COMMS PEOPLE Big charity bike ride BARNARD
THE Prince’s Trust received a £1,300 cash boost thanks to the sterling efforts of Neil Williamson, Sales Manager at Chess, who cycled the full length of Britain in aid of the charity. Williamson was part of a group of 14 north-west cyclists raising money for various charities ranging from Christie’s to the East Cheshire Hospice. During the 10-day 1,000 mile bike ride from
Neil Williamson Also on the move...
POWERNET has appointed Denise Drew as Channel Manager for its ViBE product. She replaces Mark Williams who is now Product
Denise Drew
Development Manager for the firm. Formerly a Director and original share holder of Crane Telecommunications, Drew has much experience in
building a reseller channel. “One of the reasons I joined Powernet was the instant feeling of belonging to a family of people who cared for each other and their customers, reminiscent of my days with Crane,” said Drew.
Wes Lomax
WES Lomax has been appointed Head of IT at Bolton-based Digicomm BCS. Lomax, who is a Microsoft Certified Solutions Expert, was an engineer with the RAF for nine years where he serviced all of the MOD servers. As
an IT and avionics engineer Lomax has travelled around the globe including Bahrain, Ascension Island and the Falklands. As the avionics engineer for the TriStar aircraft, Lomax looked after the servicing of its RADAR, autopilot, communications and defence systems.
Land’s End to John o’ Groats the group managed to conquer the hilly terrain of Cornwall, Devon, the Lake District and the Scottish Highlands on their way to the furthest point on mainland Britain. Commenting on his achievement, Williamson stated: “It’s been fantastic to represent and raise money for such a worthy cause. Handing over a cheque worth over £1,300 to the Prince’s Trust made all the pain and sacrifice it took to complete the ride worth while. I would also like to thank everyone at Chess for their support and donations, all of which helped to spur me on and made me dig deeper.”
Wiles to lead APSL channel
APSL has expanded its sales team with the
appointment of Rob Wiles as Head of Channel. The move signals an attempt by APSL to grow its channel business. Wiles has 15-plus years of channel experience
...and finally
BIG BROTHER? Don’t we love compliance regulations when they lead to sales? Call logging, call recording, mobile recording, voice encryption, think FSA compliance, think call centre monitoring upon hardware software installation training and ongoing support contracts, we drool. No wonder the magnificent James Emm is always in a white tux, he’s the savior of us all, a saint!
But store every call, text, every email, every search for how long, two or seven years?! Don’t these civil servants know anything about technology? Have they not heard of hide my IP and the like? For the older readers hide my IP is like hide my wife only less fun. When will the networks stand up to these lunatics? After all, the networks want customers to be known, seen, felt. They want to bill them for services as do content providers. Driving people away from legitimate browsing and shopping will harm everyone and help none.
Generation Y: The rage in presentations at Comms Vision 2011 was Generation Y. No we had not strayed into DNA testing or the gender question (although the latter was raised later in the bar). These Y’ers, are the under 35’s who text, MMS, prod, poke, tweet and blog, who email, upload, share and lastly of course, sometimes make a call. They of course BTOD (the cleverer ones BYOD) to work and expect full access to you client list and payroll don’t they, on their little tablets the darlings.
Rob Wiles
under his belt including a stint at ShoreTel UK where he was Area Sales Manager responsible for growing the north channel by more than 500 per cent in two years. Prior to this he was Distribution Account Manager at Avaya, responsible for over £10 million revenue and the launch of enterprise portfolios into Nimans and ScanSource. Wiles has also worked as Channel Account Manager for Crane Telecom and on New Business Sales for Siemens Communications. He said: “Current market conditions are making
if difficult for the unified communications channel to invest in engineering skill sets. APSL is able to fill that gap but also enable partners to expand into different product areas. This, in my opinion, is a perfect storm for the professional services world.”
Well, forgive the last sentence you can imagine where I stand on that point. But at last we are seeing some real proof these trend pronouncements are coming true. SMS and mail traffic is up. Calls, both on fixed and mobile networks are down but still at 250 billion minutes pa. The numbers make interesting reading. Make no mistake, for over a decade I have been hearing that voice is dead. Well, maybe it’s ex-growth but it’s certainly not dead; and all the data in the world doesn’t amount to much in revenue or margin does it now? 50 per cent to 80 per cent of revenue is still voice on many networks. One hears the MNO’s struggle on with 3G pricing and investment and now they have 4G LTE galloping over the horizon.
And Finally, voice is dead, long live Voice! You thought it was all over didn’t you? But lo, behold the canny Scot! Gamma are announcing the return of the buy back, proving the French got one thing right, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Champagne? The first winner of champagne is Steve Burges, lately of Edge into Spiritel into Daisy into Monte Carlo who provided a stimulating note on smartphones and the opportunity in security therein. Another bottle awaits, so do mail gossip, the best story or comment to
andfinally@modcomms.com
Adrian Barnard is Managing Director of London based Modern Communications, a provider of converged business communications services.
54 COMMS DEALER AUGUST 2012
www.comms-dealer.com
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