Comms Dealer

Senior executives of leading ICT companies descended on the world famous Gleneagles Hotel for Comms Vision 2014, the channel's premier strategic business planning convention (November 5th-7th).

And this year's line-up of Platinum sponsors wasted no time in setting the scene by spilling the beans on their reasons for supporting the event which is now in its ninth year.

"The landscape is changing massively," commented Andy Brocklehurst, Regional Sales Manager for Cisco UK & Ireland. " With Azlan we can help resellers navigate the future towards profitable outcomes. It's time for resellers to decide who they will back."

Peter Tomlinson, Director for Product, Marketing and Sales at Eclipse, also addressed Comms Vision delegates. "If something's worth doing, it's worth doing properly," he said. "Our Platinum sponsorship is the culmination of years of commitment to our channel. We are now introducing new product areas in hosted as well as opportunities with the Microsoft portfolio."

Gamma's Sales Director John Hawe's key message to delegates was that he wanted to take them to the next stage of market motivation. "We all understand hosted voice and SIP, now we're focused on helping resellers sell more through integrated marketing campaigns."

The role of UC in a hybrid world is top of the agenda for Shoretel. Adrian Hipkiss, Vice President and Managing Director EMEA, explained how the acquisition of M5 Networks introduced UC-as-a-Service to the vendor's portfolio, and that bringing choice to resellers and customers was now a top priority.

"Our investment in a next generation platform offers a seamless choice between on-premise, cloud or a hybrid solution," said Hipkiss. "This will build on our 20% year-on-year growth."

Martyn Etherington, Mitel's Chief Marketing Officer, also has clear objectives for top and bottom line growth for Mitel and its partners; and to say the vendor is well advanced along a steep growth curve would be to greatly understate its expansion from a $400m company two years ago to a $1.2bn operation today.

"We've doubled our investment in innovation to $100m," he told delegates. "There is a big opportunity for partners to share in our momentum."

Tollring has secured a BroadSoft Xtended Incubator Program Award for its iCS insight application. The app delivers telecommunications data analytics and visualisation to enhance business productivity and extends BroadSoft's UC services.

The BroadSoft Xtended Incubator Program is a global initiative that accelerates the development of UC applications by providing seed funding to third party application developers.

iCS insight seamlessly integrates with the BroadWorks CDR Call Accounting feed to enable customer-facing teams with SLAs / target commitments monitor inbound and outbound calls on any device.

The intuitive 'click and drill' application is easy to deploy and enables businesses of any size to view call metrics critical to their business, by accessing reports, dashboards and wallboards that have been optimised specifically for mobile devices.

The new app helps businesses to make immediate decisions based on call activity. Visual dashboards and wallboards are delivered via a browser on any computer or mobile device. Managers can monitor caller tolerance, the percentage of calls answered, abandoned calls and unresolved missed calls to improve customer service and achieve goals.

Karim Sadroudine, Director, Applications Marketplace at BroadSoft, said: "We know that data analytics is critical to running a business efficiently, so we have been keen to add a call reporting app to our Xtended marketplace. We believe iCS is a valuable productivity tool that will enable businesses to visualise their call data and turn it into business intelligence."

Tony Martino, MD of Tollring, added: "Our iCS insight app was well received at BroadSoft's annual users' conference as it clearly addresses the market need for business reporting and analytics. Our cloud solutions portfolio has never been stronger."

Leslie Ferry, vice president marketing, BroadSoft, added: "BroadSoft recognises the funding challenge developers face getting applications from concept to customer, and by committing funding, resources and support - as well as access to our global customer base of more than 600 service providers - we aspire to accelerate enterprise and consumer adoption of innovative applications."

Olive Communications has outperformed its stated growth targets with revenues to year ending January 31st 2014 up by £6.6 million to £17.6 million.

This includes over £3 million through strategic acquisitions, with the remainder being driven from organic growth. The company's earnings (EBITDA) rose from £1.2m in 2013 to nearly £4.5 million in 2014 before exceptional items.

During the year, Olive enhanced its product range with the addition of fixed line and professional services, as well as launching a unified communications joint initiative with Vodafone (Olive is a Platinum Partner). Olive has also invested in the development of new intellectual property for business-critical software.

The acquisition of Wish Holdings and Direct Communications during the trading period increased Olive's scale in the mid-market and SME sectors, as well as strengthening its management capability and adding fixed line and professional services to its product portfolio.

Since the year end, Olive has continued its expansion, with the acquisition of SafetyBank, a company providing business critical software for the management of health and safety in the construction sector through a Software as a Service (SaaS) model.

Olive CEO Martin Flick said: "Our growth is testament to the role Olive is playing in the constantly evolving business communications landscape. As businesses look to transform the way they work, and take advantage of exciting new technologies, our role as both trusted partner and solutions provider is increasingly important."

telent has bolstered its ICT capability with a deal to acquire Telindus UK. The acquisition significantly increases telent's ability to deliver end-to-end ICT and IP networking solutions, while adding expertise in delivering Cisco and Juniper Networks solutions strengthens its multi-vendor capabilities.

