Comms Dealer

Dr Frank Heinricht (pictured) h as been named Chairman of Sennheiser following the departure of 70-year-old Prof. Dr. Jörg Sennheiser on 1st January 2015.

Heinricht has been Chairman of the Board of Management of Schott AG since 2013 and became a member of the supervisory board of Sennheiser five years ago.

"Dr. Heinricht has a profound technical expertise and brings experience in managing large family owned companies to his new role.

"We are very happy that he is taking over as chairman of the supervisory board of the Sennheiser Group," said Daniel and Andreas Sennheiser, CEOs and shareholders of Sennheiser.

In withdrawing as Chairman of the supervisory board, Jörg Sennheiser is placing the management of the company fully into the hands of the third Sennheiser generation.

His sons Daniel and Andreas Sennheiser have been running the firm as CEOs since July 2013.

Jörg Sennheiser said: "My goal has always been to pass a healthy, thriving company on to the next generation.

"The family is committed to pursuing its strategy without any influence from third parties, a strategy that focuses on absolute customer orientation, technical innovation and quality.

"This is an aim I have always pursued, and it is the basis of the decades of success that we have enjoyed and will enjoy in the future."

Jörg Sennheiser became Sennheiser's Director of Technology in 1976 before taking over management of the family business as executive shareholder in 1982.

During his time at the helm, Sennheiser developed to an internationally successful brand. This involved setting up new manufacturing facilities in Ireland and the USA, while at the same time expanding production in Germany.

In addition, Sennheiser internationalised its sales organisation during this time.

Sennheiser today has over 2,500 employees across the globe and is active in more than 60 countries.

Nimans' in-house football team is celebrating success after winning the league title in their inaugural season.

The team play in a Monday night 'JP Business League' at Salford Sports Village - 11-a-side matches against other local Manchester companies. In their first season they won Division 2 and have now been promoted to the top division.

They played eight matches, won seven and lost one. The team scored 41 goals and conceded 10.

The team is made-up of staff from across the business, including the Warehouse, Purchasing and Credit Control.

Chairman Julian Niman was on hand to officially present the trophy at the Group's Christmas Party.

Access Technology has bolstered its hosting capabilities and SaaS and cloud suite of products following the acquisition of StratoGen.

The deal adds around £4m revenue and brings 150 customer base. StratoGen specialises in delivering VMware hosting solutions to an international market.

Access has been on a path of strategic and organic growth since its Lyceum Capital backed MBO in March 2011 with FY14 revenues announced last month of £53.5m, and EBITDA of £11.6m. Underlying these figures is ongoing organic growth of 12%.

Access CEO Chris Bayne said: "Bringing hosting into the Access portfolio extends our control over the delivery environment, enabling us to improve the service provided to our customers.

"This acquisition gives us end-to-end control of our SaaS and cloud based product offering."

Access' portfolio now includes a range of integrated enterprise solutions, managed services, cloud-based point solutions and hosting.

Bayne added: "Our SaaS and cloud platforms are continuing to grow with recurring revenues increasing 323% year on year.

"This acquisition continues our ongoing growth strategy to provide solutions that meet the needs of the whole organisation, from finance and HR, to collaboration tools and CRM, delivering full transparency and visibility of information across every department. We are fully prepared for the future."

Outsourcery's Unified Lync offering has snapped up the 'saaS Solution of the Year' award at the 2014 Storage, Virtualisation and Cloud (SVC) Awards.

Piers Linney, Co-CEO of the Manchester-based Cloud Services Provider commented: "Winning this award is a great achievement which we are all very proud of at Outsourcery.

"We always strive to drive progress in all areas of our business and delivering the best possible SaaS solutions to our customers is at the heart of what we do."

The SVC Awards rewards products, projects and services as well as honouring companies and teams operating in the cloud, virtualisation and storage sectors and the public is invited to vote in recognition of the achievements of end-users, channel partners and vendors alike.

Viatel has enhanced its offering for new and existing customers in Ireland, the UK and throughout Europe following a big investment in new infrastructure and services.

These include the extension of MPLS capabilities into new markets following the initial deployment in the UK and France, enabling Viatel to create bespoke WANs between sites in multiple locations and countries for individual customers.

IP transit and Dedicated Internet Access (DIA) will also become available in Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Zurich.

Viatel engineers have built infrastructure to close the network loop from Milan to Marseille, meaning that Viatel can provide wavelength services with speeds of up to 100G out of Milan and Marseille.

"From a geographical perspective Marseille is strategically important for communications into and out of Europe from Africa, the Far East and Asia," said Colm Piercy, CEO.

"The new infrastructure will enable our customers to choose from a protected range of routes to all strategic cities across the Viatel footprint including Dublin, London, Paris, Amsterdam and Frankfurt.

"Viatel will continue to roll out additional services across the eight countries that we operate in, while providing end-to-end connectivity for the thousands of enterprise and wholesale customers who rely on our network throughout Europe."

Norbain has acquired CMS, a distributor of IT infrastructure, network and safety solutions established 20 years ago.

CMS will continue to operate as a standalone business as part of Norbain. All sales enquiries will be handled directly at the CMS head office, based in Farnborough, Hampshire.

Anne-Marie Salisbury, Marketing Director at CMS, said: "Our portfolio is a great accompaniment to Norbain's range of security products and services."

Edinburgh-based Commsworld Chief Exec' Ricky Nicol has called on the industry to stop profiting from customers who have fallen victim to toll fraud attacks.

