Comms Dealer

Cloud security company Zscaler has appointed Jamie Farrelly as EMEA Channel Director. He brings over 15 years experience in building channel partnerships.

"Jamie's expertise and experience is exactly what we need to accelerate our channel growth and expand awareness around our Zscaler cloud security platform," said Matt Piercy, VP and GM EMEA at Zscaler.

"The old way of stacking up security appliances in the data centre and creating a moat is no longer effective to protect today's agile business. Digital transformation has security at the very heart of it."

Exclusive Group's Cloud First strategy has a new man at the helm, Patrick van Arendonk, who brings almost 30 years experience and joins from Exclusive Networks Netherlands where he held positions including General Manager and Director of Business Development.

Prior to this he was founder of VADition Benelux (acquired by Exclusive Group in 2011) and has also worked in senior sales roles at Juniper, F5 and Cisco, among others.

"It's time for some blue sky thinking now that the cloud consumption model is beginning to become more relevant," said Barrie Desmond, COO of Exclusive Group.

"The Cloud First initiative is our way of helping us, our vendors and reseller partners understand their relevance in this journey and get them to put cloud at the forefront of their proposals and strategic mindset.

"Cloud First means always thinking cloud, something we've done ever since the launch of BigTec four years ago. And to underline the significance we have appointed Patrick as our envoy to spread the message and activate new, practical programmes across all divisions of Exclusive Group."

Arendonk, Director of Cloud First, commented: "The traditional on-premise hardware-based markets for cybersecurity and infrastructure are still growing. But the private, public and hybrid cloud alternatives are growing 10 times faster. The opportunities for partners are huge but only if they take some steps to evolve."

Excell Group has acquired IT and Apple support company MacSeven Consultants adding over £2m turnover to the bottom line.

MacSeven's main service offering is Apple Mac computer support. It also offers PC support and project work.

MacSeven's team of seven is led by directors Michael Humphreys and Naveen Nahar. Their operational activities will remain autonomous post-acquisition and they will continue to be the point of contact for their existing customer support.

The acquisition follows last year's purchase of City Audio Visual Services which strengthened Excell's strategy of horizontal and vertical integration.

Excel said this latest acquisition is particularly relevant for the 6,000-plus customers in Excell-enabled business centres, many of whom use the Apple Mac OS and devices.

Finance Director Edward Pettit said: "There are multiple benefits here: Excell's customers can access expert Mac services and support, and MacSeven's customers can now take advantage of a range of telephony, network, comms and business resilience services. It's diversified our product suite further."

Naveen Nahar, co-Director of MacSeven, added: "Becoming part of Excell Group marks the beginning of an exciting time for both teams. With a 25 year pedigree and consistent growth, Excell will allow us to continue refining our expertise and resource, while significantly growing our offering."

Excell Group celebrates 25 years in business this year and is intensifying its activity with an acquisition fund of millions.

Exertis has extended its professional services portfolio with the addition of Exertis Monitor, a post sales service that provides a basic level of monitoring on any vendor's solutions across IT infrastructures.

Ian Gilbey, Exertis Technical Services Director, stated: "Exertis Monitor provides essential information on how resources are performing in different areas from any vendor and on any device that has an IP address.

"Resellers can now take advantage of device monitoring on switches, servers, virtual hosts, storage and UPS. Outside of these core areas, any other IP enabled device can be monitored to provide, at a minimum, availability reports."

Exertis Monitor provides availability monitoring and reporting with a notification process on outages or performance issues.

Nimans and Unify have staged a joint 'Cloud & Triple Play' workshop, a three hour event where attendees discovered how to identify, target and win more sales based on cloud as well as on-premise solutions.

"For example, resellers learned about the functionality, benefits, and user adoption tactics for winning new business with Unify's collaboration solution, Circuit," said Marcus Yates, Unify Solutions Business Manager at Nimans.

Unify also introduced its new 'Triple Play' marketing support programme which can be hosted on a partner's own website and provides resellers and end users with transparent solution choices.

"Triple Play is designed to increase revenues, enhance demand generation and motivate resellers to break into new markets," added Yates.

"Triple Play also plays into the digital buyer journey of today where its estimated 85% of small business owners begin the buying process in a digital environment. Triple Play enables partners to capture those buyer prospects during the early stage of their online research."

Telecoms training company Train to Win.tv has introduced a new fully managed service - Support to Win.tv - which provides outsourced expertise to channel partners who don't want the headache or business overheads of supporting hosted telephony customers in house.

Support to Win.tv takes care of all non-commercially impacting change requests by end users including moves, adds, changes and the provisioning of services.

Julie Mills, founder of Train to Win.tv, commented: "We have created Support to Win.tv following repeated requests by both channel partners and end users to extend our range of end user training services.

"We've set up a dedicated support centre and employed experts on an array of hosted telephony platforms to ensure we provide the same level of support we offer on site to customers who call in.

"All of this is underpinned by a white label ticketing system and telephone answering service which can dovetail into a partner's existing support process.

