INDUSTRY NEWS COMMENT: OPEN LINES Nicola Porter-Vaughn
“We now have over 400 CPs consuming WLR3. We should all be very proud of our achievements.”
ON JUNE 30th, WLR2 closed for business and with the cooperation of our customers we have moved over 99 per cent of WLR assets onto WLR3. This migration has been a tremendous effort from not only our CPs and Openreach teams, but also from Ofcom and OTA who have worked closely with us. Together we have delivered a product solution which makes WLR accessible to a wide range of customers across this dynamic industry, and we should all be very proud of our achievements. When we first embarked on the programme to
move we anticipated that the number of CPs in the WLR market would reduce dramatically. Instead, we have witnessed far higher numbers of CPs completing product establishment for WLR3 than we had initially expected. This is in part attributable to the role played by the Third Party Integrators who have made WLR3 simple to use for those customers who have chosen to use the off-the-shelf portal solutions provided by these suppliers rather than developing their own B2B interfaces into Openreach’s Equivalence Managed Platform. Openreach provided formal notification of the withdrawal of WLR2 in April 2009 giving CPs 26 months notice to move their assets to WLR3. It’s been a long hard road to get to this point but working in partnership with industry, this channel, Ofcom and OTA we have achieved this remarkable milestone. We now have over 400 CPs consuming WLR3 and despite a few years of market decline for fixed lines, we have seen significant line growth over the past 15 months.
Nicola Porter-Vaughn, Director of Product Establishment for WLR3, Openreach
Wick Hill inks Expand deal
DISTRIBUTOR Wick Hill has added Expand Networks’ WAN optimisation products to its portfolio for resellers. Expand’s technology is designed to improve network performance by stripping out unnecessary packet informa- tion and duplicated data from file transfers, compression and quality of service techniques. Wick Hill chairman Ian Kilpatrick told Comms Dealer that the product is a response to reseller demand.
“Chucking more bandwidth at some of the problems busi- nesses are facing doesn’t make them go away,” Kilpatrick said. “For a lot of applications, if you supply more bandwidth they’re designed to eat more bandwidth.”
Mathew Matthews, Sales Director for Expand Networks,
explained that virtualisation and cloud services is a key driver for network optimisation. “It’s great that we’re bring- ing application control back into the data centre,” Matthews said. “But unless you can deal with latency and the way these applications appear across the network, the user experience on the office side is typically very bad.”
Kilpatrick estimates the overall market for optimisation to be worth above $1bn a year. One of the key attractions for resellers is that it’s an area of high perceived complexity and good margin. “It’s actually relatively straightforward to do,” he said. “You can provide a service that a customer will pay for, but you don’t have to be a rocket scien- tist to implement it.”
Jabra signs Logitech agreement
JABRA has expanded its chan- nel reach through a distribution agreement with Logitech. The distributor will offer a number of select Jabra headsets under the co-branded name ‘Logitech powered by Jabra’.
Jabra CEO Mogens Elsberg said: “Adding voice to the UC
experience is one of the most important factors for a success- ful deployment. The combina- tion of Jabra’s headsets, the Logitech brand and channel reach will increase the aware- ness of UC headsets to the ben- efit of both parties and the exist- ing Jabra channel network.”
SHORT CALLS
Red Box Recorders has developed its own technology to embed mobile phone recording into its voice recording solution. Designed to meet the FSA requirements, the fully compliant mobile recording solution treats mobile recording as any other end point and does not charge the customer a premium.
Oxon-based STL has won what is believed to be a £90k contract to supply communications to London 2012 Ceremonies Limited (L2012C). According to those familiar with the project, STL beat off a strong field of competition with around 30 companies reaching the last stage, including BT.
Klick2Contact, a European provider of Live Help services for e-commerce websites, has closed a first round of financing from premier Central European venture capital firm Credo Ventures. The investment proceeds will be used to support the company’s growth initiatives, continue to enhance its product offering, and strengthen sales activities in the UK, Western, Central and Eastern Europe.
6 COMMS DEALER JULY 2011
www.comms-dealer.com
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