Comms Dealer

KCOM Group has hosted its tenth annual charity golf day, raising an impressive £36,000 for its charity partner 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 than £10 per child is spent on health research. Sparks raises money to fund pioneering children's medical research to get this to change.

Employees from KCOM Group came together with customers, partners, suppliers and celebrity sportsmen, including Ray Clemence, Iain Dowie and Mike Dean.

Forty teams battled it out on the golf course, winning prizes for the best individual round, best hole and best team, before an evening of fundraising activities including a silent auction and a raffle.

Madeleine Buckley, Corporate Partnerships Manager at Sparks said: "Throughout the day and evening it was great to see KCOM Group bring together customers and partners to raise money for Sparks. Everyone who attended played an important part in helping KCOM Group reach their fundraising total and we appreciate their generosity."

Paul Simpson, Chief Financial Officer at KCOM Group, said: "When we first held this event in 2005 just 13 teams took part. Now there are 40 teams with 160 players involved, including celebrity sportsmen from across the country.

"It's our biggest fundraising event in the calendar but we couldn't raise as much as we do without the support we get from the other businesses that attend."

KCOM Group will be taking on a number of testing challenges this summer in support of Sparks, including a dragon boat race and a 300 mile cycle across Italy. It has supported Sparks since 2012 raising £175,000 during that time to beat its original fundraising target by £75,000.

3CX, developer of the Windows VoIP PBX 3CX Phone System, has opened a new office in Modena, Italy.

The move follows new office opeinings in France and Poland last year.

Nick Galea, CEO of 3CX said: "At 3CX we felt that there was no better place to open our Italian office than in Modena, the heart of Italy's high tech engineering industry.

"Being firmly committed to innovation, 3CX is in great company at the home of Lamborghini, Ferrari and Maserati. We look forward to working with our 3CX Partners in Italy to take advantage of the boom in demand for VoIP solutions."

Loris Saretta, Channel Sales Manager of 3CX Italy said: "The opening of our new office in Modena is a great step. 3CX Italy significantly increases our presence within the Italian market, enabling us to better support our partner network and customers."

3CX Italy will provide technical and marketing support for 3CX partners and distributors. The new office will provide a training centre and locally-based support services. It sees sales growing as businesses switch from proprietary phone systems.

Square 1 Products has added AV vendor Draper Group to its portfolio of AV solutions.

Draper, a maker of projector screens, mountings and accessories, was introduced to Square 1 Products by the distributor's AV specialist Matt Farrer who has maintained a close relationship with Draper during his career.

"Our vendor relationships are born from product quality and functionality ensuring new portfolio additions can easily integrate with existing product lines to strengthen our solutions offering, and enable our resellers to further develop new business," he said.

Contact: www.square1products.com

Motivated by their links to friends and family affected by cancer a team from Bury-based Pennine Telecom have completed the Race For Life staged at Manchester's Heaton Park.

The seven strong team, called the Pennine Panthers, included Marketing Manager Belinda McGee who said: "We had a great laugh training, sharing each other’s woes and, while we got a bit out of puff, had fantastic fun on the run. I lost my father and grandma to cancer and my aunty has just received a diagnosis, so Cancer Research is a charity close to my heart."

York-based IT distributor Varlink has completed the integration of its EPoS sales division, EPoS Distributor.

Retail system resellers can now access the full product portfolio including EPOS terminals, receipt printers, touchscreens, cash drawers and other EPOS peripherals, alongside Varlink's mobile computing and data capture product set.

Mike Pullon, Varlink CEO, said: "When the EPoS Distribution division was established there was a clear separation between the products purchased by EPoS specialists and those taken by our established Varlink customer base.

"Over time, while there remains some fundamental differences, there are many product sets that are of interest to both segments of our customer base.

"We have therefore moved from two websites to a single Varlink branded site which carries all mobile computing, label printing, data capture, networking and EPoS brands.

"While we are retiring the EPoS Distributor brand, our three EPoS sales team members will continue to work, exclusively, with our retail focused customers."

Fujitsu is working with Intel on the use of Silicon Photonics to develop next-generation technology for the data centre, which increase the throughput of system data by a 50-fold factor and reduce system latency.

Today, typical server configurations tend to over provision functionality and under utilise resources, it says. Fujitsu Silicon Photonics-based systems - expected to be commercially available within the next 12 months - will offer a new way to build and operate data centres.

Such a performance increase opens up new horizons and opportunities in using large scale data sets. It will also radically change data centre design in favour of dynamic resource pools, where users are able to access the computing, processing, network and storage capabilities in line with their exact application needs. Individual components will be disaggregated, since Silicon Photonics can transfer data over distances up to 300 meters without any perceptible impact on performance.

The ability to remove system performance bottlenecks that hamper today's data centres is especially compelling when handling large-scale volumes of data, running into Petabytes. By replacing traditional connections between data centre components with light (photonics)-based interconnects, data can be moved through running systems up to 50x faster than today's state-of-the-art 16GB Fiber Channel technology. Resource pools can be optimised independently to achieve the optimum combination of performance, density, energy efficiency and cost.

The provision of this almost limitless bandwidth enables the optimised use of server resources in combination with direct access to Storage Class Memory connected to different server nodes via Silicon Photonics interconnects. This will provide huge performance benefits in all data intensive environments, such as cluster solutions and in-memory databases. Our vision is to have no dedicated storage, just large, redundant and highly available SCM pools which can be addressed by CPU loads with Store Operations.

