Comms Dealer

IDC estimates that global PC shipments fell 2.4% yr/yr in Q4 to 80.8 million - a bigger decline than Q3 and Q2's 1.7%, but better than its expectations for a 4.8% drop. Gartner is more positive, estimating shipments rose 1% to 83.7 million.

Both analysts say that emerging markets, where tablet cannibalisation remains a major issue, remain in worse shape than developed markets. IDC also says that commercial PC demand (boosted earlier this year by the ending of Windows XP support) has slowed, and that "market progress has been fueled by low-priced systems, including growth of Chromebooks and [Microsoft's] promotion of Windows 8 + Bing.

The US consumer market is expected to return to positive growth in 2015, aided by slowing tablet demand and the Windows 10 launch. IDC believes all top-5 vendors gained share from rivals with less size. A quarter after cracking the top 5 for the first time with a 6.3% share, Apple's unit share is believed to have risen to 7.1% (+130 bps yr/yr) on the back of 4.9 million shipments (+18.9%). Given higher ASPs, revenue share might be around 15%.

Market leader Lenovo's share rose 140 bps to 19.9%; #2 HP's rose 300 bps to 19.7%; #3 Dell's rose 140 bps to 13.5%; #4 Acer's rose 40 bps to 7.7%. Non-top 5 firms saw their share drop 740 bps to 32.2%, with their shipments declining 20.7%. We await Intel's results later this week, with interest.

In a channel revamp Citrix has introduced Citrix Solution Advisors (CSA) as part of a new scheme that encourages partners to focus on their particular specialisations.

Partners will be offered an opportunity to access Citrix technical expertise in the areas of virtualisation, mobility management and networking. Also, Citrix Specialisations will reward partners for their technical competency, sales capability and service delivery.

Under the scheme, the company will offer almost 9,000 Citrix Solution Advisors along with new benefits, adjusted revenue requirements and simplified certifications.

Both parts of the programme, CSA Programme and Specialisations, have been launched while the two other 'pillars' are expected to be rolled out later in the year.

The additional pillars refer to field and partner collaboration focused on engagement between Citrix and partners' teams; and partner enablement across the customer lifecycle with new tools, resources and programmes.

Arrow has added Oracle Cloud services to its portfolio and is set to roll out the service to the US and extend to Europe.

Sean Kerins, President of Arrow's Global Enterprise Computing Solutions Business, said: "This agreement represents a significant addition for solution providers seeking to move up the stack."

Through the global agreement, Arrow will offer Oracle's applications, cloud programmes and enablement services through the ArrowSphere cloud services platform.

"There are many corners of the market and globe Oracle simply cannot reach," said Bruce Chumley, Group VP, Worldwide Alliances and Channels, Oracle.

"Our success relies on our partners' ability to sell and implement Oracle Cloud services in the broad market. For this reason, we continue to invest more resources in helping partners maximize their cloud-based opportunities, in turn, extending the opportunities for our customers."

NCONNECT has expanded its range of terminals to include Yealink's T4 Series.

The certified Yealink VoIP-telephones include T41P, T42G, T46G and T48G terminals, the EXP40 Expansion Module and the EHS36 Adapter.

Bolton-based IT solutions firm Imerja has again been selected by Essex County Council to secure and maintain its end user devices with a contract worth £160K.

The deal will see Imerja conducting a health check of the IT systems and upgrading the endpoint security on 9,000 devices to the latest version of CheckPoint software.

The two-year deal builds on an existing relationship between the two organisations and is a renewal of Imerja's previous contract to offer an ongoing proactive and reactive support service.

Ian Jackson, MD and co-founder of Imerja, said: "Working in partnership we have developed a strong relationship with Essex County Council and understand the complexities of its IT system and the importance of securing the end user devices."

David Wilde, CIO at Essex County Council, added: "The documents we store are extremely confidential so IT security is paramount to us."

Hosted Voice Exchange (HVX), Daisy Wholesale's BroadSoft-based cloud telephony solution, was 'quickly swept onto the emerging rip curl' of cloud market adoption following its launch in January 2014, according to Product Director for Cloud Graham Harris.

He said: "As with any new technology, it takes time for resellers to gain confidence in the solution, however it is once that confidence has been established that you really start to see results. During the second part of last year, we witnessed a growth rate of 20% month-on-month."

The HVX service has developed over the year and now offers a monthly priced call statistics package that can deliver real-time business information.

"This statistics package, alongside the mobility solutions, call recording capabilities and CTI integration, means that there is no longer a gap when compared to the premise-based PBX," added Harris.

"In fact, when combined with the resilience and inherent disaster recovery facilities that HVX has to offer, it is clear to see that hosted voice can present far more to the modern business than the traditional PBX."

