Comms Dealer

Extreme Networks has named Westcon Group EMEA Top Distributor of the Year for high revenue growth across the region. The vendor's Global Partner Conference, staged in the Eden Roc Hotel on Miami beac, was the first public event introducing the 'New Extreme', marking the beginning of its integration with Enterasys.

Westcon has been an Extreme Networks Distributor Partner in EMEA for over a decade. And from 2008, when the resale of Extreme took place in just five EMEA countries, Westcon has grown revenues by over 60%, and is now reselling Extreme Networks portfolio of products across 20 countries via a network of over 120 resellers. 

"Westcon has helped partners across EMEA drive sales revenues for Extreme with value added programmes and support as market opportunity for data networking continues to grow; and align closely to Extreme's ethos," commented Roland Richter, Extreme Networks EMEA VP Sales.

David Grant, Senior Vice President Europe, Westcon Convergence, said: "I would like to thank the Westcon Extreme team who work relentlessly to ensure that we are strategically aligned with Extreme. I look forward to another successful year with Extreme Networks, and welcome the opportunities ahead working with the combined organisation."

TDAzlan has extended its TDCloud services portfolio through a strategic partnership with Box, the provider of secure file sharing and document collaboration services.
 
Box's collaboration services will be available as part of Azlan's overall Cloud Services portfolio, giving resellers the ability to offer customers access and sharing of content from anywhere and on any device.

The agreement with Box gives enterprise and SMB customers access to a wider range of cloud services. Box serves more than 20 million users at over 180,000 businesses worldwide, including 97 percent of the Fortune 500.

HP shares rose after PC sales only fell 2% yr/yr in FQ4 and its enterprise group sales bounced back. EMEA fourth-quarter revenue of $10.3bn was down 4% year-over-year, or down 5% in constant currency. The Q4 EMEA environment remained tough, it says, although sales declined less year over year than in Q3 and it saw growth in Germany and other pockets of Western Europe. Full year EMEA revenue declined 9%

In the Enterprise Group, where revenue growth was 2%, it bounced back after eight quarters of decline. HP saw improved sales execution, a strong Hyperscale quarter and stabilisation in blades, complemented by revenue growth in networking and storage, it says.

Overall margins were pressured by competitive price environment and an unfavourable mix. "Looking forward we are focused on improving our channel performance, driving cost savings to improve operating margins and bringing new innovations to market in converged infrastructure," says CEO Meg Whitman (below).

"Our blade business recovered as the benefits of our targeted segmentation, and efforts to improve operational excellence paid off. We saw improved sales in our mainstream server business but we need to improve our pricing discipline and profitability." HP Networking grew in EMEA, and it is looking for momentum in wireless LAN and will focus on driving innovation in software defined networking.

"In the server business, we strengthened our go-to-market. In just the last six weeks of the quarter, I think we were more focused on market segmentation, and we did a better job with the channel," says Meg Whitman.

Jobs are still being lost, however as the restructuring programme is on track. So far, 24,600 people exited. The current plan is to end FY14 at the high-end of the anticipated range: somewhere between 33,000 and 34,000 people.

Security firm Accumuli has bagged Bracknell-based EQALIS, a Big Data analytics specialist, for £1.9m.

The EQALIS product portfolio complements Accumuli's security incident and event management (SIEM) solutions and will strengthen the company's big data monitoring and analytics capabilities, it says.

EQALIS provides solutions that enable organisations to gain visibility of data across the IT estate, including monitoring, managing and delivering actionable intelligence on security and operational risks.

The company won the Splunk UK, Africa and Ireland partner of the year award for the last two years, and the only Splunk authorised training provider in the UK. In addition, EQALIS is a leading partner for Prelert, Puppet Labs and App Dynamics, which assist enterprises with anomaly detection, system change, application and infrastructure performance management.

Gavin Lyons, CEO, Accumuli, said: "The key to successfully mitigating IT security threats, detecting incidents and responding to breaches is the ability to access and analyse large quantities of data in real time across an organisation's entire IT assets. This level of intelligence and visibility enables companies to prioritise actions, respond to incidents, improve processes and enhance controls.

