Comms Dealer

A holiday giveaway scheme that rewarded excellent customer service provided by individuals at Chess has been won by Sarah Wolstenholme, Andy Holder and Richard Thrien who were placed first, second and third respectively.

They earned the most 'Gimme 5' chips for good customer service deeds throughout 2014 and each scooped a holiday that includes scaling a landmark tower or mountain. The top prize being a choice between Dubai's Burj Khalifa or Mount Kilimanjaro.

Each chip also counted as a pound for charity, raising £6,000 for good causes.

"Our Holiday Giveaway was a fantastic event," said CEO David Pollock. "It was a chance to celebrate our successes over the last 12 months and to focus on our vision for the rest of 2015."

Pictured: David Pollock congratulates Sarah Wolstenholme

Maintel is to deliver the Avaya Cloud Solutions service over BT Wholesale's managed Ethernet network. Targeted at mid-market enterprises, Maintel Cloud is based on the Avaya Aura Contact Centre and Unified Communications product suites delivered as a secure cloud utility service. "Maintel Cloud enables businesses to replace unsupported legacy systems with a feature rich cloud service that's cost-effective, scalable and resilient," said Eddie Buxton, CEO of Maintel.

"To remain competitive in today's marketplace and meet increasing customer service expectations, businesses need effective communications that can adapt and be easily implemented.

"Enhancing our cloud services portfolio supports our aggressive expansion plans and enables us to take advantage of strong demand across all our key verticals."
 
Maintel has worked with Avaya for over 20 years and received the Avaya Technical Partner of the Year Award 2014.

Simon Culmer, MD for UK&I at Avaya said: "Flexibility is key in this customer centric world. Dialling services up or down can keep companies responsive and help them manage costs. Maintel recognises this."

Version 12 of ICUK's Control Panel released this month incorporates fresh support and diagnostic tools based on a new Knowledge Base Diagnostics feature.

With its latest release ICUK claims to have removed the complexity common to traditional management tools for broadband and telecoms, with 'plain English' being the order of the day, according to Senior Support Engineer Niall Higgins.

"Diagnosing faults at carrier broadband and telecoms level is a daily routine for the support team," he said. "We've been working closely with our resellers and listening to feedback on how to get the right diagnostic tools without having to blind them with complicated questions and results that are hard to interpret."

Neil Barnett, Business Development Manager, added: "Throughout 2014 we've written thousands of lines of code and implemented hundreds of new features.

"The fundamental credo behind any successful partnership is to not only give the reseller the right tools to manage their customers, but to give their end customers the tools to manage the products they're using."

The comms industry has barely scratched the surface of what's possible with UC, according to Mitel's President and CEO Richard McBee, who believes that a big push towards simplicity and partner innovation will be key to unlocking UC's full potential.

"Transformational technologies like cloud communications are changing the game and streamlining how we connect, collaborate and help our customers drive success, but as an industry we are still at the starting line of what UC has to offer," he said.

"The challenge is to replace the technical complexity with a simple, seamless and universal user experience. The industry will have to come together in new and unanticipated ways to make that happen."

McBee made his comments ahead of ITEXPO in Miami (January 27th-30th) where he will deliver a keynote address.

Hot demand for avsnet's managed services have prompted a move to new headquarters with a state of the art Network Operations Centre (NOC) under its roof.

The NOC serves as the hub of avsnet's IT Service Management (ITSM) team and will allow the company to continue strengthening its portfolio of network management, IT and application availability monitoring, and 24/7 support services with new solutions and capabilities.

This includes new flexible managed services, public, private and hybrid cloud solutions, monitoring infrastructure, and converged networking options, all of which have been built around delivering long-term return on investment, financial freedom and corporate sustainability.
 
Graham Fry, Managing Director of avsnet, said: "This is an exciting chapter for avsnet, especially as we celebrate our ten year anniversary in 2015.

"Our new office is the culmination of the long-standing support our customers have provided us. We have spent the past six months investing heavily in our operational and technical capabilities to ensure we can continue meeting the IT demands dictated by a rapidly changing business environment.

"This development is entirely for the benefit of our customers, many of which have entrusted their entire IT infrastructure to avsnet."

Parliament should reject the introduction of the Communications Data Bill via the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill, according to ISPA Secretary General Nicholas Lansman.

He said: "Amendments to the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill have been tabled that seek to introduce the extensive powers contained in the Draft Communications Data Bill into the Counter Terrorism and Security Bill.

"Inserting the clauses contained in the Draft Communications Data Bill into an already complex Bill that is itself proceeding through Parliament via a fast-tracked process is ill-judged.

"The Lords cannot have time to properly consider the substantial powers contained in the amendments to the Bill, and would deny the Commons the opportunity to properly consider the powers as well."

The Draft Communications Data Bill was scrutinised by a Joint Parliamentary Committee in 2012 who concluded that there 'should be a new round of consultation with technical experts, industry, law enforcement bodies, public authorities and civil liberties groups'.

"At the time industry was critical of the level of consultation and there has since been no adequate consultation since," added Lansman.

