Comms Dealer

Hybris, the SAP owned e-commerce and multichannel software firm is on the hunt for large, fast growing telecoms enterprises keen to sell more mobile devices and cloud services on the web and effectively reduce customer churn.

"We have engineered a solution which is a best practice fit for the telecoms industry," hybris Business Development Director for Telco Peter Conquest told Comms Dealer.

"It enables partners to deliver an on-line e-commerce solution that develops propositions, guides the customer to the right products or solution and along the way does verification checks on fraud, integrates with payment gateways and talks to billing and back end systems.

"But on-line is only one piece of it. In essence we provide customers with the ability to seamlessly move from one channel to the next. We can also look at in store kiosks, point of sale, customer care and even things like print catalogues and distribution to dealers. It means customers can check on line for a particular product, check the inventory in a particular store, reserve it and execute the transaction because they have all the physical information to hand. It's about consistency of information across the different touch points on the journey.

"It is a homogeneous stack and it can be easily extended. So, if a third party wants to bring in new business models, introduce a new service or look at an analytic capability, it is easy to introduce that into the stack."

Hybris, which has a 150 million dollar global turnover, has Telco customers such as Samsung and Brightpoint among its growing base of telecoms clients, as well as major wireless operators and service providers in the UK, Europe and Asia.

Peter Conquest will be speaking on Big Data at Comms Dealer's Comms Vision thought leadership conference at Gleneagles on (November 6th,7th and 8th).

Hats off to tenacious Senior UC account manager Will Wood of Datasharp Integrated Communications who raised over £1,100 for charity Sparks having completed the notorious Tough Mudder Challenge.

The event is designed to test physical and mental grit during a 12 mile challenge across rugged, mountainous, mud-filled territory fitted out with 25 obstacles designed by the British special forces. These include the participants being electrocuted, dunked, burned, and frozen in various forms.

Chess has been re-accredited to the ISO 14001 environmental standard.

Since 2009 the business has recycled over 20 tonnes of paper and plastics alongside reducing its annual energy consumption by 18% in 2013.

Its green initiatives are spurred on by the Eco-Team, a group of Chess employees who set targets and goals for the business to make it a greener company.

Anne Binnie, HR Director and a member of the Eco-Team stated: "It's part of our culture at Chess to minimise our impact on the environment and the Eco-Team have come up with various initiatives to further reduce our impact.

"Our most successful have been the 'bike to work' Government backed scheme encouraging us to ride instead of drive and also a green car incentive where our people can lease an eco-friendly vehicle at discounted rates."

Vaioni can press ahead with its growth plans having secured a funding boost of £500k following an agreement with Baker Tilly Corporate Finance and Maven Capital Partners.

According to Sachin Vaish of Vaioni the company will use the money to bolster its headcount and network infrastructure.

He said: "Clearly our advisors and more importantly our funders, Maven, see something special in Vaioni, our capability today and more importantly our potential for the future.

"I could not have done this without the support from my management team, my Financial Director Manish Dev and his exceptional efforts during this process and my Tech Director Matthew Hattersley for displaying our phenomenal network capabilities, and of course the Vaioni Team who ensure our customers are served at the highest quality day in, day out."

Vaioni was founded with just £300 in Manchester and has grown from being a back room and lifestyle business to a multi-million business providing high performance and ultra-resilient connectivity and cloud services over its National Carrier Class Network to over 350 businesses across the world.

Node4 has appointed Ian Millward as its new Head of Channel Sales. He brings over 17 years of sales leadership experience to Node4 with previous positions including Head of Sales at Networks First and Head of Sales Performance and Projects at Kcom.

His experience of working with partners of all sizes will be invaluable as Node4 invests in its channel strategy to maximise short and long term growth.

"There is a huge opportunity for Node4 when it comes to the channel as partners want to work with vendors that provide high quality solutions with strong differentiators," commented Millward.

"Node4 has seen significant growth in its channel business and my role is to build on this success and to further develop our Partner Programme."

Paul Bryce, Business Development Director at Node4, added: "Ian is passionate about sales professionalism, sales performance, business transformation and customer experience. For us he is a perfect fit for how we want to do business with our channel partners, and his experience is going to be invaluable in developing and expanding Node4's existing channel programme."

Eclipse Internet has launched Eclipse Partner backup, the first of many new cloud services for partners under its Eclipse Cloud portfolio.

The Eclipse Partner Backup service is designed to provide intuitive and responsive access to data, via a simple subscription based service and Partners have the flexibility to create their own backup propositions to resell to end customers through the new Partner Backup Console.

With access to bespoke storage quotas and licenses, the console enables Partners to custom build packages for their end customers and to sell at the price points that they choose.

Henry West, Head of Sales at Eclipse Internet, said: "Most customers know us primarily as a connectivity and communications provider, and although this remains of the utmost importance we can't ignore that as technology evolves cloud services are moving to an everyday reality.

"Now is the time to get on the growth curve of cloud services and there is a real opportunity as there is now a genuine demand for these services - look at how they have developed in the home with subscription services such as Netflix and Love Film. There is a real on-demand economy and as a result, a new, smarter way of working.

