Comms Dealer

Content Guru has become a global hosted partner of Verint customer engagement solutions including workforce optimisation and speech analytics.

Verint's digital first engagement management solution for government and public sector applications has been integrated with Content Guru's storm cloud platform.

John Rees, CCO, Content Guru, said: "Organizations looking to deliver a fully effective customer experience should leverage best-in-class, compatible components across every area, as only a truly joined-up experience can enhance the levels of customer engagement expected by today's consumers. This is equally true in the public sphere."

John Bourne, senior vice president, global channels and alliances at Verint, added: "Through cloud ACD and our multi-tenanted workforce and customer engagement solutions, organisations of all sizes can achieve their most important business objectives, from increasing employee and customer experiences to enhancing loyalty, and from driving revenue to lowering the cost of service delivery."

Cloud Direct has pocketed AlwaysON Group (AOG) for an undisclosed sum. Transcend (a mid-market corporate finance advisory firm based in Reading and Birmingham) acted as lead advisers to the shareholders of AOG.

AOG was owned by private equity firms Foresight Group and Mobeus Equity Partners, together with management and a group of private investors.

The deal adds £5.5m revenues to Cloud Direct and additional expertise in UC, data communication and managed data services.

Cloud Direct is a provider of cloud based managed IT service to SMEs, encompassing UC, cloud back-up, disaster recovery, hosted VOIP telephony, Office 365 and cloud hosting and infrastructure.

Martin Peck, Executive Chairman of AOG, said: "The current investors built AOG up by merging two complementary IT services business, and having completed this process, the time was right for a new owner to take the business forward."

Transcend partner Steve Bartlett commented: "This is a sector we know well, with a lot of M&A activity. Cloud Direct were an obviously strong fit with AOG and we are sure the business will flourish under their ownership."

Brett Raynes, CEO of Cloud Direct, added: "Since 2003 we've been helping organisations grow by migrating them to the cloud. Moving forward, AOG's capabilities will be critical to that as we drive better business continuity, people productivity and infrastructure.

"Their people and customers are a great asset to our business at this exciting time of high growth. We'll slowly integrate the business into the Cloud Direct clan as we continue to support organic growth with an ambitious acquisition strategy."

BT has rolled out Tollring's new iCall Suite on its Wholesale Hosted Centrex (WHC) platform.

The cloud-based iCall Suite has been deployed to customers on the WHC 2.0 version of the platform.

BT resellers and their customers can now monitor business-critical call metrics by accessing real-time reports, intuitive dashboards and visual wallboards via live tiles that are optimised for mobile devices.

Steve Best, Managing Director for BT Wholesale Products, said: "Including Tollring's call analytics on BT's Wholesale Hosted Centrex ensures businesses can access utilisation statistics to see who is calling them, when and how.

"This information is invaluable in terms of providing peak traffic flows, destinations and call behaviour and will help businesses identify customer behaviour and plan resources accordingly. For resellers, this will help them differentiate their proposition, increase competitiveness and drive new revenues."

Tony Martino, Managing Director of Tollring, added: "The functionality within iCall Suite call analytics will enable BT resellers to differentiate their services over their competition by delivering in-depth business analytics that provide a valuable understanding of their customers."

Exsel Group has won backing worth half a million pounds from private equity company Coralinn LLP.

The investment secures around 50 jobs in Glasgow and Aberdeen and will allow plans for further expansion in Edinburgh to go ahead.

Exsel MD Tom McDonald said: "As two strong Scottish businesses, it will be exciting to see what we can do together and where this investment will elevate us."

Exsel, which is headquartered at the CityPark offices in Glasgow, was ranked third among the UK's fastest-growing technology companies in Deloitte's Fast 50 last year and 19th on its Fast 500 EMEA (Europe, Middle East and Africa) list.

Its clients include the Institute of Chartered Accountants Scotland, Muir Construction, Scottish Futures Trust, Celtic FC and the SFA.