According to Harris this market moved from early adopter to early majority, a surge that he says is set to continue.

"Whilst there is no specific reason for this step change, undoubtedly the increased availability of competitively priced and robust data connectivity, including FTTC, has had a massive impact," he added.

"Customers have been able to benefit from reduced costs but still experience the excellent call quality of a hosted voice system.

"Another development that we have seen in the last 12 months is the increasing desire from end customers to minimise asset ownership and ensure the predictability of spend.

"Businesses have become increasingly keen to move away from spiky capital expenditure and are turning to subscription-based models for more and more services. 2014 proved to be a seminal year in cloud telephony as a significant tipping point was realised."

ScanSource Communications has expanded its relationship with Spectralink to include Germany, Austria, Switzerland and UK&I.

Through this expanded relationship, resellers in Europe will have access to Spectralink's mobile communication solutions for a range of verticals including healthcare, retail, warehousing and manufacturing.

Spectralink DECT and Wi-Fi wireless devices are qualified for deployment in combination with some of the leading unified communications and collaboration solutions.

Verizon is launching a new enterprise portal for its Managed Certificate Services platform that offers digital certificate creation and management capabilities for large-scale IoT deployments in the tens of millions.

The number of Internet-connected devices, such as vehicles, smart meters and home monitoring systems, is predicted to reach in the billions by the year 2020.

Verizon's Managed Certificate Services (MCS) platform is designed to authenticate objects and machines (much like two-factor authentication of people and machines), verifying object and machine 'identities' for the trusted exchange of information - and secure data transmitted between these connections.

Verizon's new bulk certificate portal provides increased ease of commerce without large capital investment for enterprises, such as manufacturers and media companies with large IoT and/or traditional machine-to-machine (M2M) implementations. Featuring usage-based pricing, the new portal is aimed at helping organisations control management costs for securing the Internet of Things.

"With the massive growth of The Internet of Things and the use of connectivity to make devices smarter, businesses require a simple, scalable and effective way to manage identity and data integrity," said Mike Denning, vice president of Global Security for Verizon Enterprise Solutions.

"Building on our digital certificate technology and managed security services expertise, Verizon's Managed Certificate Services provides the foundation for helping to protect the Internet of Things from cyberthreats."

The latest Recruitment and Employment Confederation survey reveals that 90% of companies have 'no' or 'only a little' spare capacity to increase business.

Kevin Green, Chief Exec of REC commented: "Businesses are increasingly thinking about expanding their numbers and many are telling us that they can't take on more work without more staff.

":At the same time, the UK is suffering from skills shortages across the economy and it's getting harder for hirers to attract and retain the talent they need."

From the recruitment perspective, Clive Jefferys of recruiter JMA Network observed: "All companies must look at every possible recruitment option as a matter of urgency. Internal referral schemes, direct advertising, recruitment agencies and headhunting all form part of the solution, but none can solve the problem alone."

Traditionally many companies relied on using temporary staff. However, due to wholesale change in taxation and legislation, the scope for using temps, part-timers and contractors is actually reducing.

"There are tremendous opportunities in this situation," added Jefferys. "We all need to invest in technology and training to increase productivity and look at new sources of labour too. There are over a million under-utilised 50-65 year olds in the UK. It seems utterly mad not to use such a skilled and available resource."

In its Q2 2015 financial results statement ShoreTel posted total revenues of a record $90.9m, an increase of 8% compared to Q2 2014. Non-GAAP net income (which excludes stock-based compensation charges, amortisation of acquisition-related intangibles, other charges and related tax adjustments) for Q2 2015 was $5.4m. This compares with a non-GAAP net income of $3.2m in the same period of the previous year.

GAAP net loss was $6.8m, compared with a GAAP net loss of $0.9m in Q2 of fiscal 2014.

"We've continued our business momentum with investments in growth while also improving our key financial metrics," said Don Joos, president and CEO of ShoreTel. 

"The acceleration of our hosted bookings in the December quarter resulted in 33% growth for calendar year 2014, showing the effectiveness of the strategic actions we launched a year ago.

"We've made continued progress in the development of our common platform, which we expect to introduce at our partner conference in April."

Recurring revenues, which now consist of all revenue from hosted and related services plus support revenues from support and services, represented 46% of total revenue in Q2 2015 and reached an annualised value of $166m, an increase of 17% compared to the Q2 2014.

The company adjusted its methodology for calculating its recurring revenue metrics to better reflect the predictability of the business and align with the reporting of its industry peers.

Hosted revenues of $25.8m were up 19% year-over-year and 3.5% sequentially. 

Non-GAAP hosted gross margin was 45.4% in Q2 2015, compared with 39.8% the previous year.