"We want to enable our Partners to go to market quickly with these services and with no large upfront investment. By easily enabling the provisioning and management of these services via our Partner portal and Partner Backup Console, we can continue to focus on great support and the customer experience to deliver the high level of technical and customer support to our Partners."

Norbain has appointed Gary Rowden as Divisional Director of Sales - South. He joins the company with industry experience having worked for Anixter International as Sales Director and, more recently, Samsung Techwin Europe as Sales & Marketing Director.

Rowden is no stranger to Norbain having previously worked for the company for eight years as a Regional Sales Manager.

Charlie Lacey, Norbain's Sales and Marketing Director, commented: "We're delighted to welcome Gary back to Norbain. He brings with him a wealth of experience having worked in both distribution and in manufacturing, and we're looking forward to using his insights to continue to drive Norbain's sales, particularly in the IP market."

Rowden added: "It's a great opportunity to be able to work at Norbain again. The business has moved on considerably in the last 12 months, especially in its approach to IP, which is now a key focus area."

UK-based ISV and cloud infrastructure management solutions specialist CloudFabricQ is gearing up to take on new partners.

As the company's software solutions (V-Maestro) support demand for analytical management and automation of virtual environments, CloudFabricQ says it plans to recruit systems and services partners that can integrate these solutions into their own portfolios and provide customer and business consultancy support.

The company, which follows a 100% partner-inclusive strategy, plans to reach out in particular to Linux-centric ISVs, server systems vendors, SIs and data centre-focussed VARs.

The most suitable environments for deployments of CloudFabricQ V-Maestro are power-constrained data centres and virtual machine estates, it says.

"Partners can expect to realise incremental margin from V-Maestro software and gain an opportunity to provide added-value services around it," said Steve Charnock, VP of sales and operations EMEA at CloudFabriQ.

The global telecoms industry's revenues will remain roughly flat over the next few years, with a decline in spending on voice services counterbalanced by growth in spending on mobile and fixed (broadband) data services, according to global analyst firm Ovum.

In a recent market forecast analysis report, it was found that as growth slows, market realities mean telcos must find ways to serve their existing customers profitability rather than simply growing their customer bases.

Shagun Bali, analyst for Telecoms Technology at Ovum and author of the report said: "Over the next five years, service and tariff innovation will be key revenue-generating strategies, while LTE rollout, network optimisation, and creative approaches to partnerships will become focal points for cost savings. Telcos need to monetize new business models, leverage customer data by investing in analytics, and define their response to over-the-top (OTT) players."

Ovum estimates that telco IT spending will reach $60bn in 2017, growing at a CAGR of 0.6 percent between 2013 and 2017. Growth in telco IT spending will be driven primarily by investments in packaged software and system integration.

Spending in emerging markets in Asia-Pacific, the Middle East and Africa (MEA), and South and Central America (SCA) will drive global IT spending. In North America, telco IT spending will grow modestly at a CAGR of 0.8 percent to reach $17.5bn by 2017.

Bali added: "Although overall telco IT spending will grow modestly, the trend is for telcos to reduce internal IT spending and increase spending on external IT projects. To control costs, telcos are outsourcing the maintenance of legacy IT and turning to trusted partners, both to implement unified and standards-based systems and software and to provide skills such as those of data scientists for Big Data analytics projects. Consequently, the overall addressable market for vendors will increase.

"The combination of middling profits, high capital requirements, high risk, and uncertain economic growth requires telcos to place their bets carefully, including investing in growing revenue streams and managing customer experience more than ever before. The result is increased opportunities for the IT industry. In the long term, telcos will place more focus than they have before on software to drive innovation."

Red Box Recorders has expanded its business development and technical support team in North America in response to increased demand for voice and data recording solutions in the region.

John Pace and Francis Etchie have been appointed as Regional Sales Manager and Senior Sales Engineer respectively to target sales opportunities within the emergency services, call centre and financial services sectors.

In his new role, John Pace will utilise more than 15 years of experience within the recording marketplace to drive sales growth having held a number of roles for Cybertech and Dictaphone. Most recently he spent almost five years as Regional Sales Executive for Cybertech responsible for the direct and reseller channels in the Northeast and across Canada.

Prior to this he worked for over 10 years at Dictaphone selling technology solutions to call centres, public safety dispatch centres, financial trading floors and healthcare organisations.

Meanwhile, Francis Etchie will be tasked with supporting business development within the financial markets. This will include managing and developing pre-sales proposals, demonstrations and presentations, as well handling integration with various trading turrets and PBX systems including IPC, BT Netrix, Speakerbus IP Trade, Cisco and Avaya.

He possesses 14 years experience working for financial services organisations as Telecom Manager for Crédit Agricole Corporate & Investment bank and before this IT Manager for BNP Paribas Asset Management.

Lee Jones, CEO of Red Box Recorders commented: "North America is a key growth region for the business, so we are investing in our resources to ensure we are best placed to provide recording solutions that help overcome the precise challenges of our customers."