Comms Dealer

Phil Brown has been promoted to the role of B2B Director at Micro-P, to focus on driving forward the distributor's B2B customer, vendor and sales proposition.

Brown has been with Micro-P since 2011 as Commercial Director and since then he has driven vendor relationships and built strong, dynamic commercial teams. Using his vast channel experience, he will now focus on core IT and specialist resellers to ensure Micro-P is continuing to support their needs, enabling them to grow and develop their businesses.

Brown commented: "In this new challenge, I will ensure that Micro-P's reseller partners are fighting fit for the future. Micro-P has always been led by the principles of strong customer relationships and I will continue to ensure that we exceed our customers' needs to drive our combined growth and success."

Paul Bryan, Managing Director at Micro-P, added: "Since being with Micro-P, Phil has consistently demonstrated his ability to drive vendor strategy and relationships, enabling us to fulfil our aggressive growth plans. He's in a perfect position to take a holistic view of our proposition to the channel and prepare Micro-P and its reseller partners for future expansion."

Surrey-based IT, voice and data solutions provider siptel has helped to raise over £19,000 for two Woking charities.

The reseller sponsored the annual charity ball and silent auction held at Hoe Bridge School, in Woking in support of 'LinkAble', which provides sports, social and recreational activities for children and adults with a broad range of learning disabilities, and global children's charity 'Plan' which works with children in the world's poorest countries to help them build a better future.

Steve Rasmussen, Director at siptel, commented: "By supporting such worthy charities as LinkAble and Plan, as well as Hoe Bridge School, it is nice for siptel to feel that we are giving valuable input into the local community."

New London-based hosted VoIP provider TeslaOne has launched TeslaVoice, a fully-featured, all-inclusive hosted VoIP service for startups and established small businesses of up to 10 people

The suite is said to offer premium PBX features as standard, with no upsells or subscription additions. £25 per month is all the small business will have to pay to access a myriad of premium features including unlimited extensions, unlimited phone numbers, time-based routing, call queues, music-on-hold and many more.

TeslaOne claims to have has also succeeded in slashing call costs to mobile phones. At just 3p per minute, the company says it beats all other landline and VoIP providers in the UK on cost.

Ben Christian, Founder of TeslaOne told Comms Dealer: "It's all about making the service accessible and predictable. Many VoIP services offer a very low base rate, some as low as £5 per month.

"This looks great in their marketing but, as soon as the business starts adding essential calling features such as music-on-hold and an auto-attendant, they can easily pay over £100 each month.

"We've packed everything into one low monthly fee, allowing the start-up or small business to control their cost, predict their budgets and pay as little as possible for the privilege. There's nothing else they need to buy - we're offering the full suite of features for a flat rate."

One of the package's biggest perks is the ability to create unlimited UK phone numbers, a feature Christian has noticed huge demand for.

"As small businesses diversify, they need more communications channels. Our package allows for the unlimited creation of numbers for each department, office or fax machine.This allows the business to offer a direct number to key people within their company and we won't charge them any more for the privilege," he added.

Telappliant, the Internet telephony provider for UK based small to medium sized enterprises, has won the 'Best Internet Telephony' award at the 2013 Internet Service Providers' Association Awards. 

The award winners were announced in a ceremony on 11th July at the Park Lane Sheraton Hotel in London.

Entrants underwent two months of rigorous testing by ISPA's technical testing partners, Malden Electronics, and written submissions were assessed by an independent panel of industry experts.

Presenting Telappliant with the award, ISPA said: "In a very tight contest, the judges decided that Telappliant's transparency and impressive network resilience meant they were worthy winners."

Tan Aksoy, Chief Executive Officer at Telappliant, commented: "Following our 'Best Business ITSP' award from ITSPA earlier this year, we are thrilled to be awarded the 'Best Internet Telephony' by ISPA. I am particularly delighted that the judging panel commented on Telappliant's network resilience, which is an area we have invested heavily in over the last 12 months."

ShoreTel has joined the global HP AllianceOne partner programme claiming it will enable joint customers and partners to leverage two best-of-breed solutions instead of being tied into a proprietary single-vendor system.

Shoetel says the initiative will give companies the flexibility to: design, employ and manage a solid-state network and VoIP infrastructure that is flexible, adaptable and complexity-free; provide a consistent user experience with video, voice, IM and presence across a variety of architectures, platforms and device types, through HP FlexNetwork architecture; deploy UC services with increased reliability and resiliency with uninterrupted availability through the HP FlexNetwork architecture.

"ShoreTel has one goal in mind, and that is to delight our SMB and enterprise customers worldwide with robust, easy-to-use and manage solutions," said Chris Burgy, vice president of GTM strategy/planning, business development & alliances at ShoreTel.

"Best-of-breed vendors streamline the sales and implementation process, enabling companies to get up and running in record time, and we are extremely pleased to be able to jointly achieve this objective with our HP AllianceOne partnership."

The new Polycom CX5500 and CX5100 Unified Conference Stations are designed to deliver an around-the-table experience for all participants, whether they're in the room or thousands of miles away.

At the Microsoft 2013 Worldwide Partner Conference, Polycom also announced that it has received Lync 2013 qualification for its full portfolio of Polycom VVX Business Media Phones.

These announcements are said to further the partnership between the two companies, building on Polycom's portfolio of 40 video, voice and content sharing solutions that are interoperable or optimized to work with Lync today.

