Comms Dealer

Although distributor Nimans has moved by leaps and bounds from its traditional roots as a 'box shifter'  MD and Chairman Julian Niman could not resist supplying staff with traditional boxes of chocolates to celebrate Valentine's Day. "You could say it was a 'love-ly' surprise and a really nice gesture," said Head of HR and Training Melanie Williamson.

Visual collaboration specialist Oblong Industries is continuing its expansion in Europe with the opening of an office in Munich next month, to serve the Germany, Austria and Switzerland (DACH) markets.

New regional sales director Thomas Spiegl will lead the team in Munich. This will be Oblong's third office in Europe and fifteenth globally. From 2010, Spiegl worked at LifeSize, formerly a division of Logitech, and was most recently regional director for DACH and director for EMEA channels.

Spiegl said: "With our Mezzanine offering we provide an immersive and visual technology for collaborating with both geographically dispersed and mobile users. Mezzanine re-defines meetings and delivers Infopresence to accelerate decision-making and improve business collaboration."

Steve Smith, sales director EMEA, Oblong Europe, said: "With Thomas' expertise we can tap into the great potential that the region offers and continue to grow the business throughout Europe."

Last year, Oblong hired former Cisco and Polycom man Steve Pryor as director for EMEA channel sales, to develop the company's partner programme and be responsible for partner relationships. Founded in the US in 2006, Oblong Industries customers include Boeing, GE, Fujitsu and IBM.

Distributor Esprinet's consolidated results as at 31 December 2016 show consolidated sales: €3.046bn is up +13% vs €2.694bn last year. Gross profit €164.2m is up +5%, Q4 was good: consolidated sales: €1.12bn (+26% vs € 888.5 million of fourth quarter 2015). Some of this growth is attributed to acquistions - EDSlan and Mosaico in the year.

Despite fears related to Brexit, United Kingdom registered the most significant growth rate (+ 8.7%), with a second half (+ 11.7%) sequentially better than the first. Germany showed instead an opposite trend, going into negative territory in the second half and closing the year with a -0.6%. France improved in the second half, but not enough to turn positive, marking a -1.2% for the full year.

Italy underperformed the market, closing the year at + 0.9% mainly thanks to the performance registered in the second half. Spain on the other hand registered a + 1.2% due to a particularly negative fourth quarter (-4.7%).

The performance by product category shows a growth in notebook (+ 6%), monitor (+ 18%) and consumables (+ 6%) segments. Tablet and desktop are instead negative, respectively with -13% and -5%. Smartphones registered a lower result than expected mainly due to non-recurring events that penalized one of the leading international brands, it says. Huawei and HP excelled among the best performing brands, while Apple and Microsoft ranked among the worst.

Esprinet says it closed 2016 still in first place in the local distributors rank, with a share of 31.5% - slightly decreasing (-0.9%) - without taking into account the contribution of the newly acquired EDSlan and Itway VAD.

In Spain, the best performing categories were mobile phones and the notebook, while processors (-27%), desktop (-6%) and toner (-9%) contained the overall trend of the sector. Among the best brands are reported Huawei followed by Asus, while Toshiba and Acer delivered the worst results. The market share of Esprinet Iberica increase to 17.9% (+ 0.9%); considering the contribution of the acquired assets of Vinzeo the group in Spain was in the first place in the national ranking, according to management estimates.

ITSPA has welcomed the launch of GCHQ's National Cyber Security Centre, opened today by The Queen, and called on the organisation to help combat telephony fraud and protect both businesses and consumers.

Eli Katz, Chair of ITSPA, said: "ITSPA was pleased to see the National Cyber Security Centre launch today. We welcome Government's continued efforts to protect national infrastructure from cyber security threats and the continued focus that is being placed on this issue, and we look forward to working with the new Centre.

"Our members feel that Government, law enforcement and industry need to be more joined up to help combat telephony fraud, which remains a significant problem and is estimated to add 2% to the average user's phone bill.

