Comms Dealer

Straight Communications, a new business telecoms firm launched in Northern Ireland, does what it says on the tin and is on a mission to do away with confusing jargon and provide no-nonsense solutions.

With a consultative approach Straight aims to help businesses make the best use of the latest mobile, landline, phone systems, broadband and IT solutions.

The company, headed by Managing Director Adrian McCourt, has ambitious growth plans and with new custom-designed office the company has employs 16 people so far with plans for additional employment growth in the coming months.

McCourt said: "We work with key partners across the business telecoms space and our flexible approach means we will recommend the solution that delivers the best value for the individual business and not one that
simply conforms to a particular network or tariff.

"For example, we offer rolling mobile contracts from as little as 30 days. This has proven popular with companies with a temporary mobile workforce or those who like the flexibility to scale up or down easily in response to changing dynamics of the business environment.

"We have heard of businesses being signed up to three, four and in some cases, even five year deals - I believe there is simply no place in the market for these lengthy, inflexible contracts."

Straight has secured partnerships allowing the company to offer solutions from mobile network providers including Vodafone, O2, EE as well as handset and mobile technology manufacturers including Apple, BlackBerry and Samsung and Straight will also be utilising the BT network to offer landline and broadband solutions.

McCourt added: "The Straight Charter reflects our commitment to be clear and straight-forward when communicating with our customers and to delivering advice that is free from meaningless jargon and consumer hype."

Coms has scooped the Best Performing Share of 2013 on AIM award following a year of ups and downs.

"We have truly had a rollercoaster of a year and now winning this award makes it all
seem worthwhile," said CEO Dave Breith. "I want to say a big thank you to all who have contributed to our success this year- we are all thrilled as out of all the awards given last night, it was this one which I felt was the one to win.

"Being the new boy in town I expect winning this award two years back to back has never been done. I will see you next year to collect this award again."

Congrats to the winners of this year's Comms National Awards (sponsored by Nine Telecom), the most coveted and celebrated awards for the ICT channel. Taking centre stage at London's prestigious Hilton Hotel on Park Lane on October 10th was Azzurri which capped a trio of award wins with the Reseller of the Year accolade (pictured).

Top TV comic Patrick Keilty led proceedings with an inimitable side-splitting stage presence. And industry veteran Julian Niman collected a Special Award in recognition of his industry achievements and ongong contribution to channel growth.

Comms Dealer Editorial Director Nigel Sergent commented: "I would like congratulate our winners and finalists, our judges and Nine, and all our sponsors for supporting this fantastic event."

2013 COMMS DEALER HALL OF FAME

Best Channel Fixed Line Network Provider - Gamma

Best Channel Mobile Network Provider - Gamma

Best Channel ISP - Entanet

Best Channel Wholesale Service Provider - Virtual 1

Best Channel Peripheral Solution - Sennheiser

Best Channel Software Solution - Union Street

Best Channel Telephony Solution - Cirrus

Best Channel Convergence Distributor - Micro-P

Best Channel Installer/Maintainer - Micro-P

Best Channel Mobile Distributor - Abzorb

Enterprise Contact Centre Solution - Azzurri

SME Contact Centre Solution - Cirrus

Enterprise Hosted Solution - 4net Technologies

SME Hosted Solution - Spitfire

Enterprise Mobile Solution - e-know.net with Shoretel

SME Mobile Solution - Cirrus

Enterprise UC Solution - Azzurri

SME UC Solution - TIG

Enterprise Vertical Solution - GHM Communications

SME Vertical Solution - Eclipse

Nine Customer Service Award - PSU

Reseller of the Year - Azzurri

Westcon Convergence hosted a two day sailing event on the Solent for its top performing Avaya partners who hit their sales targets over a three month period.

Ioan MacRae, General Manager, Westcon Convergence, commented: "The Sailing Incentive gives Avaya and Westcon the opportunity to thank our partners for their ongoing commitment and support. The partners have achieved fantastic results this financial year with Avaya business and services."

Partners experienced sailing tuition and racing onboard a 50 foot racing yacht followed by dinner and prize giving for achievements of the day.

"It was such a fantastic event that we have asked Westcon to extend next year's trip by an extra day," said Richard Pennington, Director, 4net Technologies.

Sennheiser Communications has entered into an EMEA distribution agreement with Westcon Convergence.

As part of the agreement, Westcon Convergence will now offer its UK reseller partners the Sennheiser range of business headsets with the ability to support global opportunities.

Sennheiser follows a product distribution model but with direct Sennheiser account management support for channel resellers in conjunction with distribution partners.

Sennheiser can offer the channel conventional and UC optimised headsets for both wireless and wired applications, such as the recently launched Presence Bluetooth series and Century wired series.

Andreas Bach, President of Sennheiser Communications stated: "Ou agreement with Westcon represents a major expansion of our distribution route to market.

"Westcon's strength in the growing UC market sector is a particular advantage. The combination of Westcon's large reseller and system integrator channel community and Sennheiser's range of premium business headsets is a tremendous growth opportunity for both companies."