Jens-Peter Seick, Senior Vice President, Product Development Group, Fujitsu: "Quite simply, the introduction of Silicon Photonics-based technology means that businesses can be confident that their ICT departments will be able to service bigger, better, faster and more needs than ever before.

"As a result, Fujitsu envisages that the data centre of the future will become much more of a technology enabler for business velocity. The introduction of disruptive technology such as Silicon Photonics-based systems creates new opportunities for environments where the ability to process large volumes of data has, until now, been a major bottleneck."

IT lifecycle management company Network 2 Supplies (N2S) has secured a brace of contract wins with the combined potential to generate an additional £1m per year.

The firm has renewed a contract with a global banking organisation to carry out the secure disposal of end-of-life IT systems containing sensitive and confidential information. N2S will also install and support a telecoms and IT infrastructure for the company.

N2S first won this contract in 2012 and one year later scooped an award for its green IT initiative. The programme saw 163 tonnes of equipment collected and only 0.1% go landfill compared to a 29% original estimate.

The second deal win is a six year contract with a global engineering and technology services company.

The work will involve N2S taking responsibility for the company's IT lifecycle management at sites across the UK and Europe.

Jack Gomarsall, N2S MD (pictured above), said: "In recent years we have become an international player by moving into global markets, and these two new contract wins will help us cement our reputation on a worldwide scale.

"The fact organisations of this magnitude are putting their trust in us is a huge endorsement to the professionalism of our work."

N2S has sites in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk and London, and its client list includes the Home Office, the HM Prison Service, military departments, government departments, UK universities, large NHS organisations and a number of industry bodies.

Google is aiming to support the next generation of European entrepreneurs with the creation of an EMEA venture fund to the tune of $100m.

"When we launched Google Ventures in 2009 we set out to be a very different type of venture fund," said Bill Maris, Managing Partner, Google Ventures.

"Startups need more than just capital to succeed, they also benefit from engineering support, design expertise, and guidance with recruiting, marketing and product management. Five years later, we're working with more than 250 portfolio companies, tackling challenges across a host of industries."

Google believes that Europe's startup scene has big potential: "We've seen compelling new companies emerge from places like London, Paris, Berlin, the Nordic region and beyond - SoundCloud, Spotify, Supercell and many others," added Maris.

Professor Stephen Roper, Researcher and Director of the Warwick Enterprise Research Centre, observed: "Google's announcement of the creation of a European venture capital fund is another welcome signal of confidence in the European high-tech industry.

"Google is rather late into this arena, however, with companies such as Intel Capital already having a well established portfolio of European tech investments. Perhaps more valuable than the investment to Europe's high-tech starts will be the potential relationship with Google itself, its technologies and market position.

"European high-tech firms have often looked enviously at the supply of risk capital available across the Atlantic. The arrival of Google Ventures in Europe takes us some way to redressing the lack of risk capital in Europe.

"As to whether Google is on a technology shopping spree or have a real interest in building Europe's next generation of high-tech gazelles only time will tell."

Gamma has appointed Richard Last as Non-Executive Chairman, and Martin Lea and Alan Gibbins as Non-Executive Directors.

Last is currently Non-Executive Chairman of Servelec Group, a UK-based technology company, and British Smaller Companies VCT2, a listed venture capital trust.

He is also Non-Executive Director of Corero, an AIM quoted IT solutions provider, and Lighthouse Group, an AIM quoted financial services group.

Lea was most recently interim CEO of Multicom Security Group in Sweden. From 2004-2011 he was CEO of Invitel, a telecommunications group with operations in Hungary and Eastern Europe. Prior to this, he was Executive Vice President of Intertek Group where he was global CEO of its electronic product testing division. Lea's international experience extends across the USA, Europe and Asia.

Gibbins was an Audit and Business Assurance Partner of PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP from 1985 -2006. During this time, his responsibilities included one of the main London audit groups. More recently Gibbins has been a Non-Executive Director and Audit Committee Chairman for BlueBay Asset Management as well as being a Non-Executive Director for a number of private companies.

The trio will join Gamma's board alongside current executive directors Bob Falconer (CEO) and Gerard Sreeves (CFO) and Non-Executive Directors Andrew Stone and Wu Long Peng.

Falconer said: "We are delighted to have been able to attract three individuals with the depth of corporate and industry experience that Richard, Martin and Alan bring with them.

"The company has seen excellent revenue and EBITDA growth for a number of years, and the outlook is really exciting. As the scale and profile of the business continues to increase, I am sure that all three will make a valuable contribution in taking Gamma through the next phase of its corporate development."

Last added: "Martin, Alan and I are all excited to have been asked to join the Board of Gamma. It is a high quality business with a great financial and operational track record and some very exciting growth plans ahead. Since becoming involved with Gamma, I have been impressed by its market leadership, its closeness to its customers and the quality of its culture and people."   

C4L has strengthened its management team with the appointment of Alex Cruz Farmer (pictured) as Technical Director.

Farmer boasts 10-plus years senior experience in wholesale and service provider roles, he is an ISPA judge, Linx programme committee member and a business owning entrepreneur from the early age of 15.

C4L Group CEO Simon Mewett said: "Alex is a trusted acquaintance with extensive industry experience and a proven track record of success in technical innovation and decision making. His skill will be used to strengthen our portfolio of services for our channel, and provide true carrier grade and service provider solutions. 

"We have a rapid growth strategy and our business plans and investments are all prepared to meet market demand, Alex' appointment was the next logical and essential step."

Farmer added: "I am looking forward to driving the technical strategic direction through innovation of the technologies within the C4L Group companies."