Former Royal Marine Andrew Skipsey is hoping to pedal his way to a big charity sum next Sunday, August 10th.

The M12 managing director is aiming to complete the 100 mile Ride London event in under six hours and net £1664 for the Royal Marines Charitable Trust Fund

Skipsey told Comms Dealer: "It's over a year since I did a challenge to raise some money for a damn good cause. I am going to have a go at cycling the 100 miles with hardly a stop and at a sensible speed and get round in under six hours. The Ride London event has two massive hills and about 25,000 others to contend with en route. My Royal Marine Commando values have stood me in good stead over the years so it's a good cause.

"M12 is also celebrating our 11th business birthday this week. During this time I have been privileged to have had a fantastic workforce, superb suppliers, tremendous clients, wonderful business and local friends and a great family. M12 is behind another RMCTF initiative as well so as I'm encouraging others to get out and do something it's important to show how it can be done!

For more information on the RMCTF challenge go to www.atleast350.org

To support Andrew for his Ride London challenge go to www.justgiving.com/ajskipsey

 

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Dragon teamA team from KCOM Group took part in the sixth annual Dragon Boat Festival on Pugney's Lake, Wakefield, netting £1000 for children's charity Sparks.
The team of 19 employees rowed a longboat 250 metres across the lake at Pugney's Country Park against another 36 teams in a bid to get the best time. The KCOM Group team managed to record a fantastic time of 59 seconds securing tenth place overall.
Madeleine Buckley, Corporate Partnerships Manager at Sparks said: "This year was the first time KCOM Group has taken part in a dragon boat race and £1,000 was fantastic achievement."
The event is organised jointly by The Rotary Club of Wakefield Chantry (club no 1496) and Huddersfield Rotary Club (club no 209), who have organised the race for five years.
"The whole team has really enjoyed taking part in this event and we're so pleased that we've been able to raise money for such a fantastic cause. There's already talk of taking part again next year," said Team Captain Lee Morrison.
KCOM Group has supported Sparks since 2012 raising £190,000 during that time to beat its original fundraising target by £90,000.

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Marek LowtherICT service provider Telindus has achieved Cisco Channel Customer Satisfaction Excellence, the highest distinction a partner can achieve within the Cisco Channel Partner Programme.

The award is based upon the customer satisfaction results captured by the Cisco Partner Access Online tool and will enable customers, Cisco personnel and partners to identify Telindus as having achieved outstanding customer satisfaction as part of Cisco's worldwide assessment process.

Marek Lowther, Managing Director of Telindus, comments: "Achieving Cisco Channel Customer Satisfaction Excellence recognises Telindus' commitment to providing exceptionally high levels of customer service. Customer Satisfaction Excellence is a core value that Cisco and Telindus share, and is a key driver of future success.The pre and post sales feedback we received from customers is very positive and speaks highly of the experience we provide, excellent and committed account teams, strong relationships and professional service."

 

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London based Corona Copy Solutions Ltd, a supplier of printers, photocopiers and document management solutions, has acquired telecoms reseller Corporate Information & Communication Technology Ltd.

James Stephens, Managing Director at Corona, said: "There are lots of synergies between the two businesses. Most importantly we both operate with a high customer focus striving to provide the best possible service to corporate customers. We are very excited about this acquisition as it establishes us in the telecoms sector to add to our established document management specialism."

The joined up business is anticipating a turnover upwards of £10m next year.

The acquisition was funded by a mixture of existing cash resources and debt funding provided by HSBC.

Hove-based EMC Corporate Finance advised Corona on the transaction. Chief Executive Nik Askaroff told Comms Dealer: "The return of bank funding to the acquisition market creates an exciting deal option for SMEs. In this instance James is an ambitious business owner who has a great team around him and being able to fund the transaction with HSBC's support, whilst retaining full ownership of the Group, allows him to achieve aggressive growth and look to acquire again in the next 12-18 months."