Hugh Stewart OBE, managing partner at Coralinn, said it had taken a 45% stake in Exsel because it was a dynamic young company which fitted the portfolio profile for Coralinn's investments.

Stewart, who becomes Exsel's new Chairman, said: "Tom and his team have created a fast growing environment providing Scottish companies with a business model offering lower costs yet solutions across a range of tech products and services."

Two years ago Exsel employed just three people and had a turnover of £100k. That rose to £2.7m in the financial year to last March and is expected to reach more than £4m next month.

Partner companies IT@Spectrum and The One Point have taken their strategic partnership to a new level at their new £2.75m headquarters at the Bridgehead business park in East Yorkshire.

The sister businesses have created a state-of-the-art working environment where their key teams work together to offer a package of IT managed services to a combined client base of more than 1,200 organisations.

The new offices, called The View, have also been purpose-designed to enable formal and informal meetings with customers and prospective customers, enabling them to see the latest technology being used to deliver efficiency and productivity.

IT@Spectrum has more than 30 years experience providing solutions to enable businesses to print more efficiently, manage their data and information electronically and automate processes.

IT@Spectrum's client base includes blue chip businesses such as Smith & Nephew, Associated British Ports and Cranwsick.

Business telecoms provider The One Point offers IT, business telecoms, software and digital services, and was named the 02 Direct Partner of the Year at the 02 Partner Awards 2016 and is recognised in the top 5% of Microsoft Partners in the UK.

Ken Sturdy, Managing Director of office technology business at IT@Spectrum, said: "We remain two brands, but when customers 'come and see' they see our people and functions working seamlessly, side by side.
"So many questions are answered when customers visit. They see how our two businesses work together, they see the teams collaborating, they see the latest technology in action, and they see how it delivers business transformation."

Martin Lauer, Managing Director of IT services and telecoms company The One Point, added: "The new offices have opened up so many new opportunities, including for customers to come in and use our facilities.
"We're literally throwing open our doors to customers and prospective customers. We're saying 'if you want to talk to any of our staff, you can do that. If you want to just chew the fat about what's next in technology, you can do that too'.

"Over the past two years we have worked collaboratively together to ensure this was the right thing to do. Our client feedback was that it made sense and worked for them.

"Now we've gone much further by coming together under one roof and integrating the teams, because that's what makes sense for our customers. If it didn't work for the customer, by delivering a better service and greater value, we wouldn't do it."

IT support staff are spending more time on service requests and issue resolution than innovation, according to a new report that looks at how optimisation of IT operations drives digital transformation.

Published by Dimension Data, the report stated that IT operations staff are spending over 30% of their time on new service requests and supporting issue resolution, while only 15% of their time is allocated to innovation.

This represents a 25% year on year decline, and according to Dimension Data the message is clear - enterprises that don't evolve their IT business models could miss future market opportunities.

Dimension Data Group Executive for Services, Bill Padfield, said: "Savvy IT organisations understand that if they don't focus on efficiencies today could miss the greater market opportunities of the future."

Dimension Data commissioned research firm IDC. According to the report, only 20% of organisations claim they've fully automated and optimised their infrastructure, while the majority are on a path to automation, but haven't reached their goal.

Barney Taylor, Dimension Data's MD UK&I, said that some of the reasons why IT organisations are lagging behind can be attributed to budget, experience, and expertise. "Successful digital transformation requires the right mix of people, processes, and tools," he commented. "However, IT service automation platforms are expensive and time consuming to develop and successfully integrate into hybrid IT environments."

Channel marketing firm Bowan Arrow has been awarded full membership of the DMA (Direct Marketing Association) having completed a compliance audit.

Full membership enables Bowan Arrow to promote its DMA badge of accreditation in the market as a sign of compliance with the Direct Marketing Code of Practice.