"We have also created a range of additional services aimed at solving some of the problems we've experienced over the last three years.

"A great example of this is the new guided install service. During the last 12 months the market has seen a significant increase in hosted sales to businesses of less than 10 users.

"These businesses simply don't warrant an onsite visit but still need handholding through the initial set up and installation to ensure they get the most from their new system.

"By offering a virtual installation over webinar and telephone we can ensure that customers get the same level of service you would get from an onsite deployment at a much lower cost."

Spitfire has concluded a supplier agreement that sees the addition of TalkTalk Business Ethernet to its portfolio which includes Ethernet from BT Wholesale, Colt and Virgin Media Business.

Spitfire's portfolio of Ethernet services includes delivery via fibre, EFM and GEA.

Justin Orde, Joint MD, commented: "Increasing demand for high speed bandwidth means we need to offer customers prompt implementation and flexible pricing options.

"We aim to provide customers with the right network connectivity solution for their business needs and not a 'one size fits all' product."

Westcon-Comstor's global SAP platform is now live in 54 countries.

The company first deployed SAP in the United States in 2012 and two years later kicked off a global expansion project in New Zealand, concluding its global rollout by bringing its Africa businesses onto the platform earlier this month.

"Going live globally on SAP is game changing for Westcon-Comstor," said CEO Dolph Westerbos.

"Over the past few years we grew our operations to every corner of the world, generating $6bn in gross revenues for our vendors and customers. We could only scale further with a common business platform which gives instant visibility in our operations with the data to make the best quality decisions.

"There have been challenges and we must continue to optimise, but we now have a foundation to run a truly integrated global business with much improved analytics and data management that benefit our vendors and solution provider customers."

The company has also deployed an automated quoting engine in front of SAP and integrated its BlueSky cloud and services management platform onto SAP.

Dave Spencer, SVP and MD, East Market Unit at SAP North America, added: "This project was a true collaborative effort between Westcon-Comstor and SAP. The culmination of all our work together enables significant business process improvements for Westcon-Comstor and its partners."

Glamorgan Telecom has completed a management buyout with support from Finance Wales which takes a 15% equity stake in the group. MD and majority shareholder Kelly Bolderson (pictured) and members of the senior management team have bought out founding director Neal Pughe's stake bringing the company under the full control of the current board.

The move enables the Cardiff-based company to refinance its existing debt and push forward growth plans across south Wales and the south west and target revenues of over £5m by the end of 2018 having expanded its sales team by 40%.

Bolderson said: "This is the beginning of a new and exciting journey for the business. With a full buyout in place the management team has control to guide Glamorgan Telecom into an exciting new chapter, and with the investment we can continue with our expansion plans."

This is the latest investment from the Wales Management Succession Fund, a Welsh Government-backed £25m fund supporting business succession for growing Welsh companies.

Glamorgan Telecom was established in 1993 and has more than 1,800 customers and currently employs 32 staff.

The European Commission has called for 'swift action' to drive forward its Digital Single Market initiative across the European Union.

The Commission has published its mid-term review of its Digital Single Market strategy, which takes stock of the progress made, calls on co-legislators to swiftly act on all proposals already presented, and outlines further action on online platforms, the data economy and cybersecurity.

Since May 2015, the European Commission has delivered 35 legislative proposals and policy initiatives as part of its Digital Single Market strategy.

The focus is now on obtaining political agreement to boost investments in 'high-speed and quality networks', which are 'critical' for the full deployment of the digital economy and society, said the Commission. 

Andrus Ansip, vice-president for the Digital Single Market, said: "The European Parliament and member states need to adopt these proposals as soon as possible, for new jobs, business and innovation to take off across Europe. Two years on, we propose to update our strategy to reflect new challenges and technologies.

"We need cyber-secure infrastructure across all parts of the EU so that everyone everywhere can enjoy high-speed connectivity safely. We have already agreed on strong EU rules for personal data protection, we now need to make sure that non-personal data can flow freely to assist connected cars and eHealth services. And we need high-performance computing along with a digitally skilled workforce to make the most out of the data economy."

On the data economy, the Commission is preparing a legislative initiative on the cross-border free flow of non-personal data (Autumn 2017) and an initiative on accessibility and the re-use of public and publicly funded data (Spring 2018).

In cybersecurity, by September 2017 the Commission will review the 2013 EU Cybersecurity Strategy, and the mandate of the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA), to align it to a new EU-wide framework on cybersecurity. The Commission will also propose additional measures on cyber security standards, certification and labelling to make connected objects - the Internet of Things - more cyber secure.

In the area of online platforms, by the end of 2017, the Commission will prepare an initiative to address 'unfair contractual clauses and trading practices' identified in platform-to-business relationships.

In addition, the Commission wants to address the need for further investment in digital infrastructure and technologies in areas where investment 'needs to go far beyond the capacity of single member states', such as high performance computing.

"A fully functional Digital Single Market could contribute €415bn per year to our economy and create hundreds of thousands of new jobs," said the Commission.