CSP Vapour Media is to become Leeds-based Jungle IT's main supplier of Internet fibre access and cloud services following a link-up between the companies.

The partnership has already secured contracts worth £250k with more projects in the pipeline.

Jungle IT's Sales Director, Jonathan Asquith said "Over the last 10 years we have built a large customer base around our core product offerings and wanted to get more traction in the cloud services arena.

"Vapour has brought a specialist arm to our sales teams and fully equipped them to take advantage of the definite shift towards cloud shown from our customers."

Vapour Director Tim Mercer commented" "We help our resellers win cloud business it's as simple as that. They have the customer relationships and we bring our cloud expertise to the meetings, this is why we continue to win business with our partners.

"Vapour only provides three products - why complicate when we are good at what we do? We don't sell traditional services or hosted, we provide a pure cloud offering.

"We are aiming to add another 50 strategic partners in the next three months and we are well on the way to achieving this."

VanillaIP is gearing up for the international launch of its Uboss technology management platform at BroadSoft Connections 2013 (October 16-19, Hilton San Diego Bayfront).

Uboss enables carriers in multi-platform environments to increase revenue, improve differentiation, drive customer self-service and ARPU by consolidating back office functions and combining multi-vendor services within an on-demand user portal.

As such, says the VanillaIP, Uboss helps to maximise revenue by getting service providers to market quicker with a more sophisticated product offering.

For BroadSoft service providers, Uboss simplifies and expedites the roll-out of third party BroadSoft community apps, without having to do the interoperability testing every time.

Leslie Ferry, BroadSoft's VP for Marketing, commented: "The Uboss platform underlines the importance of automation for service providers to scale their hosted communication services.

"We believe the ability to easily add applications and services while streamlining operational and billing elements is critical for our telecommunications service provider customers to capitalise on the rapidly growing cloud Unified Communications market."

As a SaaS model, BroadSoft customers leveraging Uboss will not need to deploy any servers or databases in their network. Uboss is a hosted platform that seamlessly connects to BroadSoft platforms and any other vendor solutions customers need to integrate.

Cloud Service Provider Redstor has launched its Virtual Disaster Recovery (DR) service, designed to meet the requirement for copying servers and their data offsite and recovering them quickly in the event of a disaster.

The fully managed service requires little to no customer management. Once configured, an onsite appliance stores system snapshots locally and then securely transfers them to the DR platform in an encrypted format while minimising bandwidth usage.

Redstor's Virtual DR service tests every image nightly to ensure that success is guaranteed. The recovery systems are booted up and agents test and report on a variety of items and any failures or issues are investigated thoroughly.

Chris Sigley, General Manager of Redstor, said: "Professional businesses often can't afford the loss of access to critical business data for even a couple of hours. Redstor's virtual disaster recovery service ensures that when a disaster occurs, a business' systems and data are accessible via the Internet within minutes."

Colt has unveiled new cloud infrastructure backup and replication services for VARs, extending the availability of its VMware vCloud data centre services offerings into its data centres in Italy and Switzerland, building on an existing estate in the UK, France, Spain and Germany.

Colt has also announced services are now available from a second data centre in Spain, with Barcelona adding to the existing Madrid capacity.

Colt's new backup service for VMware vCloud provides VARs with flexible service options for their end user customers who can now choose what data they want to protect and backup, the level of resiliency, and in which European locations.

Managed via an online portal, the new service gives Colt's channel partners the option to create and operate a managed cloud backup service, or to pass self-management rights directly to their own customers. The service is available on a pay-as-you-go basis with no upfront costs.

Colt also announces the launch of a replication service. Managed through a portal, the service permits VARs to administer the location of their workloads in the event of a disaster.

By building replication into the fabric of its vCloud estate, Colt has greatly simplified the creation of geo-resilient solutions. This will enable VARs to better meet the needs of customers with on-site VMware deployments who require cost-effective disaster recovery capabilities. Colt's new service also allows resellers to offer their customers cloud-to-cloud resilience.

Keith Humphrey at EuroLAN commented: "With the launch of these new business continuity features, Colt has significantly enhanced its vCloud portfolio and taken another step towards industrialising the hybrid and public cloud.

"Solid backup and recovery is an essential component of most IT solutions, and customers increasingly expect a degree of DR capability in their infrastructure.

"We particularly like the fact that Colt has put the tools into a portal, and opened their infrastructure up to resellers, allowing them to create their own managed services."

Marco Andersen has been appointed by Acer as its new General Manager in the UK. He will replace Neil Marshall who has been promoted to the role of regional manager for North Europe.

Andersen, who will co-act with Marshall from November to January, is currently country manager at Acer Sweden and serves as marketing director for the Nordic region.

Prior to Acer, he was responsible for business development and marketing at retailer MediaMarkt during its entry to Sweden. He also worked at HP and IBM.

"Marco has a solid reputation for building and leading successful teams and for forging great relationships with our customers and partners. We are confident that he will be successful in applying his experience and commercial acumen in his new role in the UK," says Neil Marshall, country manager, Acer UK.