"The Committee also had substantial concerns around the wholesale collection and analysis of communications data, oversight regime, definitions of communications data and robustness of cost estimates, and these have not been addressed and would require considerable changes to the current drafting.

"Introducing as amendments to a Bill that is being fast-tracked through Parliament, without acknowledging the need for further debate and substantial change, is deeply regrettable.

"The Government established a review into investigatory powers led by the independent reviewer of terrorism, David Anderson QC, that is set to publish before the General Election.

"Rather than bringing in substantial legislation by the backdoor before this review has published and without addressing the concerns of a parliamentary Joint Committee, we urge Parliament to reject this attempt to insert complex legislation into an existing Bill at the last minute."

In common with Southampton, the premiership football team its supports, things are on the up for Romsey-based Nix Communications.

In a record breaking year the company secured its best ever business performance in 2014 and secured a trophy double, namely Unify Reseller of the Year and Naomi Housing Corporate Supporter of the Year (small and medium sized businesses).

Office Manager Emma Davis was also finalist in the Outstanding Charity Champion category in the Naomi Housing awards process.

"We've had a terrific year and got off to a fabulous start in 2015," said MD Nick Zammit.

"It's a true team effort. With everyone working hard towards the goals of sales excellence and unrivalled customer service, the only way for NIX is up!"

During 2015 Nix will continue to achieve national TV coverage via pitch side banners at the St Mary's Stadium, home of Southampton FC and will also continue to support a number of local causes including the Independent Marshall Arts Association), children's cancer charity Joe Glover Trust and the Baddesley Crusaders Football Team.

Picture shows Nev Wilshire from BBC's The Call Centre programme who gave a memorable motivational speech at Nix's annual sales conference.

Distributor Avnet has reported a 1.8% rise in Q2 revenue from the previous fiscal year, with strong sales in Europe.

Avnet Technology Solutions, the IT arm, reported revenue of $3.1bn, at the high end of expectations due to better than seasonal growth in the EMEA. This figure was a fall of 4.6% year-over-year driven by 13.4% decline in Asia, it says.

Kevin Moriarty, CFO, said: "TS saw better than expected growth in our EMEA and Americas region which led to above-seasonal growth as revenue grew 29.4% sequentially in constant currency.

"Our EMEA region grew 34.5% sequentially in constant currency while Americas and Asia regions grew 29.2% and 13.7% respectively. Revenue of $3.12 billion declined 4.6% year-over-year and was down 2% in constant currency driven by 13.4% decline in our Asian region related primarily to our continuing components business."

The decline in the Americas gross profit margin was partially offset by increases in EMEA and Asia. 30% of revenue and an even higher percent of operating income is derived in the EMEA region.

Rick Hamada, CEO, added: "At a product level, networking of security, services and storage were all up year-over-year while our sequential growth was led by software services and storage."

Converged solutions continue to be a hot area, he says, as a key building block of today's data centre.

BroadSoft has surpassed 10 million hosted UC lines deployed, a milestone that demonstrates strong and growing demand for BroadSoft's UC-One application by businesses of all sizes and across North America, Europe, Asia, and other global markets.

A broad range of service providers, including fixed, mobile, and Over the Top (OTT) players, have deployed UC-One, which allows voice, video, business directories, call logs, instant messaging and presence to be available on a single interface, regardless of the user's preferred mobile device, type of connectivity, or type of communication service connectivity (hosted or premise-based PBX).

BroadSoft customers have the option to deploy unified communications services via the BroadWorks platform or via BroadCloud, a managed service that significantly shortens the time it takes service providers to enter this fast growing market.

According to an August 2014 Infonetics Report, the global hosted PBX and UC services market is expected to grow from $8.5bn in 2014 to $12.3bn by 2018.

North America is the largest market for hosted VoIP and UC services, commanding 49% of all seats in the first half of 2014, compared to 24% in Asia Pacific, 22% in EMEA, and 5% in Central America/Latin America.

"The fact that BroadSoft's biggest customers have deployed over 500,000 hosted UC seats reinforces our market analysis that businesses are actively seeking out hosted UC solutions, and that adoption is occurring across all market segments - from SMBs to large enterprises," said Diane Myers, principal analyst, Infonetics Research.

Michael Tessler, president and chief executive officer, BroadSoft, added: "Ten million hosted UC lines deployed is more than a number, it's a statement that BroadSoft is redefining the future of work by inspiring workers to create, collaborate and perform in ways never before imagined.

"As BroadSoft continues to focus on developing and delivering innovative technologies that smash through traditional work silos to accelerate workforce collaboration and productivity, we can accelerate the enterprise shift from premise-based to hosted UC - and all of the benefits that come along with leveraging the cloud."

Britain's second largest mobile provider O2 could be sold to the owner of Hong Kong-based Hutchison Whampoa according to a BBC report.

Li Ka-shing, who owns the Three mobile network, is said to be in talks to buy O2 from Spain's Telefonica for £10.25bn. The move could create the UK's biggest mobile group.

Hutchison shares rose 4% on the announcement.