"Telephony fraud is in some ways the UK's forgotten crime. Due to the difficulties in bringing forward successful prosecutions due to the highly international element of crime, it often goes unreported by the telecommunications industry, resulting in law enforcement and Government devoting a disproportionately low level of resource to the area. ITSPA continues to work to encourage industry to report instances of telephony fraud to ensure that the crime receives the attention it deserves."

In recent months, ITSPA has developed a Cyber Crime Task Force to help form positive relations with the relevant organisations involved in the fight against telephony fraud, including a number of Government Departments, the regulator and law enforcement. It will be engaging with the National Cyber Security Centre as part of this continuing this work.

Katz added: "The recent formation of the ITSPA Cyber Crime Task Force has concentrated our efforts in highlighting the level of telephony fraud experienced by UK operators to policymakers. We look forward to developing these conversations further in the coming months and I hope to engage in a positive dialogue with the new Centre to see how they can assist with ensuring this specific crime is combated effectively."

Westcoast has has expanded its mobility business following an agreement with ruggedised mobile device vendor M3 Mobile.

The Korean-based firm's product portfolio includes durable smartphones and PDAs aimed at enterprise customers, particularly in logistics, retail and field services.

Darren Seward, Head of Mobility at Westcoast, said: "This is a great opportunity to increase our foothold in the enterprise mobility market."

M3 Mobile manufactures all its products at its own factory in South Korea.

It's end customers include DHL whose 15,000 field employees use M3 smartphones and PDAs on a global basis. Other large customers include Domino's, BP, Vision Express and Jaguar Land Rover.

Oracle has expanded its Startup Cloud Accelerator programme by opening new centres in Bristol, UK; Delhi; Mumbai; Paris; São Paulo; Singapore and Tel Aviv.

The announcement comes soon after the business software giant revealed it was expanding its cloud data centre infrastructure in Europe.

Run by members of the Oracle research and development team, the accelerator programme provides six months of mentoring from technical and business experts, a co-working space, access to Oracle customers, partners and investors, and free Oracle Cloud credits.

"After a successful launch in Bangalore we're committed to building a supportive ecosystem for startups across the globe," said Thomas Kurian, Oracle president of product development.

"Cloud is enabling incredible innovations across every aspect of business and across every industry. We want to support this next technology revolution powered by cloud."

The Oracle Startup Cloud Accelerator is open to early-stage technology and technology-enabled startups. The call for applications will open later in 2017 in each of the seven new hubs.

Oracle says it currently delivers more than 50 integrated cloud services to support companies of all sizes. To support cloud product delivery growth, Oracle last month announced plans to bring three new data centres in London online, and further data centre openings were unveiled for Virginia, US and Turkey.

The new data centres are expected to come online by mid-2017, and other data centre openings have been promised for mid-2018.

RingCentral is aiming to become a $1bn business by the end of 2020, with revenues driven by mid-market and larger customers and channels switching customers to cloud.

In the short term, however, shares dipped 9% following Q4 earnings where it beat expectations on top and bottom lines, but provided earnings-call profit guidance on the light side for the upcoming quarter. Overall revenue was up 25.2% and software subscriptions (the bulk of revenue) rose 28% to $98m.

Annualised recurring software subscriptions grew 31% to $414.4m; of that, ARR for RingCentral Office grew 38%, to $341.5m. Gross margin on software subscriptions rose to 81.2% on a non-GAAP basis.

"The fourth quarter was a strong finish to a great year driven by our success with mid-market and enterprise customers," said Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral's Chairman and CEO.

"Additionally, the reseller channels are now increasingly switching their focus to cloud solutions and it has enabled us to scale our mid-market and enterprise go-to-market efforts rapidly."

The company guided to software revenue of $102m-$103m for Q1 (28-29% growth) and total revenue of $109.5m-$111.5m, above consensus for $106.7m. For the full year, it's forecasting software revenue of $447m-$454m (26-28% growth) and total revenue of $484m-$492m, above consensus for $468m.

Scotland's £200m Fortis data centre located near Newhouse in North Lanarkshire is now live through Commsworld's gigabit capable pure fibre network.

