Council was spending in the region of £283,000 every five years on its fixed telephony, but with the Foehn IP telephony solution, this has been reduced to £116,000. Another benefit of the new system is that apportioning costs is now much simpler and clearer, with each extension and associated call costs invoiced monthly and directly to the relevant cost centre.

"Although the cost savings are sizeable for a local authority like Boston Borough Council, there are many other benefits that can be derived by switching to a more modern and flexible system," added James Passingham, Technical Director for Foehn.

"In this case, the Council has been able to reduce its spend but at the same time have more features and functionality, including call queuing that provides detailed, real-time visibility of the numbers of calls queued, waiting times, and agent status."

This insight led to customer service improvements in just two weeks as the Council was able to allocate resources based on emerging traffic patterns. It also paved the way for further transformational and improvements across the Council's service areas where remote working - in the field, at other council offices and from homes - is now a viable and almost zero cost option.

The new telephony system also provides enhanced disaster recovery capabilities. Having experienced a near miss in the East Coast flooding of December 2013, the Council has been able to mitigate the risk of a similar event with staff members now able to access the telephony system from any location with an Internet connection.

Before full roll out, Foehn provided Boston Borough Council with a pilot at one of the authority's small depots that proved that the concept could work.

Weston Digital Technologies has unveiled its flagship product, Symphony 7, a communications recording and analytics solution for the channel.

Weston has 20 years of expertise in the industry and specialises in the emergency services, contact centres, financial services and education. The company has now opened the channel door to its call recording portfolio designed for businesses of all sizes.

Mike Partridge, Commercial Director, Weston Digital Technologies, said: "We are excited to launch our portfolio into the channel and wanted to maximise the opportunity for call recording that we are currently seeing in the SME sector.

"SME businesses are getting switched on to the benefits that call recording can bring, such as increased productivity and improved customer service."

Symphony 7 offers unified call recording for TDM, IP, mobile telephony, screen activity, CCTV and radio; and has recently achieved Mitel Compatible Certification - officially validated for use with Mitel's MiVoice Business (Rel 7.0) and MiVoice Border Gateway (Rel 8.0.27.0) products. Certifications with other major vendors will soon be available.

"Building and maintaining the right technology relationships to deliver customers high value integrated solutions is a critical component for success in the business communications marketplace," said David Lowenstein, Director of Business Development for Mitel Solutions Alliance, Mitel.

"Mitel continues to work with best-of-breed companies like Weston Digital Technologies to deliver complete solutions that address the business challenges of our customers."

Outsourcery Co-CEO Piers Linney is calling for more businesses to integrate UC tools and strategies to get the best from employees.

According to a study by 451 Research Group 39% of organisations just have basic email systems while 26% currently use email systems with advanced features that include integrated document management, rights-management and full-featured archiving.

Outsourcery's Linney underlines the opportunities that can be unlocked further through deploying a high performance, innovative unified communications solution.

"Businesses need to be aware of their reliance on their email system for the fundamental management of processes and delivery of service. With the rising consumer BYOD trend in particular, the key to achieving enhanced performance across the workplace in the future will be to invest in an advanced UC solution that will enable employees to work out of the office and check-in with their colleagues at their own convenience.

"UC solutions that are supported by cloud technology have the ability to be accessed on-the-go and provide an invaluable opportunity for businesses aiming to achieve greater connectivity to accelerate processes and generate increased business productivity.

"Further to this, a scalable architecture provides businesses with the potential for decreased IT expenditure, with the capability to modify the number of accounts required for employees. This will, in turn, save costs that can ultimately be channeled into other areas of the business."

There are rich pickings in security and data management for IoT platform service providers according to industry watchers at Beecham Research.

"Due to the growing complexity of IoT applications and trend to consumer-driven, multi-service environments such as smart cities, cars and homes, there is a growing need to manage edge devices - such as sensors, switches, smartphones and tablets - connected using a variety of short range wireless and fixed line technologies," said Saverio Romeo, principal analyst at Beecham Research.

"With this pace of change, companies will increasingly rely on outsourcing and we expect that revenues from device authentication, device management, data management, billing and security will exceed $3bn by 2020. And out of these, we see security and data management services generating some $1.8bn alone."

Data management for IoT is currently a small market, but Beecham Research believes that it has the most potential for high gross margins.

"While many market players still see security as a cost rather than a business opportunity, this is changing and we see IoT security providers offering high value, end-to-end security to service and application providers," added Romeo.

He also pointed to authentication, device management and billing/charging as leading indicators of the growth potential for enabling services in an IoT environment.

Robin Duke-Woolley, CEO at Beecham Research, added: "We see many changes in requirements for these enabling services in the IoT market now compared with just a few years ago. Our current research is assessing the impact of this on the connectivity services layer, the application enablement layer, and on other services that span both these."

Fraud and security concerns have put a spotlight on the identity management market which analysts believe will reach a tipping point this year.

High profile digital data breaches have raised fears over the vulnerability of sensitive personal information revealed during online and mobile transactions, creating a market for solutions that address these security issues.

A new MarketsandMarkets report predicts the global identity and access management market will be worth $18.3bn by 2019, and according to findings from a CrunchBase poll, identity management was identified as the industry expected to see the greatest growth in 2015.

"The frequency of security breaches and surge in related trends like identity theft have increased awareness of more effective methods of online authentication and identity management," said Daniel Mattes, founder and CEO of Jumio.

"While consumers previously may have been willing to accept a certain degree of risk when it came to online and mobile transactions, we're at a tipping point at which companies need to go to greater lengths to protect their customers or risk losing their business as the users themselves demand more security."

The methods used by identity robbers are growing more sophisticated and are therefore harder to combat with traditional means of identity verification, leaving the market ripe for third party vendors and solutions, pointed out Garrett Bekker, senior analyst with 451 Research.

"It's clear there's a lot more interest these days in delivering identity management as a service because it's a lot less complex," he said.

"You can hand off a lot of the complexity to the service provider and you don't have to deal with it."