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Clodagh MurphyClodagh Murphy, Managing Director at Eclipse, is getting ready to tackle a four day, 300 mile cycling challenge across Italy to raise money for medical research charity, Sparks.
Every day one in 30 babies are born in the UK with a condition which may affect them for life and each year less that £10 per child is spent on health research. Sparks raises money to fund pioneering children's medical research to get this to change and has been the charity partner of Eclipse's parent company, KCOM Group, since 2012.
Taking place in October, Clodagh is part of a 14-strong cycling team riding from Venice to Genoa, which also includes employees from Deloitte, Addleshaw Goodard and Lloyds Bank.
Clodagh told Comms Dealer: "With two young children of my own I'm absolutely committed to successfully completing this challenge and raising money for this fantastic charity. Here at Eclipse we do lots of fundraising activities, from dress-down days and cake sales through to hard physical challenges such as this one, and we love every minute of it."
As part of a summer of fundraising activities across KCOM Group, Clodagh's epic ride will be added to a charity golf day, a longboat race and numerous smaller activities.
Since 2012 KCOM Group has raised £160,000 to support Sparks.

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Resellers looking to offer customers low cost video conferencing solutions will welcome a new package from Nimans.

The convergence distributor has formed a strategic alliance with BlinkPipe that enables video to be added to meeting room audio conferencing calls, which it says is ideally suited to the SMB market.

Nimans says customers will be able to deploy flexible video conferencing by simply connecting a BlinkPipe camera to a TV and a traditional meeting room audio conference unit and HD video calls can be 'instantly made and received'.

In addition to the camera, a BlinkPipe Hub cloud service enables group video calls and screen sharing between BlinkPipe hardware, PCs and Macs. Legacy enterprise systems can also connect to the video call via an additional subscription.

Paul Burn, Head of Category Sales at Nimans, told Comms Dealer: "BlinkPipe is a unique solution for resellers to upgrade sites from audio to video conferencing, particularly SMB locations. Video Conferencing is now within the reach of all businesses, big and small. We are very excited by the potential this partnership creates. Users simply walk in, sit down and dial... that's it!"

RRP prices start from £750 based on upfront and recurring revenue opportunities for dealers.

BlinkPipe co-founder Dave Gwilt, commented: "We believe high quality video gives so much more feedback than voice alone. It can change the outcome of a call. We started BlinkPipe to make it unbelievably simple and cost effective for businesses to switch to video calling. Working with Nimans will enable us to take the brand to a new level - and most importantly it allows their resellers to capture additional revenue from their own customer bases, or target new areas of activity."

A joint launch event is planned for September 16th at Nimans to provide resellers with a hands-on experience of the new technology.

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Newbury based Gamma has achieved a 20% hike in gross profits with EBITDA up to £17.2m.

Announcing its financial results for 2013 the channel only network operator claims the following set of encouraging headline figures:

  • Turnover up 8.4% from £137.2m to £148.7m
  • Gross Profit up 20.0% from £44.9m to £53.9m
  • Gross Profit percentage up 3.5% from 32.7% to 36.2%  
  • EBITDA up 19.6% from £14.4m to £17.2m
  • Profit before tax up 20.2% from £9.3m to £11.2m
  • Cash inflow before acquisitions and financing up 23.6% from £6.6m to £8.1m

Gamma said it has now demonstrated consistent growth in cash generation for six years. This is despite the poor economic climate over much of this period and the continued erosion of the wholesale calls market which now only accounts for approximately one third of gross profit.

The growth has come primarily from Gamma’s more disruptive communications services that have much higher know-how and software content, and in which the Group has invested significantly. In particular SIP, an alternative to traditional ISDN for business connectivity, has grown by over 50%. This is a displacement market, where investment in automated provisioning and resilience is clearly bearing fruit. Similarly, Gamma’s Horizon product, which provides a cloud based alternative to a traditional PBX, has exceeded expectations with over 18,000 new seats added during 2013.

Bob Falconer, CEO at Gamma, commented, "We are pleased with another set of strong results.  Around 20% of our staff is engaged in product development, and it’s good to see this investment bearing fruit. As a channel focused business, our growth continues to demonstrate the appetite of our partners for taking new disruptive services into the business.

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Arrow bounced back in Q2 with the European acquisition of COMPUTERLINKS helping to keep its growth positive. Second quarter sales of $5.7 billion were above the midpoint of guidance and overall and adjusted for the impact of acquisitions and changes in foreign currencies, total sales increased 1% year-over-year.

Enterprise computing solutions (ECS) grew 10% year-over-year and was flat globally adjusted for acquisitions. Operating income grew 12%, and billings grew at a mid-single digit rate year-over-year adjusted for acquisitions. Sales in the ECS business were $2.1bn, driven by continued growth in the software and services businesses and by a rebound in hardware-related business, following a spending pause during the first quarter.