Bowan Arrow Director Andy Grant has also been appointed as Vice Chair of the Responsible Marketing Committee which has been appointed by the DMA Group Board to set out its policies on the responsibilities of marketers and define what constitutes 'responsible behaviour'.

Grant said: "It is a privilege to work with the DMA leadership team and other industry peers to help guide our marketing industry in ensuring a consistency of responsibility in all marketing activities."

Following news of Simplivity's £521m acquisition by HPE, HyperGrid has broken cover to claim that, on the back of the deal, enterprise IT will evolve from services delivery to value creation.

According to HPE the purchase of Simplivity 'advances HPE's strategy in the fast-growing, high-margin HCI market'.

While spending on HCI is growing fast, HCI will increasingly be viewed as a use case (specifically for VMs as a service) rather than a market, reckons HyperGrid.

According to Manoj Nair, Chief Product Officer at HyperGrid, to evolve quickly from services delivery to value creation, businesses need to simultaneously deliver a broad set of services for legacy applications, enable application modernisation where possible, and provide modern application management for developers without disruption or overhead and do all this in a way that's agile, flexible and on-demand with security, control and governance.

"This shift will be driven by customers demanding integration of additional, higher layers of the stack, and innovative vendors responding to that demand with offers that support HCI as a use case, but deliver public cloud services in their data centres that include infrastructure, platform, and application management services," he stated.

"It is important for vendors to help CIOs and IT practitioners leapfrog from simply delivering services to creating business value by enabling business innovation while maintaining security, control and governance over delivery of IT services.

"Like HCI, we see public cloud as a partial solution to customer challenges. There are significant problems due to shadow IT owing to lack of control and governance, risk of cloud lock-in and poor support beyond VM-based computing. Enterprises are looking for an integrated and expanded IT solution that goes beyond HCI and public cloud options.

"This broader dynamic in IT is driving this vision of Enterprise Cloud Services, which deliver a public cloud-like services in the customer data centre.

"IT teams deploying Enterprise Cloud Services can better support overall business innovation and success through fast and flexible deployment of new and existing applications on the most efficient delivery platforms.

"The shift away from do-it-yourself approach to service delivery and higher-value added activities minimises the need for IT to perpetually focus on building, integrating, optimising, maintaining and refreshing many point solutions from multiple vendors that make up their services stack."

MSP Redcentric has become a Certified Partner of Purple, the intelligent spaces company.

Redcentric specialises in providing on premises, managed and cloud services to public and private sector organisations across the UK.

Purple's marketing and analytics solution acts as a complementary overlay to Redcentric's Enterprise Wireless LAN service. It will enable customers to engage with visitors and understand the best use of physical spaces.

As a Certified Partner, Redcentric has full access to unlimited NFR licenses, preferential lead allocation, online partner training and technical support.

Redcentric is looking to increase its proposition and strength within the healthcare sector following the Government's announcement that WiFi is to be made available in all NHS locations.

Anton Murphy, Business Development Manager for Redcentric, said: "Network service based outcomes sought by Redcentric customers are no longer confined to operational efficiency. They now extend to corporate user productivity, easy guest user login and analytics for actionable real-time insights. Introducing Purple's solution to our portfolio will assist Redcentric to meet demand and enable customers through highly valuable marketing insights."

Hats off to QDOS Communications for scooping the 2016 Excellence in MLE award from Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise.

The award recognises a project undertaken by QDOS for PPHE Hotel Group. Its multi-brand portfolio comprises 38 hotels and offers more than 8,300 rooms, and includes the Park Plaza Hotels & Resorts brand, working in partnership with the Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, across the United Kingdom, Netherlands and Germany.
  
The solution was is a privately hosted Alcatel-Lucent centralised OmniPCX platform, with two regional core clusters supporting the UK hotels, and a separate cluster supporting the European hotels.

Peter Tebbutt, General Manager, ALE UK&I, said: "ALE and QDOS see an excellent opportunity for growth as organisations look to embrace digital transformation and overhaul legacy systems."