Comms Dealer

Bob Sparks, founder of Cardiff-based Ayspark, struck gold as the lucky winner of a genuine gold bar at one of Fidelity Energy's 'Gold Rush Discovery' events staged in London and Manchester.

The event was designed to increase the understanding of the tools available to partners entering the energy supply arena, including marketing and sales support and the company's new portal.

"We have seen a significant uptake in portal usage, a number of new partner contracts have been signed and activity is around 20% up compared to before the event," said Fidelity Energy MD John Haw.

Haw will also be running an educational webinar on the 6th June at 10am.

Knight Corporate Finance has launched a new company to help channel businesses gain Government funding for research and development.

The new enterprise, Knight R&D, is headed up by Australian Rupert Mayo, a former scientist who spent over nine years leading teams in KPMG's R&D tax practice both in his home country and in the UK.

The new business helps ICT companies claim for Government R&D tax credits, an initiative that rewards UK companies for investing in technology development and associated innovation.

Companies that spend money developing new products, processes or services (or enhancing existing ones) are often eligible for a cash payment and/or corporation tax reduction.

The Government sees the initiative as an important contributor to the UK's efforts to keep R&D in the UK, particularly post-Brexit.

Mayo believes that passion and common sense are key to a successful outcome for claims, which can lead to a 33p in the pound payback on qualifying project expenditure.

"All too often I saw the 'Big 4' accounting firms hire people with extensive qualifications but litte enthusiasm," he said.

"With Knight R&D I have been able to build my own team based not just on their competencies but on their passion for technology and desire to help companies get their full entitlements."

Mayo claims his team also has a strong practical understanding of how companies undertake their R&D in the 'real world', outside of university style environments.

"We have good minds capable of rapidly grasping the concepts of our clients and we have software and electrical engineers who lead the technical side of our TMT claims.

"We take almost all the effort out of the company's hands. There may be some grey areas in the qualifying criteria but we help businesses to apply the rules as objectively as possible, ensuring there is always a fair and reasonable case for claiming while leaving the final decision in what to include with the claimant company."

Mayo says Knight R&D will only invoice on agreed success fees once the company receives its benefit.

"If required, we will also respond to any enquires from HMRC within the success fee," he added.

"However, to date this has not been required as our reports have served the purpose of providing HMRC with all the information it needs."

Former Head of BT Local Business and seasoned channel builder Jatinder Sispal (pictured) has joined CityFibre as Head of Carrier and National Providers assigned to drive the formation of new partnerships and deliver growth in pure fibre connectivity across the UK.

Sispal brings 22-plus years carrier industry experience as a senior sales and marketing leader in a career that includes a notable stint at Telstra where he was responsible for building the wholesale division from scratch.

He also led Colt's UK wholesale unit before heading up the firm's northern European indirect sales and marketing divisions. 

Sispal joins CityFibre from BT where he was Head of BT Local Business responsible for the enterprise division serving circa 700,000 customers a year and driving annual revenues of £400m.
 
His new remit is to advance the benefits of CityFibre's independent full-fibre networks to the carrier and national provider sector including content providers and data centre operators.

"CityFibre is driving forward the construction of full-fibre infrastructure across the UK and I wanted to play a key role in this agile and revolutionary organisation," stated Sispal.

"Our focus is to enable customers to innovate knowing they have the support of a true alternative infrastructure partner that's committed to extending its reach and delivering service excellence."

CityFibre's Commercial Director Rob Hamlin commented: "Jatinder brings decades of invaluable experience to his new role and is fully aligned with our vision to transform the UK's digital infrastructure. The team is already benefitting from his insights and energy for the task at hand."

Sispal has started work on building automation into CityFibre's channel operations enabling partners to transact 'smartly' and deliver fibre connectivity through his four key sub-verticals - carriers, data centre operators, SIs and VARs.

"We're already introducing CityFibre to a new prospect base," added Sispal. "We are ambitious, innovative and focused on keeping the proposition strong and simple."

Sispal is a Chemistry graduate from Bangor University and holds an MBA from Cardiff Business School.

Elitetele.com CEO Matt Newing has answered a plea for help posted on Instagram by Comms Supply MD Karl Alderton who called for a buyer to rescue his firm from liquidation and save the jobs of all staff. Newing said: "Karl approached me as one entrepreneur to another via Instagram to ask for help.

