Comms Dealer

Hats off to ICUK for being selected as the Best Business for Customer Service at the Croydon Business Awards hosted on the 15th of May.

The hosting, telecoms and broadband wholesaler was also Highly Commended for its commitment to the community, reflecting its work with the Croydon Tech City start-up and inspiring young entrepreneurs at school. The firm had also been shortlisted for the Training and Development award.

According to Director Paul Barnett the award reflects 12 years of hard work from the company to ensure customers always receive support as soon as they raise a query. ICUK has always placed focus on support over sales, and this has allowed the company to grow to more than 600 resellers and tens of thousands of clients.

Barnett said: "This award has been a long time in the making and is hard earned by our current support team.

"They work tirelessly and we'd like to thank Mark, Niall, Kushal, Alan, Mat and Lynn for all the work they do."

The judges at the Croydon Business Awards said: "ICUK is a dynamic company in the telecoms and Internet industry. The drive and enthusiasm generated by the directors is impressive."

BT has outlined plans for a major recruitment drive across the UK, with 1,600 new engineering jobs being created at Openreach, BT's local access network business.

With the company having passed more than 19 million homes and businesses with fibre - some two thirds of the UK - the new recruits will help to continue to improve customer service and bring the technology to even more communities.

As more and more people rely on the Internet they have rising expectations of reliability. The new engineers will help Openreach to continue to improve customer service by installing new lines and fixing faults more quickly.

Openreach has also committed to increase transparency around its customer service performance by promising to publish regular reports on its website from this summer.

These reports will show how Openreach is delivering against its service targets.

The business expects a significant number of the engineering roles to be taken up by ex-service men and women - continuing the company's long-standing relationship with the UK Armed Forces.

Openreach is also particularly keen to recruit more female engineers and has launched a campaign encouraging women to enter the world of engineering.

The Prime Minister, the Rt Hon David Cameron MP said: "Supporting business, creating jobs and providing a better future for hardworking people is a crucial part of our long-term economic plan.

"So I am delighted that BT is launching this major recruitment drive for 1,600 engineers across the UK, providing financial security for families and delivering a world class infrastructure for Britain."

The Rt Hon Sajid Javid MP, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport and Minister for Equalities said: "The creation of new jobs, like the ones being announced by BT today, is one of the many benefits associated with the roll-out of superfast broadband currently underway. We know that for every £1 invested by government, we get £20 benefit in return, and the employment boost delivered through infrastructure projects like this are a vital part of the Government's long term economic plan."

Joe Garner, CEO, Openreach, added: "Millions of customers depend on broadband and they rely on us to keep them connected, whatever the weather. Our engineers have been rolling out fibre broadband faster than anywhere else in the world, and at the same time completing hundreds of thousands of jobs each week to keep people connected throughout the UK - an amazing achievement.

"These new recruits will be a welcome boost to that effort, joining an already world class team. We want to attract the best in the country to a career in engineering.  We are also keen to recruit women - as I'm keen to dispel the myth that being an engineer is an exclusively male vocation. In fact we have many successful women engineers and it is my personal belief that recruiting more will also help our customer service agenda. Being an Openreach engineer is a terrific job and a rewarding career, regardless of your background, or gender."

BT has a long-standing relationship with the UK Armed Forces, and some of the latest group of new recruits will join through its well-established Civilian Work Attachment scheme. This helps to facilitate a smooth transition from the Forces into the civilian workplace.

Tablet sales are moving up-market with modem connections becoming more popular and prices rising. Apple and Samsung combined for 71% of the 41.3 million branded tablets in the first calendar quarter of 2014, according to early vendor shipment share estimates from market intelligence firm ABI Research. This is the closest the two leading vendors have come to date and the pair remains well-ahead the rest of the pack.

"Despite questions remaining about data disclosure in 2010 and 2011, Samsung's release of tablet sales data this past quarter is a good sign for the mobile computing market," says senior practice director Jeff Orr. "Whether due to its confidence in the economy, its own business, or a combination of reasons, Samsung continues to demonstrate tablet growth as its 2013 retail push in North America and Western Europe pays off."

The first three months of the year remain a seasonal low-point for tablets as with other computing and CE markets. Apple's share dropped 10.1% with 16.4 million units, as Samsung rose 11% to 13 million units. The mix of tablet operating systems is also showing signs of stability with only minor changes in shipment share. Android continues to lead new tablet shipments at 56.3% for 1Q 2014 followed by iOS at 39.6% and Windows 8/RT at 4.1% with an accuracy of +/- 3% due to vendors yet to report.

A bright spot in the quarter was the tablet attach rate level of mobile broadband modems (3G and 4G). Some 22% shipped with an embedded modem, which is the highest penetration seen since the September quarter of 2011. "As major advanced markets become saturated, buyers are expanding their tablet use case, which is also pushing up the ASP in these markets," added Orr.