A.E. Natarajan, Senior Vice President, Worldwide Engineering at Polycom commented: "The strategic alliance we've built with Microsoft over the past several years continues to deliver innovative collaboration solutions that provide Polycom and Lync customers with an unrivaled experience.

"Our Lync solutions such as the new panoramic video collaboration experience, and our leading portfolio of Lync interoperable offerings, enable Polycom and Microsoft to win business from organisations seeking UC&C solutions that empower people to collaborate however, wherever and whenever they want."

Micro-P has made a key appointment to bolster the UC support and service it provides to channel customers.

Dan Burgess has joined as UC Devices Product Manager and is aiming to ensure resellers are fully equipped to deploy UC solutions and provide the professional end points to deliver the necessary call clarity demanded.

"I will be complementing a team that continues to deliver excellent results for the highly-respected technology brands that we represent," commented Burgess who is also tasked with sales and building long term vendor and reseller relations.
Micro-P's UC Devices Business Manager, James Burns, said: "Dan's appointment - combined with our growing commercial team of product specialists and BDMs - means Micro-P is in a position to educate and equip its partners with the marketing and sales tools needed for them to take the UC proposition to market."

Commenting on Dan's appointment, "Dan's appointment further demonstrates Micro-Ps commitment to creating, delivering and supporting UC solutions to the channel. Dan is ideally suited to build on the consistent success Micro-P has enjoyed in taking our core UC vendors and customers into new vertical and corporate markets.

"By introducing complimentary product sets to their existing portfolio, Micro-P delivers additional revenue streams to partners' businesses. Resellers that have and continue to adopt UC and embrace market changes, have broadened their portfolios to include vendors such as Plantronics, Polycom, Konftel and Yealink as part of their solution sale. This means end users can rationalise their supply chain by using Micro-P's resellers as a single source for all technologies."

"Commenting on his position, Dan said: "In my new role, I will be using my skills and experience to ensure that as our resellers are deploying UC solutions, they are fully equipped to provide the professional end points that are appropriate for the end user profile in order to deliver the necessary call clarity demanded. I will be complementing a team that continues to deliver excellent results for the highly-respected technology brands that we represent."

Burns added further, "Our customers continue to enjoy the luxury of being able to openly discuss a full solution proposition with our range of product specialists with the confidence that Micro-P is 100% committed to a channel only approach."

Mark Pearce, strategic alliance director at Enterasys Networks, has slammed the Government's slow progress in rolling out superfast broadband to rural areas of the UK.

An official audit has found that the government's rollout of 'superfast' broadband to rural areas is about two years behind its original schedule.

The report said only nine of 44 rural areas would reach targets for high-speed Internet by 2015, and four areas could also miss a revised 2017 target.

"Accessing fast and reliable broadband is increasingly essential for businesses and schools, and the fact that the rollout in rural areas is two year's behind is simply not good enough," said Pearce.

 "Ofsted recently reported that schools in rural areas are failing their poorest children, and lack of broadband in rural areas surely has a part to play in this.

"The influx of BYOD mobile devices is putting pressure on bandwidth, which schools and businesses are struggling to keep up with. Some rural areas have broadband connections slower than 2Mbps, that's snail's pace in our modern world.

"This is having a knock on affect for both businesses and schools, and in some cases pupils are struggling to do their homework because of insufficient Internet access.

"It's widely known that poor connectivity is creating a digital divide between urban and rural communities and more delays will only result in rural communities falling further and further behind their urban counterparts.

"Superfast broadband is important, not just because of the potential benefits it can bring to both individuals and society but also the role it could play in supporting the central focus of the government: economic growth. Having the fastest Internet in Europe by 2015 is an ambitious target but one that the government needs to hit," added Pearce

ShoreTel's reseller channel is said to be 'buzzing' following the unveiling of the manufacturer's new Mobility 7 software release.
ShoreTel says with Mobility 7, users can transform their iOS iPhone, Android or tablet into a desk phone with the ShoreTel Dock, which is now available for ordering.

David Petts, senior VP of worldwide sales at ShoreTel commented: "Our channel is a buzz of excitement with the customer interest in ShoreTel Mobility and the ShoreTel Dock. With our latest software release, resellers can deliver a fantastic and intuitive experience for end users and IT administrators alike.

"As a result, customers are able to integrate leading smartphones and tablets securely, simply and cost-effectively into existing enterprise communication applications and infrastructure to provide greater flexibility and increased productivity."

Brian Riggs, principal analyst at Ovum commented. "Enterprise end users expect mobile UC clients to be as intuitive and easy to use as consumer apps found on a wide variety of smart phones and tablets. This release increases adoption of UC in the enterprise, helping businesses to derive the most benefit from their IT investments, while reducing training costs, resulting in lower cost UC solutions."

BT Business Partner Sales' General Manager Martin Clarke has reaffirmed his commitment to the channel and recruited additional Partner Managers and specialists with a remit to support 10 new partners who have recently joined the channel.

"Our strategy is to grow the channel and recruit more partners to sell the BT Retail portfolio," said Clarke. "I expect another four high quality partners to come on board early in August."

Terry Hughes, BT's Specialist Sales Manager, added: "We have invested in the Specialist areas of ICT, Calls & Lines, Mobile and Broadband to strengthen the BT Retail proposition and make working with BT an attractive option."