"I recognised his passion for the sector and empathised with his challenge of trying to maintain sales growth while being distracted by the requirements of being an MD and the wider work-load that brings.

"In buying Comms Supply, the trading name of Comms Consulting, we are giving Karl the opportunity to grow his business with the support of our wider team.

"He's created a reputation for working with the IT channel to deliver connectivity and telecoms alongside wider IT solutions.

"We are continually looking to improve our IT services and I know Karl and his team will bring fresh ideas and energy to what we are doing."

Newing confirmed that Comms Supply will operate under the Elitetele.com brand and continue to serve its customers with the same services by the same people.

Elitetele.com has acquired 13 businesses since 2008 and has a £20m war chest to invest in firms with complementary niche technologies.

ITSPA has welcomed the release of guidance produced by NICC for the use and secure implementation of SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) ALG (Application Layer Gateways).

SIP ALG is a feature often enabled in routers to prevent some of the problems that can be caused by Network Address Translation (NAT) and Firewall functions interfering with the SIP traffic.

This can be particularly problematic for VoIP calls, causing phone registrations, inbound calls and call transfers to fail.

Currently, many routers are shipped with SIP ALG enabled as default with very little straight forward guidance to disable this feature. This causes huge disruption for consumers and is incredibly time consuming and expensive for both ITSPs and ISPs to resolve.

NICC (the technical forum for the UK communications sector that develops interoperability standards for public communications networks and services in the UK) has produced guidance that recommends SIP ALGs being be disabled by default; SIP ALGs being easily configurable (i.e. to be disabled/enabled) by end users as part of the normal administration of the equipment; and
configuration status displays should clearly indicate that a SIP ALG is either disabled or enabled.

Eli Katz, Chair of ITSPA, said: "Our members are pleased that NICC has worked up useful formal guidance for the industry to consider. This is an issue that has long been a problem for ITSPA members. We produced a position paper about SIP ALG, which we took to NICC. We are pleased that they decided to undertake a review into this area, resulting in the production of this beneficial guidance."

The next steps will be to educate the industry and particularly router manufacturers to consider this guidance when developing new products.

Katz added: "The problems around SIP ALG hurts us all but particularly consumers who understandably find these technical issues incredibly frustrating. The aim now is to educate the Internet industry to ensure that future router purchases bare this guidance in mind and resolve these unnecessary problems."

TalkTalk Business has welcomed South West Communications Group  as its newest cloud-hosted unified communications partner.

The solution offers IP telephony services and unified communications (UC) features using Mitel handsets, all hosted and managed on the UK-wide TalkTalk network.

The solution requires only a limited investment in hardware, free upgrades, free inter-site calling via integrated voice and data networks and 24/7 support to replace on-premise telephone systems and traditional ISDN and PSTN lines, which are becoming rapidly outdated.

swcomms MD Brian Lodge said: "We have been supplying cloud-hosted IP telephone and UC solutions to our customers for a number of years but wanted to offer them a broader choice, especially with ISDN services scheduled to be phased out by 2025.

"We already resell TalkTalk Business's connectivity solutions and this move is a natural one as both parties have already built up a healthy rapport."

Alexandra Tempest, Director of Partners at TalkTalk Business, said: "More UK businesses are moving from ISDN to IP telephony services each year in order to take advantage of the capabilities and flexibility that these products can offer.

"With its expertise of combining both IP telephony and the connectivity services that underpin them, swcomms is in a great position to help UK businesses to grow and flourish."

Volume sales of mini PCs (housed in a space-saving small case design) through Western Europe's largest distributors continued to grow in Q1 2017 even though demand in the overall desktop segment remained weak, according to data published by Context, the European IT market research company.

While overall desktop PC sales fell by -10% year-on-year in the first quarter of 2017, sales of mini PCs were up by +26% over the same period. As a result, their share of the desktop market increased by 7 percentage points from 18% in Q1 2016 to 25% in the same period this year.

"Mini PCs have enjoyed rising popularity over the past year because of their space-saving design and improvements to their performance, and many PC vendors have increased their focus on the segment to leverage rising demand," said Marie-Christine Pygott, senior analyst at Context.

In Q1 2017, the top three vendors in distribution - HP, Intel and Lenovo - posted year-on-year volume growth of +47%, +8% and +78% respectively.

Large-scale telco cloud deployments will reach global critical mass after 2020 says ABI Research, in parallel with the deployment for 5G.

This network generation will likely require a new core network to allow for advanced concepts, including network slicing and services geared toward different business verticals.