Nicol describes the behaviour of telcos making money from the misfortune of end users as 'alarming'.

"I find it extremely difficult to comprehend that any carrier firm will look to make an opportunistic buck on the back of crime carried out on their customers, and I have heard of numerous examples where we are not talking about a small profit," he said.

"Severe attacks have the potential to put firms out of business, therefore it's essential their service providers do all they can to prevent that.

"I would urge all business to take action to prevent toll fraud and to check that their service provider would work on a non-profit rate should they be victim of an attack."

"Toll fraud is similar to computer viruses. It's vital that people and businesses protect themselves by installing anti-virus software, but despite the best efforts of firms like Amazon and Apple, and even the Government, the hackers will keep finding new ways to attack.

"We can prevent the majority of toll-fraud attacks from being successful and we certainly wouldn't look to profit from our customers when a criminal act has been clearly carried out on them, indeed we would as a matter of course and policy credit back any elements of profit (not cost) we would make.

"However, the same could not be said of some of the national carriers. Seemingly it is legally acceptable to profit in this way, but it is surely morally unacceptable to willingly choose to make profit from customers who have had a criminal act carried out on them."

Nimans resellers can take advantage of free EFM network connections as part of a promotion running until the end of January 2015.

Free EFM (Ethernet First Mile) quad pair installation is available for all three year contracts, representing an average saving of up to £500.

Mark Curtis-Wood, Head of Nimans' Network Services, says EFM is a cost effective alternative to Ethernet Internet access, maximising the potential of legacy technology and a step up from traditional DSL.

He says it's ideal for businesses looking for a speed upgrade and sites that rely heavily on the internet for on-site or cloud-based services.

Businesses looking for a cost-effective replacement for BT leased lines and those increasingly using high quality voice (SIP and hosted), data, video and CRM systems with greater resilience, would also benefit.

"EFM is playing an increasingly important role in today's data hungry world and resellers can literally save hundreds of pounds by taking advantage of this promotion," he said.

Research published by Comms-care suggests that professional services are set to grow to over 60 per cent of the channel services market in the next 12 months - four times the size of the market in 2012.

A lack of the right skills within the channel is an important driver for this increase. Professional services including unified communications and other leading technologies are the most in demand skills in the channel, making up around 40 per cent of skills shortages with unified communications taking nearly half of this share.

This is amplified by the findings that over half (52 per cent) of channel businesses highlight 'specialist IT skills' and 'offering an enhanced services proposition' as the top drivers for outsourcing over the next 12 months.

Comms-care Professional Services Director, Simon Day said: "Our research highlights that the rise of IT professional services isn't just a coincidence, but a positive move by businesses to offer an enhanced service to their customers as the need to adopt new technologies rapidly grows."

Only one in 10 channel businesses are motivated to outsource by cost savings, highlighting that a majority of businesses are proactively looking to outsource to provide clients a higher level of service through expert individuals and enhanced services.

The Cloud Industry Forum (CIF) has set out its predictions for the Cloud industry for 2015, forecasting that by the end of the year 90 per cent of organisations in the UK will have formally adopted at least one Cloud service.

According to the industry body, the end of support for Microsoft Windows Server 2003 in July 2015 will be the single biggest catalyst for the Cloud industry since the term was first coined.

CIF's research indicates that Cloud adoption will reach another peak throughout 2015, increasing in breadth with more organisations overall using Cloud services, and in depth, as existing users expand their use of Cloud services.

Over 90 per cent of organisations will be using Cloud services by the end of the year, up from 78 per cent in 2014, and 60 per cent of these will use two or more material Cloud services.

This growth, according to Alex Hilton, CEO of CIF, will be driven in no small part by the end of support for Microsoft Windows Server 2003, which will create a new imperative for businesses to look to Cloud-based alternatives.

Hilton said: "In the period leading up to July 2015 the market faces the most significant IT refresh of the 21st century to date with the end of support of both Microsoft Windows Server 2003 and Small Business Server 2003.

"These products have not only underpinned the IT server market for the last decade they have been the basis upon which many local IT providers have built their businesses.

"In the UK alone, an average of 1,000 servers per day are likely to need to be transitioned in the final year of support. Some customers will take the opportunity to move the server workloads to Cloud services, some will undertake a rudimentary incremental upgrade and others will take the opportunity to refine their IT strategy.

"The next 12 months represent a great opportunity for customers to make a Cloud migration and adopt the latest enterprise ready technology at a fraction of the price.

"Our research suggests that 61 per cent of UK organisations are still running Microsoft Windows Server 2003.

"This product has been supported for 11 years but technology has moved on. Doing nothing is not a viable option, the majority of users will move to cloud or Managed Services. Cloud migrations tend to happen on needs-based activity - historically, users migrate because of a definitive business need, be it business growth, security, or in this case, a technology refresh cycle."

Glenn Woolaghan, UK SMB Director, Microsoft, added: "Migration to the cloud presents businesses of all sizes with an opportunity to discover the right balance of simplicity, flexibility and cost and enable SMBs to take advantage of enterprise-grade features at start-up prices.

"By this we mean that businesses will be able to host applications in the way that bests suits their business and cost structure, whether on-site or in the cloud.

"They'll also be able to grow efficiently and use only what they need, when they need it. Finally, employees of SMBs will be able to get their work done anywhere and work together easily with the latest cloud-based mobility and productivity solutions."