Comms Dealer

Virgin Media Business has linked up with with CTI Group to create a platform that will provide customers with up-to-the-minute billing information, reduced admin costs and improved efficiency.

Over 10,000 customer accounts have already been signed up onto the platform which enables businesses to access detailed billing information and options to analyse usage on calls yet to be billed.

These allow customers, for example, to keep track of costs across different parts of the business and at different cost centres - meaning no more surprises at the end of the month. It also provides the platform for Virgin Media Business customers to 'go paperless'. In addition, the new platform simplifies and streamlines internal Virgin Media Business processes, allowing for an overall improved customer experience.

The portal can be integrated with businesses' accounting systems and deployed quickly to support customers from the minute they sign up. Customers can also slice, dice and analyse their billing information in a way to suit them with a range of new features including:

Paul Mitchell, Director, Customer Operations, Virgin Media Business, said: "One of our top priorities over the last 12 months has been to reduce the administrative hurdles our customers face with an overload of paper-based invoices every day. As well as improving the look, feel and functionality of our business portal, customers are able to gain real insight from their data."

Liquid Voice has completed a successful project with Cheshire West & Cheshire Council to help it streamline its call handling procedures and improve accessibility to council services for the local population.

Cheshire West and Chester has a population of 329,500 over a 350 square mile region in the North West of England. The council covers the historic city of Chester and the industrial and market towns of Ellesmere Port, Frodsham, Helsby, Malpas, Neston, Northwich and Winsford. About a third of the population live in rural areas which makes contact with the council via telephone extremely important for citizens to gain access to critical services.

The council has adopted KANA Lagan CRM solution which is essential for quickly managing inquiries handled by the 80 agents at its contact centre at Wyvern House, Winsford. Every year the council receives over 500,000 calls and while the majority of calls currently get through to a member of staff in less than 20 seconds, during busy periods these wait times can increase.

The new Liquid Voice platform has full audit and reporting capability which allows the council to effectively maintain staffing levels within the contact centre and understand trends to help better plan its future communication strategy in line with on-going activities and expected demand.

"Liquid Voice has been both professional and flexible in the delivery of what has been deemed a successful project that will allow us to improve the customer experience across many aspects of council service delivery." Maria concludes.

Chris Berry, Business Development Director and Co-Founder of Liquid Voice, said: "The long term benefits of reducing call durations by 15% to 20% equates to shorter waiting times for callers held in queues and more cost effective use of public funded resources. CTI is an effective project that the public sector can quickly undertake to generate rapid cost savings and quantifiable service improvements."

Cloud and IT service provider InTechnology has boosted its client base in the retail sector by signing up Evans Cycles, the UK's largest cycle retailer.
 
Evans Cycles has 50 stores across the UK as well as a an e-commerce operation with its Information and Communications Technology (ICT) supported by an internal team of six.
 
By moving to InTechnology's managed services, Evans Cycles has upgraded its legacy systems, solved growing data storage and security issues whilst reducing IT spend.

InTechnology's managed backup service has transformed the speed of restores, reduced the backup window and added an extra layer of security to the disaster recovery strategy.
 
InTechnology moved Evans' Head Office phone system onto their hosted IP telephony platform and took control of its entire calls and lines estate.

This centrally hosting infrastructure has allowed the cycle retailer to bring online three new stores, both quickly and within budget.
 
Natalie Duffield, Sales Director at InTechnology added: "We are confident that as a result of adopting our managed services, Evans Cycles has secured a 20% reduction in their IT costs and improved the speed, agility and flexibility of their IT systems."

Canalys Unified Communications Analysis report has ShoreTel at 21.9 percent year-on-year shipment growth in EMEA

ShoreTel has repeated its year-on-year shipment growth in EMEA according to a Unified Communications Analysis report from Canalys.

The report found that with year-on-year growth of 21.9 per cent in EMEA, ShoreTel is ahead of the market average of -1.1 per cent.

"ShoreTel's ability to offer a single scalable platform for all markets in EMEA is attractive for resellers and customers," said Matthew Ball, principal analyst at Canalys.

"This increases the total addressable market for resellers and lowers the overall cost of training, selling and support by focusing on one solution to target opportunities of all sizes."

Distributor Avnet has been named to the 2013 Gartner Supply Chain Top 25 Ranking: The Next 25.

Avnet was evaluated for its multi-tier supply chain and cost-to-serve analytical capabilities.
The list identifies the companies that best demonstrate leadership in applying demand-driven principles to drive business results. Avnet is the only distributor to be recognised on the 2013 list.

"We feel that as a global distribution leader with more than 90 years of supply management experience, Avnet is positioned to help our customers and supplier partners optimise their supply chains,\" said Gerry Fay, global president of Avnet Electronics Marketing, and former chief global logistics and operations officer, Avnet.

"Our supply chain experts work with customers and suppliers to assess their cost-to-serve models and develop strategies for reducing costs and improving end customer satisfaction.
"We can quickly identify supply network problems and disconnects, and develop supply chain solutions that leverage Avnet’s physical logistic assets and virtual systems.\"

High-performance packet processing, security, and network infrastructure firm Adax is claiming that current LTE signaling infrastructure is insufficient for the imminent wave in 4G uptake.