"Big data monitoring and analytics is now intrinsically linked with security and operational excellence and EQALIS has been addressing these challenges for the last six years."

BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions is to relocate its IT retail division from Bristol to Basingstoke in a consolidation move that better aligns the company with trends in managed print, unified communications and enterprise software solutions, as well as bringing product integration benefits according to Russ Pettifer, Head of Technology Solutions.

"Making the move from Basingstoke to Bristol is the best decision for our technology vendor partners and end user customers," he said.

"By bringing these teams together we can improve communication between all departments for a more efficient and cohesive service delivery. We can make the whole division easily available to partners and customers who want to experience our breadth of capabilities and benefit from our technical expertise to solve their day-to-day business challenges."

Smart wearable device shipments including smart watches and glasses will approach 130 million by 2018, 10 times higher than estimated this year, claims Juniper Research.

Its report notes that this change in adoption levels can be attributable to heightened consumer awareness of wearable technology and new product launches. It also observes that with the emergence of major players and other key stakeholders, there is a much more focussed approach towards 'wearable computing'.

Juniper's latest report contends that the market attractiveness of wearable technology has led to the emergence of a host of players and competition is expected to intensify.

However the report notes that, as of now, wearable devices represent a 'nice to have' and not a 'must have' for consumers. "Even though wearables are relatively new in terms of market maturity, it is clear that the market, for example the smart watch in particular, will be - as per smartphones - a somewhat crowded affair", said report author Nitin Bhas.

The report notes that there are a number of social and legal barriers to the deployment of wearable devices. However, not all of these hurdles will apply to every device, or indeed, every type of device. Issues such as privacy commonly arise if the wearable device (eg smart glasses) has a camera and gives the appearance of filming at all times. In the case of Healthcare wearables, the most relevant issue is the storage of confidential and personal vital health information by these devices.

As more wearable products are rolled out, Juniper expects that governments will in turn seek to develop regulatory frameworks to legislate their use, both from a privacy and data protection perspective.

Other key findings:
• Juniper Research has revised upwards the adoption of certain wearable devices to reflect the latest announcements from vendors and the heightened consumer awareness of wearable technology.
• Mobile fitness wearables will begin to diversify into new mHealth areas.

As part of an SMS fundraising service Core Telecom has raised over £200 for children's charity Dreams & Wishes.

In August the company set up the service to provide a quick and easy way for people to donate to the charity. The service provides three keywords to text to the given number, which range in value from £1 to £10, and has been useful in furthering the fundraising efforts.

Mahmood Mazhar, CEO of Core Telecom, said: "Dreams & Wishes is an amazing charity that works to fulfil the dreams of seriously ill children. We are passionate about our support of them and it is a pleasure to be able to provide the SMS service for them and others to also choose the support them.

"No matter how big or small the donation, it all goes towards making dreams come true and we will continue to support the charity however we can."

Core Telecom has worked with closely the charity since its beginning in 2011 and provides both financial and professional support on a regular basis, including recently revamping the charity's website.

Dreams & Wishes' chairman, Tony Curtis said: "Core Telecom's continuing support has been vital to setting up the charity and helping to continue its work. The SMS service makes it so easy for people to donate and the response for the Mount Kilimanjaro climb has been fantastic."

Next Generation Data (NGD) has announced the availability of a further data hall at its NGD Europe tier 3+ carrier-neutral data centre in South Wales.

This is NGD's 11th data hall to be built within the giant 750,000 square feet facility since its opening in 2010. Capable of supporting several hundred racks in shared, caged or private configurations the new hall will meet planned demand from further corporate, government and smaller service provider organisations requiring secure, flexible and scalable facilities.

"With major customers including BT, CGI, IBM and most recently Wipro Technologies on board in custom private halls NGD has already achieved occupancy levels on a scale comparable to filling to capacity several large London Docklands area data centres," said Simon Taylor, chairman, NGD.