"This deal represents an important step for telent and will bring a transformational strengthening of our ICT capability," said Mark Plato, CEO of telent.

"We have been investing in growing our capability in IP networking and in the delivery of end-to-end ICT solutions for some time now. The acquisition of Telindus takes us to another level, providing a step change in our core expertise and capabilities with key industry partners and introducing us to a range of new customers and markets."

Based in Camberley, Surrey, Telindus delivers ICT solutions including network infrastructure, data centre and security solutions, plus professional and managed services.

The company has an annual turnover of over £45m with a wide range of enterprise and public sector customers, including service providers and the defence industry.

Key customers include Virgin Media, LINX, Interroute and British Aerospace.

Under the agreement, telent will retain the Telindus Camberley base, which includes high specification lab facilities that allow the replication, and the development and testing of customer's networks.

Telindus Managing Director Marek Lowther commented: "Becoming part of the telent group is an exciting new step for us and will significantly expand our sphere of activity, while contributing our expertise to telent's overall offering in the marketplace. The combination with telent will provide us with additional scale to address the UK market and open up significant opportunities for the combined business."

The move follows a number of recent investments made by telent. Earlier this year the company acquired the business of voice processing and communication specialists Voice Perfect and has also taken a 25% stake in CNS Group, the IT security and information assurance specialist.

Videonations has collected the Lifesize Cloud Award 2014 at the manufacturer's annual EMEA Partner Awards in Ibiza, Spain.

Lifesize Cloud provides a connected experience for anyone using smartphones, tablets, laptops and especially conference rooms. Delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS), Lifesize Cloud is for organisations that want business-class video collaboration without taxing their budget or IT resources, and is proving to be a success for Videonations.

"Winning this award is testament to the dedication and passion of our team who operate in all four corners of the world and always go the extra mile," said Ian Carter, MD at Videonations.

"Cloud-based solutions represent an exciting new chapter for video communications."

Andreas Wienold, Vice President International for Lifesize, added: "Our reseller partners bring tremendous value to Lifesize, and we are proud to honour Videonations with this award."

Phoenix IT Group has joined the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Programme, enabling Phoenix to provide direct billing, sell combined offers and services, as well as provision, manage and support Microsoft Cloud offerings directly.

The programme is designed to strengthen customer relationships and expand cloud sales opportunities by enabling partners to provide direct billing, sell combined offers and services, as well as directly provision, manage and support Microsoft products and services.

Phoenix will own the complete customer lifecycle, allowing it easily to sell Office 365 and Windows Intune subscriptions and help customers take advantage of Cloud services by owning the entire billing process and directly managing support.

Steve Vaughan, Phoenix Chief Executive, said: "The Cloud Solution Provider programme is an exciting development from Microsoft - and a clear statement of Microsoft's intent to put the cloud first when it comes to service delivery.

"I'm proud that Phoenix has proven itself worthy of being at the forefront of this initiative which will allow us to build secure and scalable cloud-based IT systems. By using Microsoft solutions, integrated with Phoenix's CloudSure UK, we will be able to deliver a public cloud end-to-end service offering which will meet the needs of a wide range of customers in our chosen markets.

Phil Sorgen, corporate vice president, Worldwide Partner Group at Microsoft Corp, said: "By joining the Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Programme, partners will deepen customer relationships and expand business opportunities in the cloud."

Westcon Group has signed an EMEA distribution agreement with Tely Labs, a provider of plug-and-play video conferencing solutions for meeting rooms in a wide range of both horizontal and vertical market segments including SMB, Enterprise, healthcare, education and service providers.

Guy Koster, Director of Product Management and Product Marketing for EMEA at Westcon Group, said: "Video conferencing is fast becoming a business critical necessity for enhancing workplace collaboration and productivity. In parallel, adoption is growing exponentially as both unit costs and deployment complexities are significantly reduced.

"The market opportunity is huge. Of the 60-70 million physical conference rooms worldwide only 5% are equipped with video conferencing capability."

Sreekanth Ravi, Founder and CEO of Tely Labs, added: "A strong focus on Europe and the Middle East is the next logical step for Tely."

IT solutions provider Logicalis has embarked on a new Business Intelligence (BI) project for retail consortium Nisa Retail.

The cloud-based solution replaces Nisa's existing on-premise offering, enabling its business users to gain deeper insight, faster, and better inform key business decisions to help shape the company's proposition and support continued growth in the competitive convenience retail sector.

David Morris, Head of IT at Nisa Retail, explained: "Our incumbent Business Intelligence solution gave us a glimpse of what was possible with BI and analytics, but we knew we could do more to leverage the technology. We wanted to adopt a new approach that would pool all data sources from right across the business, to put the right information, in the right users' hands, and quickly."