Vaioni Wholesale's growth ambitions have been boosted by a key hire that MD Sachin Vaish says will take the company to the next stage of development.

The former Transformation Director at TalkTalk Andy Lockwood has joined the Ethernet and cloud specialist - which is aiming to become a £20m business within five years - as a Non-Exec on the board.

The move follows a round of investment through Maven Capital Partners and a period of strategic planning.

While at TalkTalk Lockwood led the development and delivery of a transformational business strategy which over four years created more than £200m of new revenue from next generation data and IP voice services, while increasing gross margin and EBITDA, pointed out Vaish (pictured below).

He said: "With the expertise Andy has acquired over his career having worked in sales and operations for many recognised service providers, I am sure he will be invaluable in assisting me and the business to continue its growth strategy."

Lockwood added: "Vaioni has great credentials. I am impressed with what Sachin has built so far and what the business has achieved in the last 12 months. I hope to add a lot of value to the business strategy."

Zayo Group, an international provider of bandwidth infrastructure, has acquired London-based dark fibre provider Geo Networks.

The acquisition will add over 2,100 route miles to Zayo's European network and connectivity to 587 on-net buildings.

Founded in 2002 by Jonathan Watts and Chris Smedley, Geo owns and operates a high capacity fibre network, providing managed networks, dark fibre and co-location services to a variety of high-bandwidth sectors including media companies, service providers, financial services, data centres and gaming organisations.

Geo's 100 route mile London network is housed in the London sewer system which minimises the threat of physical faults, boosting reliability and security, and enabling rapid deployment with minimum disruption.

The Geo acquisition will significantly increase Zayo's fibre footprint in the UK, adding over 1,800 miles of national fibre connecting 130 data centres, telehouses and key internet exchanges.

It also will provide direct access to major cities including Manchester, Birmingham and other significant commercial regions.

In addition to enhancing Zayo's UK network, Geo's fibre enables Zayo to establish a presence in Ireland through the diverse optical fibre subsea system, East-West Ring, providing diverse connectivity to Dublin, a strategic hub for data centres and cloud service providers.

"Geo's extensive fibre and conduit assets complement our existing London footprint and bring an increased breadth to our UK network" said Dan Caruso, CEO of Zayo Group. "Additionally, diverse connectivity to Dublin is critical as it continues to develop as an international data centre hub."

Chris Smedley, Chief Executive of Geo Networks, added. "Our customers will not only benefit from the expanded reach of the combined network, but also the opportunity to access Zayo's full suite of services."

The deal will close immediately and will be funded by a combination of cash on hand and a draw from Zayo's revolving credit facility. The purchase price has not been disclosed.

The integration of the Zayo and Geo will enable access to 79,000 miles of fibre in 8 countries, and connectivity to more than 650 data centers.

Avaya will migrate all channel transactions to the SAP I-Box platform between 23-27 May. This move will eventually allow Avaya to use a single consolidated system to support orders, invoices and shipment for all of our channel partners.

During this consolidation, many of Avaya's commercial tools may be unavailable for service. On a global basis, users will not be able to order any heritage Avaya ("red") solutions or services, although designs can still be created in ASD using the untethered process. Both Order Center and Order Status will be out of service for heritage Avaya products. Maintenance quoting and renewal tools will be unavailable. Users will not be able to create or download new licenses using ADI, PLDS, or RFA, and GRT will be unavailable to register systems for heritage Avaya solutions.

Heritage Nortel products and services will not be impacted by this outage. Avaya One Source users will still be able to access pricing via GPPC and create quotes throughout the outage period. US distributors will continue to use separate ordering processes for SME and Enterprise products after the migration takes place, as Avaya will continue to have two ordering entities in the SAP I box.

Cisco sees 'continued stabilisation' across Europe with order strength in the UK up 7%, Germany up 5%, and northern Europe as a whole up 4%.

It has just reported Q3 FY '14, where it says it 'executed well as we managed through the transitions in our business and markets, resulting in our financial performance above our expectations'. From a top and bottom line perspective, total revenue was $11.5bn, down 5%. Router revenue fell 10%, but orders were nearly flat. Switch sales fell 6%.

CEO John Chambers said: "Europe is still a little bit fragile, but we did see stability across the north with some growth rates for a change and Europe in total was finally positive, not counting the emerging markets for us. Even stability in the South looks like occurring. Now I know they've still got structural issues there, and I know some of the countries are in transformation, have some tough decisions to make. But I think they are out of this downturn and slowly improving.

Orders in our emerging markets declined 7% with the BRICs plus Mexico down 13%. "As we said for several quarters, we expect these challenges to continue. The challenges we saw included Brazil, down 27% and Russia down 28%."

