INDUSTRY NEWS COMMENT: CLOUD TALK David Ellis
BUILDING, managing and administering managed services is no mean feat, but with the right partner it can unlock new business opportunities and allow you to add value to your service offerings. With so many providers offering cloud services to the channel, decisions about which ones to choose can be confusing. If you are reviewing cloud services to include in your own
portfolio, here are a few basic issues to consider: 1. Do the services on offer meet a real customer needs? Try to consider how the services you pick will help your customers meet a specific business need. It’s better to offer must-have services than nice-to-haves. 2. Does the service provider have aggregation skills and resources? The ability to consolidate multiple services and support numbers into a single source is useful and more convenient for your customers. 3. When it comes to contracts and legal terms, what protection is there from your MSP? 4. What support is available and how is it delivered? You should know whether this is handled via the web, phone or email. If telephone support is offered, does a dedicated team in a NOC provide it? It’s also important to consider the security issues around support and change control by finding out how these are authenticated. 5. Where is data kept and how is it secured? Not only is it vital to look for an MSP that performs best practice security procedures, it’s important to understand where customer data will reside. 6. For some of the more specialised managed services such as managed firewalls or managed security gateways, what credentials does the MSP have in this area?
David Ellis, Director of New Technology & Services, Computerlinks
Firms lacking in flexibility
BUSINESSES are too slow to adopt the technology that will offset potential disruption caused by the Olympic Games this summer, according to a survey by Siemens Enterprise Communications which found that many organisations still lack the flexibility to adopt home working strategies. With an increasingly mobile workforce, organisations need to provide staff with more flexible working tools during such high profile events and beyond, espe- cially as travel congestion in Britain’s main cities intensifies year-on-year, claims Siemens. Despite advanced warn- ings of potential disruption to business productivity, 43% of respondents haven’t issued a flexible working policy or trav- el guidelines during the period of potential travel disruption. But the survey also found that flexible working is becom- ing common business practice with more than half of UK office-based employees spend- ing 60% of their time away from the office. However, even with this increase, 39% of employees surveyed only think they ‘some- times’ have the right tools for flexible working practices.
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A charity quiz night sponsored by Frontier Voice and Data aims to raise much needed cash for Haven House Children’s Hospice which cares for children and young people up to the age of 19 who have life-limiting conditions and who are unlikely to reach adulthood. The ‘Big Corporate Quiz Night’ is to be held at the exclusive Balls Brothers Minster Exchange bar in London on the 22nd of May 2012.
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The growing popularity of hosted telephony has sparked a surge in IP end point sales at Nimans. The distributor has seen demand for IP handsets such as Microsoft Lync optimised devices treble in the last 12 months. Monthly sales of Polycom devices in March were up 52% compared to 2011, fuelled by the company’s largest ever handset order.
David Lindley
David Lindley, UK head of service delivery and support at Siemens, said: “It is encourag- ing that our recent study strongly suggests that UK organisations are finally adopting increasingly flexible technology to support an agile workforce.
“By investing in many of
the collaborative tools, such as unified communications and enhancing customer responsive- ness, businesses can maintain the delivery of core business functions and responsibilities. “However, some business- es are not supporting staff in boosting their potential for more productive and flexible working with effective policies, training and technology.”
Entanet boosts capacity
ENTANET has upgraded the capacity of its northern ring to 10Gbps and announced a new colocation site that will be avail- able from the end of April. Steve Lalonde, Entanet’s
Chief Technical Officer, said: “We have already made some significant improvements to our network’s footprint this year. “In line with our forecasts we are seeing an increase in demand from businesses for higher capacity. Strengthening our northern ring capacity by 500% will ensure that we stay
ahead of future demand. We have also upgraded our peering at LONAP to 10Gbps to meet the anticipated demand that the Olympics may bring.”
Entanet has replaced ten 1Gbps wavelengths with five 10Gbps wavelengths between Manchester, Preston, Glasgow, Newcastle upon Tyne, Leeds and two sites in Edinburgh. Entanet already oper-
ates 10Gbps across London and between London and its Birmingham, Stoke and Manchester locations. The firm
announced a 10Gbps upgrade to its London-Midland-North ring in 2011, and is also expand- ing its datacentre footprint to accommodate demand for colo- cation services. “To expand Entanet’s coloc- ation footprint we will
be
introducing a new suite in the Equinix colocation centre in Slough to meet an increasing demand from customers and to add more diversity from our current locations in London and at our head office in Telford,” commented Lalonde.
#1 for Deals in the sector 14 COMMS DEALER MAY 2012
BT Retail has turned up the speed dial by introducing a range of speed increases at no extra cost. As of April 12th customers signing up to BT Infinity 2 benefited from double the downstream speed, up to 76Mbps rather than up to 38Mbps. BT Retail will also boost its BT Infinity 1 product by increasing the upstream speed fivefold from up to 1.9Mbps to up to 9.5Mbps.
JMC IT has played a key role in the merger of Manchester’s Harvest Housing Group and Liverpool’s Arena Housing Group, now known as Your Housing Group. The company successfully delivered a two-phase technology project as part of the merger after going head-to-head with five other companies for the initial £0.6m tender, which JMC IT later extended to a circa £2m project through a framework agreement.
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South West Comms Group has launched a range of cloud security solutions designed to protect SMEs from spam, email viruses and other web-based threats. John Holdstock, Director of ICT, said: “One in every 317 emails contains a virus and over 2,000 new websites containing viruses are created every day which have the ability to destroy a business’s network in an instant.”
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