"Our impressive growth rate is also being helped by the recent introduction of our channel partner strategy for accommodating the rack requirements of reseller and cloud service provider companies," added Simon Taylor.

Purpose-designed for enabling customer racks to be easily installed and operational in a matter of hours NGD's latest data hall features an abundant supply of power for supporting multiple high density racks and the latest cooling systems.

A wide choice of high bandwidth low latency connections are available to customers along with 24/7 service monitoring, comprehensive engineering support and access to NGD's extensive private conference meeting facilities.

Resellers should now be making an urgent push to familiarise themselves with the developments of the cloud, urges Outsourcery.

According to recent findings from the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF), 69 per cent of organisations already use cloud services formally for at least one application and 68 per cent are looking to increase their cloud usage in the next year.

This demonstrates that the rate of migration to the cloud is increasing and that some businesses are slowly integrating cloud into their existing IT infrastructure step-by-step. In light of the research from CIF, Outsourcery believes that the channel needs to become sufficiently prepared for the rise in requests which it will inevitably be faced with.

Adam Cathcart, Head of Channel at Outsourcery said: "In our experience with resellers, many of them are still unsure about how to advise customers on cloud services. This was true in the past and has improved, but the rate at which cloud adoption is growing means that resellers which are not prepared are likely to miss out on huge opportunities and can't ignore the emergence of cloud anymore.

Some resellers have been proactive at making sure they are prepared for the end-user demand for cloud, looking to vendors for advice on how to have the initial conversations. We recently launched our InSite partner portal for the channel. This has been designed to make it easier for VARs to sell and help select the correct cloud services for their customers and we hope that this will lead the way for resellers to feel more comfortable with the concept of selling cloud services and meeting the demands of a growing market."

TalkTalk Business has introduced an Ethernet-over-Fibre-to-the-Cabinet (EoFTTC) variant to its connectivity portfolio.

EoFTTC offers a cost-effective alternative to full fibre products, including many of the same benefits - such as uncontended bandwidth - but at dramatically reduced costs. It bridges the gap between standard broadband propositions and TalkTalk Business' Ethernet product sets, offering guaranteed up to 20Mb symmetrical speeds, said the firm.

As well as bolstering its connectivity portfolio, TalkTalk Business has built out its Ethernet footprint, expanding its exchange network.

Alongside this TalkTalk has extended its core Next Generation Network to a further 255 exchanges in the past six months, meaning it now extends to 96% of the UK.

Following the recent announcement that O2 will close its wholesale broadband division in February 2014, Fluidata - one of O2's largest partners - has added TalkTalk Business' wholesale offering to its Service Exchange Platform (SEP), which will allow its customers to access business grade connectivity simply and cost effectively.

Other new partners and contract wins in the first half of the year include Peach Telecom, which deployed a converged TalkTalk Business MPLS solution on behalf of customer Portsmouth Water, used to monitor reservoir levels for flood and leakage. Portsmouth Water previously operated two networks and the converged service is expected to save the company 50% over their previous costs.

Redcentric Plc added TalkTalk Business' connectivity products (EFM and EAD Fibre), which will be used as the foundation of its managed solutions portfolio to deliver customer centric applications, services and support to many leading businesses.

Alex Tempest, Director of Partners at TalkTalk Business said: "We've had a fantastic first half-year and it's great to see our partner channel playing a real part in that. By focusing on products that leverage our network efficiently, such as VPNs, SIP trunks and connectivity solutions, we're able to provide our channel partners with margin-rich opportunities and a data portfolio that continues to attract attention. Coupled with the ongoing expansion of our Ethernet exchange network we expect this to make a big impact in the industry."

Within its recent financial results, TalkTalk revealed that corporate revenues grew by 1.3% y-o-y and that the service provider has enjoyed steadily-growing demand for its data and carrier services, and expanded its network of Ethernet-enabled exchanges by 35% from 2,199 to 2,980.