Early 5G deployments, during which time there will not be an immediate need for a new telco core, will likely focus on enhanced mobile broadband.

In spite of investment and the creation of partner programmes, telcos in Europe have so far failed to deliver their target of reaching SMBs with cloud services.

"Although telcos are transforming their technology and business platforms to become more agile and to evolve past their monolithic access-based business models, they are finding it much more challenging than anticipated," said Dimitris Mavrakis, Research Director at ABI Research.

"Software, cloud computing, and open source will simplify operations, but in the short term telcos are preferring to rely on their trusted vendors to continue this journey."

AT&T, Deutsche Telekom, Telefonica, and Verizon are honing their strategies and planning their networks as shared platforms, rather than a mix of individual network appliances.

This means that network resources will be virtualised, distributed and software controlled, leading to a much more agile network. This will allow the implementation of an 'Untelco' strategy, selling tailored network resources to different verticals.

However, there are a few indications that end-to-end systems are still the end goal. For example, Telefonica O2 UK awarded an end-to-end contract to Nokia for a cloud-native packet core, something that would be a considerable challenge to implement in-house with a true vendor agnostic, common-off-the-shelf network. ABI Research expects many more end-to-end telco cloud contracts will be awarded in the years to come.

"Although a few open source projects are contributing valuable inputs toward the evolution of telco networks, there is also competition among open source projects, and the concept is also misunderstood and in some cases, misused by several industry players," concluded Mavrakis.

"The golden ratio is somewhere between end-to-end systems and open source components, if vendors provide open interfaces and flexibility to integrate third-party and smaller vendors."

Hybrid is driving cloud and the overall IT opportunity, says researcher TBR. Over half of all enterprises have at least one hybrid process, it says.

After years of vendors investing in acquisitions, development and alliances to enable hybrid environments, customers are finally starting to see real adoption momentum.

The use of hybrid cloud (a combination of cloud services) and hybrid IT (a combination of cloud services and on-premises assets) is now a reality for most enterprises, with 51% reporting at least one workload is leveraging a hybrid cloud or IT deployment method.

While it took time for these enterprises to understand the market, build the skills and develop the use cases, more customers are demonstrating real maturity meeting the IT and business challenges inherent in hybrid deployments.

Growing hybrid adoption is a reflection of increased customer readiness and wider availability of technology from vendors for managing and integrating assets across cloud and on-premises environments.

With no signs of customers or vendors slowing their investments in hybrid, TBR anticipates companies' initial adoption will grow and deepen as the flexibility, cost savings and quality of delivery of hybrid are further demonstrated in the next year. 

The hybrid influenced market size will grow 78% year-to-year in 2017, to $155bn. With a majority of enterprise customers having adopted hybrid, the ability to deploy and manage hybrid environments will influence an increasingly significant pool of customer investment and vendor opportunity.

Cloud in general has been a steady supplemental growth driver for most vendors but has not represented most their revenue.

Cloud markets maintain growth rates that range into mid-double digits in an environment where most IT markets are either declining or flat.

However, even in the broadest terms, cloud investment across public, private, hybrid, components and professional services represents less than 10% of the total IT market. The interconnection of cloud and traditional IT resources is changing the control points for a much larger pool of revenue than just cloud, shifting opportunity.

The overall hybrid IT influence pool of revenue, which includes cloud and non-cloud software and services, will begin to rival the pure-cloud market size in 2017.

For vendors providing cloud services, it is critical to deliver services that will integrate with customers' on-premises infrastructures and data centres.

One of the biggest shortfalls of the pure-cloud model is the difficulty aligning to this mixed mode in which most customers find themselves, as experienced by Amazon Web Services (AWS). Business model shifts that began in 2016 to address hybrid IT, including partnerships across IBM, VMware, AWS and Microsoft, will accelerate in 2017, it says. 

Gateshead-based Synergi IT has won two blue light and two water authority contracts on the strength of its process mobility platform, Nintex, an automation system that helps improve workflow processes.
 
Justin Short, Director at Synergi, said: "Reducing fire officers' administration time and allowing them more time to carry out their duties is vital. The hours of work saved by streamlining and automating processes, genuinely makes a difference in how they save lives on the frontline.

"We're also actively engaged with two water authorities. For one, we have successfully introduced and developed a solution to drive ideas and innovation across the entire organisation, while driving efficiency around safety auditing and risk management."