Chambers stated Cisco is seeing price pressure in markets such as campus switching (Huawei and HP are competing aggressively here), but insists software-defined networking (SDN) isn't a factor. Switching, emerging markets, and carrier sales are expected to stay pressured near-term.

The market is changing, and Cisco is evolving to match it, it says. Robert Lloyd, President, Development and Sales, added: "We are seeing a number of our customers of all types begin to look at not just recurring revenue, but kind of a pay-as-you-go or pay-as-you-drink type of approach. We've closed a number of key deals and these are $100 million type of deal this quarter alone that we'll see the results on over the next three to five years, but it shows very little impact in terms of this quarter."

Data centre(UCS server) sales remain strong, growing 29% Y/Y with market share gains against Dell, HP and IBM). But service provider video sales, down -26% remain weak.

On the data centre business, UCS, Robert Lloyd stated: "Our growth of 29% against, I think, the three of them added together which might have shown negative growth in terms of Blade servers. Our real competition here is white label. We saw this coming three to four years ago. We're going to sell architectures in the white label approach as opposed to standalone products.

"I personally believe standalone products from any company, whether its standalone switch or a standalone server will get squeezed pretty hard. And so our competition there is architecture and how you bring compute and network and storage together, how you bring that together with application-centric infrastructure and bring it down the environment."

Network Operator Venus Business Communications is launching a new fixed price scheme for Ethernet leased lines meaning that its resellers can base their prices on the quote Venus has given without having to worry about Excess Construction Costs (ECCs), claims the firm.

he scheme is in response to the variability in costs from many network operators who provide leased line pricing that is 'subject to survey'. This often results in ECCs being applied after the initial quote has been given to the reseller.

"Any professional network operator can make an assessment of the work required to connect a client to the backbone of their network," said Brian Iddon, Venus Business Communications Director.

"Often, it requires a detailed look at how to reach an appropriate point of presence and the costs involved in both materials and expertise. The industry practice of presenting ECCs after the initial quote makes it difficult for resellers to offer a firm price to their client. The new Venus scheme abolishes ECC's and means resellers can present their clients with a firm price and gain an associated competitive advantage."

The Network Union has quickly made its mark as a BT Business Partner Sales prime mover having bagged two of the telco's top awards during its 14/15 Kick off event staged in London.

The Network Union operates as a niche connectivity consultancy aligned with BT Business Partner Sales and scooped the New Partner of the Year accolade as well The Network Union Innovation Award.

Robert Sturt, a Mindmap creator and BT IP Clear and BT IP Connect expert at The Network Union, enthused: "Winning one award is recognition enough but to be recognised twice is a fantastic accolade! One of our core abilities is sales process which combined with BT's Global capability is a compelling value proposition. The innovation award recognises our approach and provides credibility and confidence to our prospects and clients."

The event also saw BT Business Partner Sales General Manager Martin Clarke outline the channel strategy as well as improvements to the proposition including commissions and service enhancements. BT product managers discussed the product launches which are due later in the year.

Simon Rowen, Recruitment Director for the Partner Channel, said: "Our Kick-off event incorporates our UK Partner Awards. There is no better time to recognise the success of our partners over the past year, as well as outlining our shared vision for 2014.

"Without our important network of partners we would not be the organisation we are today. This year, there will be even more opportunities than ever for our partners to succeed with BT Business.

"We are expanding as a channel and looking for other companies to join our partner network."

BT Business Partner Sales Awards hall of fame

ICT Partner of the Year - Phoenix IT Services

Volume Partner of the Year - DMSL UK

Growth Partner of the Year - Koris

New Partner of the Year - The Network Union

Solution Partner of the Year - BSAS Telecoms

Innovation Award - The Network Union

Distribution Partner of the Year - Getech

Partner of the Year - SAS Group

BT Ireland's Partner of the year - Nitec Solutions

ShoreTel has appointed Georges Millet as its new European sales director with a remit to drive European revenue growth and partner acquisition across ShoreTel's investment regions, including the UK, France, Germany, and Spain.

"Georges offers a track record of success in the region and boasts great leadership and experience in the communications space," said Adrian Hipkiss, vice president and managing director of EMEA at ShoreTel.

"Georges' experience and past achievements make him uniquely qualified to help strengthen ShoreTel's presence in EMEA and drive brand awareness in the region. The appointment of Georges also further highlights the emphasis ShoreTel is placing on businesses in EMEA, and the company's desire to further expand and deliver growth throughout Europe."

Based in Munich, Georges joined ShoreTel from LifeSize-Logitech where he held several positions including EMEA channel and alliances director and regional sales director for mature European markets.

Georges is a sales and channel leader with more than 20 years' experience in the information technology industry and has previously worked for Autodesk and McAfee, where he was vice president of EMEA channels.