With analyst firm Strategy Analytics forecasting that LTE subscribers will hit one billion worldwide by 2017, operators are facing a serious signaling issue due to this rapidly rising number of users causing a potential bottleneck in the LTE signaling network, according to Adax.

"We hear a lot about spikes in data traffic, and it's an important issue, but operators should be more concerned with the inadequate signaling network technology that's being used," said Robin Kent, director of Adax Europe.

"The problem is not only the data crunch on the network, but that there is an inherent problem with effective signaling infrastructure, one that if left unattended will present a serious problem for operators. Diameter signaling solutions will deliver an improved architecture to enable an optimum customer experience on the LTE network."

To help support operators with this signaling issue, Adax has launched its new Diameter signaling solution designed to deliver respite to the core network, which will become heavily congested due increased LTE/IMS nodes in the flat All-IP network, says the firm.

Diameter is an essential signaling protocol in today's LTE and IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) networks. The Diameter protocol will be widely used for policy and charging applications in LTE as well as authentication, authorisation and accounting (AAA) and mobility management in IMS.

Kent added: "As consumers switch to 4G in volume, the network will come under greater pressure. Developing the right signaling infrastructure now will allow operators to deal with sudden explosions in traffic and cope with the increased signaling levels."

TalkTalk Business has become the first UK operator to deploy a multimedia platform from Telsis.

The telco is aiming to use the Ocean Services Platform to grow the portfolio of branded and white label value-added services it currently sells direct and to partner companies.

The Telsis solution is user programmable and able to control multiple simultaneous services in both legacy and NGN domains.

TalkTalk's product development team will be able to devise, trial and roll out new multi-media services at low cost, said the firm.

David Chatterton, head of inbound service creation for TalkTalk Business, said: "The Java programmability will enable us to expand our product set and address new market sectors without the inertia and cost of third parties.

"We will effectively be offering our services as a white label resource for our customers to use as they wish. The Telsis open architecture enables the platform to talk to and control a wide range of other vendors' resources so we are looking at an extremely broad and flexible capability."

TalkTalk Business has deployed previous generations of Telsis services platforms since 2002, taking advantage of the vendor's open service creation environment to develop services.

Examples are Hosted Contact Centre and Intelligent Call Control products, both of which feature multiple tiers of control.

TalkTalk Business customers that require a basic no-frills product get pre-configured services while those wanting more hands-on control use the web to access an interface that at the top level enables complete self-configuration of the services.

The Ocean Services Platform runs on standards COTS servers, is user-programmable, built from the ground up to support the fast development of new multi-media services by operators' own in-house teams.

It achieves the same carrier-grade, greater than 99.999% availability of alternative core network services platforms, but it includes its own Java-based programming environment that allows new services to be designed, built, tested and deployed quickly.

Operators can use their own programmers, or contract the work to the independent Java coding house of their choice, to create services according to their own market needs and timetable.

The Ocean Services Platform includes a suite of generic services that can be quickly customised by deploying operators; and runs multiple services concurrently, rather than being limited to the provision of a single service.

Alcatel-Lucent has been placed as a Leader in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Corporate Telephony for the sixth consecutive year, published September 30th and authored by Jay Lassman, Steve Blood, and Geoff Johnson at Gartner.

The annual report's evaluation is based on 'Ability to Execute' and 'Completeness of Vision'.

Alcatel-Lucent's telephony-based solutions provide enterprises flexible architecture and business models that deliver a clear migration path to next generation Unified Communications with OpenTouch.

?Unicom has achieved Putting the Customer First status for a fourth year, the UK's national standard for customer service.

Initially gained in 2009, the standard focuses on a company's ability to build customer relationships, maximise on its market awareness and develop its employees.

In order to achieve the standard, companies are assessed against 30 statements outlined by Customer First. They must provide evidence to demonstrate they are fully compliant.

Unicom's CEO Chris Earle said: "We pride ourselves on providing high quality services to the business market so awards of this nature are extremely important to us."

"Launching into the gas and electricity market this year we've been extremely busy, however this award shows we've not lost sight of providing the best service possible for our customers and our employees.

"Our customer service calls are answered at our UK-based call centre within six seconds, by a real person."

The capital markets are set to increase investment in cloud services, continuing the trend of technology adoption in the industry, according to Ovum.

New research from the global analysts indicates that due to improvements in cloud security and a wider variety of applications, investment in cloud, by both the buy side and the sell side, is set for further growth.

The research highlights that although the capital markets aren't fully integrated with the cloud, this situation is set to change in the coming years.

Currently, the buy side has more integration with cloud services. Order management systems (OMS) are increasingly hosted and managed services delivered by third parties, rather than in-house applications, although they are not yet wholly cloud services.

Meanwhile, portfolio management systems (PMS) are now commonly hosted solely in the cloud.

"The buy side tends to be an easier target for cloud than the sell side, given that more of its participants are smaller firms with limited IT budgets," says Rik Turner, senior analyst, financial services technology, Ovum.

"That said, the sell side is changing. With budgets and headcount under more constraints since the global financial crisis, there are clearly opportunities on that side of the business too."

Investment in IT infrastructure is not restricted solely to the capital markets.

Ovum's ICT Enterprise Insights reveals that financial markets firms in general are set to increase their spending on IT systems.