"In enterprise computing solutions, we continue to move forward on our strategic transformation towards selling comprehensive solutions with a focus on the higher value segment targeted at the data centre. Our comprehensive solutions addressed enterprise customers' entire needs, be they on-premise, in the cloud or a hybrid combination. Both global components and enterprise computing solutions are benefiting from the growing demands to generate and capture data from a proliferating variety of Internet-connected devices and security transmit, analyse and store that data," Michael J Long, CEO told analysts.

In the Americas, ECS sales grew 34% quarter-over-quarter and grew 1% year-over-year. In Europe, sales grew 17% quarter-over-quarter. Europe sales in constant currency advanced 26% year-over-year, primarily due to the acquisition of COMPUTERLINKS. Adjusted for the impact of the acquisition, sales declined 1% year-over-year in constant currency in Europe.

"COMPUTERLINKS brought us new capability, new reach. And if you look at our European performance, we had record sales, record operating income and record operating income percent in Europe. So that's a big validation of that strategy that's paid off. And so when you look even deeper below that, security is growing at 9% worldwide for us."

In both the Americas and Europe year-over-year, growth in software and services were offset by a decline in proprietary servers. Enterprise computing solutions gross margin advanced year-over-year due to the more favourable mix of security infrastructure software as well as services. Operating income grew 20% year-over-year in the second quarter, and operating margin of 4.8% was up 40 basis points year-over-year.

"Proprietary servers year-over-year are down about 17%. That's why I'm really ho-hum on the IBM changes. There's really just not that much there that's worth going after. But our services business and software business is up 11% and 15%, respectively, towards that number."

"What we've really seen in the services piece is North America's a little bit ahead of Europe in growth. Europe's around 7% on the services side. And on the software side, Europe is actually leading North America by the same kind of few percentages as you saw services the other way. So the good thing about what we're seeing is that the business is learning from each other, region to region."

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Piers Linney, co-CEO of Outsourcery, has joined the Cabinet Office SME Panel, which advises on small and medium business issues.

The SME Panel, formed in 2011, advises the Cabinet Office on work to help more small and medium enterprises (SMEs) to win public sector contracts and other SME-related issues. The panel consists of a broad range of micro, small and medium business leaders across a number of industry sectors.

Linney said: "The public sector provides a massive opportunity for SMEs, which are the engine of the economy. The aim of having SMEs account for 25% of direct and indirect central government expenditure is within reach and the G-Cloud framework in particular is a world leading example of how IT procurement should evolve to drive value for money and broaden supply bases to introduce more competition and innovation.

" However, it is important that such initiatives continue to adapt and that feedback is heard and acted upon and I look forward to adding our perspective."

Stephen Allott, the Crown Representative for SMEs said: "The SME panel has been doing a fine job in acting as a sounding board for Cabinet Office policies and offering excellent advice at how best to make it easier for smaller firms to pitch for and win government business. Piers will offer the board further experience from the IT sector and we look forward to his input.

"Government is now getting huge value from SME IT suppliers in particular. The G-Cloud Cloudstore is the standout success in this regard with spend of over £190 million to date - 56% of which has gone to SMEs."

 

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The opportunity for IT resellers to adopt cloud telephony and generate new voice revenues has never been greater, according to a study by NCONNECT.

60% of survey respondents said they would take advantage of cloud telephony by adding it to existing customer offerings.

IT-centric resellers were frank about the concerns and risks associated with selling more voice services, or in many cases selling voice for the very first time.

The biggest obstacle for 55% of respondents was how adding voice might appear to dilute their customer offering.

For 36% of respondents, the prime worry was the competitiveness within the existing voice market and the need to have compelling and differentiated solutions.

"IT resellers must celebrate and exploit their hard-earned specialisms, but why leave money on the table when you're trusted by customers to deliver on their requirements?" said Rami Houbby, UK Managing Director of NCONNECT.

"There is a real opportunity for the IT channel to take advantage of cloud to break through into new voice revenues.

"According to the Cloud Industry Forum, nearly 80% of UK organisations have now formally adopted at least one cloud-based service showing just how far the market has come in understanding and accepting cloud IT. The demand for cloud telephony will only increase."

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