Logicalis is deploying the latest version of IBM Cognos, hosted on its cloud platform and wrapped with professional services inclusive of training for Nisa's team. Through the Proof of Concept and early implementation, the process by which data is processed and then presented to the business teams for use, has already been transformed, according to Morris.

"Whereas previously it was taking the team days to build data cubes, it's now just a matter of hours with far greater consistency," he said. "As we look to mesh together data from warehousing and logistics, to what customers are buying and where and when, the information garnered will be invaluable.

:It will help us to shape and refine our proposition, such as negotiating better costs with our suppliers, to directly benefit our retailers' bottom line - enabling them to be even more competitive on the high street."

Nisa's business users have also felt the early benefits. With the cloud-based solution providing greater performance, business users from across the trading, finance and customer insight teams have been able to drill down into the analytics instantly, with no delay or latency on the system, providing a far great user experience. "The solution has re-invigorated the use of Business Intelligence in the organisation," explained Morris.

"Our previous solution was viewed as something that simply existed to help Nisa's business users get from A to B in their roles. Now, as they dive deeper than ever before into our data, the solution is regarded as a key tool for delivering tangible business benefits and informing key decisions, focusing the IT department on areas that really help drive the business forward."

Implementation of the BI solution is currently underway, and expected to be fully operational across the retail business in Q4 this year.

Mark Starkey, MD of Logicalis UK, commented, "Business Intelligence is all about the opportunity to engage and act upon the right information, at the right time. Critical data is being captured by organisations like Nisa everyday that, when put to work, can inform better customer engagement, marketing and growth strategies.

"IT departments in retail are coming under increasing pressure to align more closely with business strategy, and now is the time to re-shape the IT function to focus on high-value, strategic initiatives. With this initiative, Nisa's IT team is seizing the opportunity to do just that, enabling its users to exploit IT to make a genuine mark on business performance to the benefit of its members."

Distributor Northamber saw its full-year pretax loss widen slightly due to a decrease in revenue and reduced margins.

In a statement, Northamber said it made a £1.2m pretax loss in the year ended June 30th, compared to £1.0m in the previous year.

Revenue fell to £62.9m from £77.5m but the company cut costs in a move to realign to more profitable areas - costs fell to £2.5m from £3.4m. Margins were also down 6.8% from 7.6%.

Chairman David Phillips said: "This time last year I reported that we were concentrating on the more profitable aspects of the business. That process is an ongoing task.

"There has been a marked change between the first and second halves of this past year. In the first half the results continued the downward trend of previous periods but in the second half we achieved increases in both turnover and margins compared with the first half.

"Costs were contained in the second half even though we increased the quality and quantity of resources put into marketing, selling and liaison with suppliers.

"The result of these cumulative changes was that the operating loss for the second half year was significantly lower than for the first half at £495,000 compared with £730,000."

Knight Corporate Finance has completed its 60th transaction after advising the shareholders of UK-based software and interconnection company Allegro Networks on its sale to California-based IIX Peering Inc.

The acquisition advances IIX's strategy to target enterprises with its global software and network interconnectivity solutions.

Knight Corporate Finance Director Paul Billingham said: "It is a tremendous achievement for Knight to reach its 60th deal as we approach our sixth anniversary.

"The 10 deals that we have completed this year are a good bellwether for how the industry is changing and demonstrates the strength of the UK comms sector and the confidence shown by a new range of acquirers."

Knight's deals this year include the sale of Avenir Telecom UK and CommsXchange, a Vodafone platinum partner, to Chess.

In a sale to another US buyer Knight advised on the acquisition of City Numbers by J2 Global. Knight also advised on the merger and fundraising for Transglobal Telecom and IT player Intralan, as well as five company sales in the fixed line sector this year.

Knight Director Adam Zoldan added: "Many of our deals are strategic rather than base sales. This drives higher values as the buyer is not just acquiring customers, but also skills, expertise and increasing the depth of their customer proposition.

"This also ensures that jobs are saved as good people drive value rather than become cost savings.

"The Avenir sale to Chess was a great example of this. Had we sold the business to an existing distributor we were sure that most if not all of the workforce would have been axed. However, with Chess we knew the jobs were secure and staff would have a great opportunity to enhance their career.

"This was important to the French parent company and also introduced a strong new player to the mobile channel."

Billingham also noted: "The way the acquisitions were funded is a testament to the confidence financial institutions place on the sector.

"Two deals were funded by US private equity. The Actimax deal by Coms was funded by an equity fund raise on the AIM. GCI had raised money from private equity to fund the Comms Xchange deal with rest funded by Bank finance.

"But even here we are seeing the banks offering flexible products that recognise that positive cash flow from acquisitions takes time to be realised rather than day one after the deal.

Knight has a few more deals on the go and we expect the M&A trend to continue into 2015. This really is a very positive time for the comms sector and whether companies are looking to grow, acquire, raise funds or are considering their exit options, there is a real choice in the market to find a deal that suits their requirements."