INDUSTRY NEWS COMMENT: CLOUD TALK David Ellis
TRADING conditions have remained tough for most businesses this year and in the channel in particular, adding value through services rather than squeezing margin from products has been the secret to success. 2011 also saw a number of high profile service outages from service providers such as Amazon and Blackberry as well as yet more natural and weather- related disasters. Incidents
like this raise awareness of the costs associated with service failure and data loss, which leads the way for cloud-based back up, restoration and storage solutions as well as for professional services around business continuity and disaster recovery planning. Application performance monitoring should also form part of an organisation’s business continuity plans. The bottom line is that businesses are powerless to predict when a disaster may strike, or indeed prevent it, but they can minimise or avoid any significant impact or disruption to their service if they have comprehensive contingency plans in place. Data security has remained a central theme in IT
throughout the year and is still a hotly contested issue in relation to the cloud. Again, education comes into play here as customers need trusted advisors to allow them to evaluate whether a private, public or hybrid cloud infrastructure is the right solution for their business need. Alongside this, cloud providers have been stressing the importance of a watertight data security policy and careful negotiations over Service Level Agreements. With KPMG predicting that cloud is set to ‘become more of a business question in 2012’, it will be interesting to see what the IT industry has learnt from 2011 and how this knowledge will be used to better serve the end user.
David Ellis, Director of New Technology & Services, Computerlinks
Westcoast’s big package
IT DISTRIBUTOR Westcoast has implemented its plan to offer a ‘complete unified com- munications package’ following an agreement with AudioCodes, the formation of a new sales team and the establishment of an in-house services and instal- lations capability.
Audiocodes deals with VoIP network products and technol- ogy such as media gateways, enterprise session border con- trollers and media servers. Its technology voice-enables users that want to use Microsoft Lync to make telephone calls. Paul Harman, Commercial Manager for the Solutions Business at Westcoast, com- mented: “Unified communica- tions is a key business growth area for Westcoast and we have set growth targets of over £5m to achieve in 2012.”
Scott Somenthal, who has joined Westcoast to head up its new UC team, added: “Westcoast is one of HP’s largest UK&I distributors, a Microsoft Gold distributor and Microsoft Gold Volume Licensing Partner. This enables Westcoast to offer a Microsoft Lync solution incorporating HP networking, Audiocodes and Aastra Telecom.
SHORT CALLS
Over 70 Mitel employees downed their razors last month in support Movember, the initiative that raises awareness of prostate cancer. The team’s efforts to grow a range of moustache styles from handlebars to walruses and Poirot-style specials were spear-headed by Graham Bevington, Mitel’s Executive Vice President for International Markets, and senior managers from across the international regions.
Scott Somenthal “This can all be demonstrat-
ed in Westcoast’s newly built Solutions Lab in Milton Keynes housing a fully live MS Lync environment.”
As well these developments,
Westcoast has formed a new partnership with Panasonic System Networks Europe (PSNE) to promote the vendor’s range of next generation inter- active whiteboards (IWB). David Daniels, AV Sales Manager at Westcoast, added: “This marks a significant change to our partnership with Panasonic which is one of our key vendors. “We are excited about add- ing to our portfolio of products and the partnership also gives us and the reseller complete prod- uct solutions from one vendor.”
SHORT CALLS
BT is to create more than 300 new customer advisor jobs at its Providence Place complex in West Bromwich, Sandwell. The new jobs have been made possible as a result of positive discussions between BT and the Communications Workers Union (CWU). These discussions have helped ensure the new jobs are permanent BT roles, rather than third party roles, and are based in the UK.
Avaya has launched an updated portfolio of future- ready Ethernet switches that bring the capabilities of its Virtual Enterprise Network Architecture (VENA) to the edge of the campus network. Additions to the Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch (ERS) 4000 portfolio help enterprises optimise networks and simplify the convergence of voice, video and data communications.
ScanSource has introduced vendor-agnostic free-of- charge training courses for reseller partners’ new sales recruits. The courses are scheduled on-demand by individual resellers under the topics Introduction to Telecommunications and Introduction to Data Communications.
Daisy secures key BT Wholesale deal
DAISY Group and BT Whole- sale have entered a strategic agreement involving the sup- ply of BT’s wholesale calls, Ethernet and broadband prod- ucts to Daisy’s customer base. The deal also sees a strength- ening of the existing partnership between Daisy’s ServAssure division and BT Group for the provision of maintenance and engineering services.
Daisy Group tendered its carrier pre-selection (CPS) traf- fic to six UK carriers earlier in the year. BT Wholesale was the
successful bidder and, after a period of migration, Daisy is to route the majority of its busi- ness customers’ voice services over the BT network.
As part of the new part- nership, Daisy, through its ServAssure division, will bec- ome the leading third party sup- plier of PBX related mainte- nance and engineering services to BT, although BT has stated that it will maintain relation- ships with other suppliers. This strengthened relation- ship will give Daisy a platform
to continue to build on its suc- cess with BT’s 21st Century Network (21CN) data portfolio. Matthew Riley, CEO, Daisy Group, said: “Daisy has a long standing relationship with BT and now, having grown, we have been able to build on this partnership to consolidate fur- ther our supply chain. “We are also pleased that our enhanced supplier relationship with BT recognises the hard work of our engineering teams throughout the UK, and that we can now add BT’s next gen-
eration broadband and Ethernet products to our data portfolio, boosting the quality of the offer- ing we can provide to our SME and mid market customers.” Nigel Stagg, who is the CEO
of BT Wholesale, commented on the agreement: “Deepening and extending our already strong supplier relationship will help Daisy to continue to grow and we look forward to working on new opportunities together.”
Got a news story? email:
sgilroy@bpl-business.com
12 COMMS DEALER DECEMBER 2011
www.comms-dealer.com
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