The agreement will enable Scotland's independent network operator to offer the services of the low-energy, renewables powered facility to its 2,500 clients, offering a latency performance between Fortis to Glasgow and Edinburgh of one millisecond or less.

Gareth Lush, commercial director at DataVita, the company set up to operate Fortis, said: "Scotland is ready for a next-generation data centre. We have a thriving IT industry but we are lacking the data centres to support this fully, resulting in valuable investment and jobs going outside of Scotland."

The 100,000 sqft, 2000-rack facility is expected to create 50 skilled jobs over five years and DataVita is highlighting to potential customers the scope for a 40% reduction in power costs, and up to 95% reduction in carbon emissions.

Chief executive of Commsworld, Ricky Nicol, said: "In Fortis, Scotland is getting a data centre befitting the market and I believe its services will have a major positive impact within the business community.

"The term 'future-proofing' tends to get overused, but this data centre will do exactly that for Scotland's many businesses and organisations, as demand for digital storage services continue to surge."

Liquid infrastructure is a new technology trend resellers should be embracing this year , according to Mark Curtis-Wood, Head of Nimans Network Services.

He says there are a number of factors shaping modern working practices based around liquid infrastructure and more fluid and instant communication.

"For a long time we have been talking about mobility rather than just mobile services," he said. "We saw a tipping point in 2016 which caught a lot of people by surprise. We are not selling voice connections with data bolt-ons any more, we are now selling data connections with a voice element where needed. The whole thing has flipped on its head.

"The expansion and penetration of 4G has made solutions much more accessible with faster speeds and faster phone processors leading to faster applications and faster access to information.

"People are becoming more flexible in the way they are working and technology is leading the way. It's one of the reasons why we have launched 30 day mobile contracts because we understand businesses need to upscale, downscale, have people on temporary contracts and move people and locations around. This in turn has led to resellers winning more business because they can be more flexible.

"SIP is another important factor in liquid infrastructure as the flexibility of ISDN just isn't there. Generally there's a three year contract and long term investment. It's become very much a dinosaur. SIP has hit a tipping point because people can take a number with them, port and switch it on really fast.

"Instant communication is being driven by customers. A classic example for us was when the deployment of two very large data pipes into student accommodation on behalf of a reseller was delayed. We put 4G in there with 1TB of mobile data. You just couldn't deploy that sort of solution in the past so fast.

"The cloud is obviously another important element in modern working trends but it isn't new, it's just that the 'label' became new. For most customers the biggest decision they make is to move on-premise into the cloud. Once that decision is made it's almost like a tsunami of thought because they realise it's easier than they thought and also saves them money. So they are thinking what else they can do on top of that.

"That's why it's important that resellers and suppliers like us are geared up with a package of products that ultimately give them more flexibility than they have ever had before. Today's working world is becoming very fluid, very fast.

"Connectivity limitations stopped this happening before. Further investment in wireless connectivity by Nimans for example will further fuel this growth to enable solutions to be deployed faster and run over a shorter period of time. The barriers have been removed. True liquid infrastructure is here."

Atos company Unify has enlisted channel supremo Paul Cunningham to the role of Chief Marketing Officer with responsibility for all of the vendor's marketing activities for its OpenScape and Circuit solution portfolios. Cunningham also joins the Unify Executive Committee.

He brings over 25 years experience in ICT marketing to the role having worked in a number of organisations including stints at Oracle, Westcon, SaaS start-ups and freelance consultancy.

CEO Jon Pritchard said: "Paul's expertise and leadership will help Unify build on its foundation of solutions and services to drive demand and enable Unify to meet and exceed customer and partner expectations."

Cunningham added: "Unify, our partners and our customers stand to benefit from Atos' digital transformation for enterprises, which will in turn inform our Circuit platform innovation and help sustain our strong market position with OpenScape.

"This combination of people, solutions, services and routes to market is strongly positioned to meet the business challenges faced by organisations around the globe - now and in the future."