We’re taking a break over the Yuletide season and will be back on the scene with the channel machine in early January 2021.
Have a great time over the holiday season and, hopefully, 2021 will be a lot brighter than the more than dreadful 2020.
Dubber snaps up Speik
Aussie based Dubber which does Unified Call Recording & Voice Intelligence has snapped up Speik a UK-based provider of call recording and PCI Compliance solutions.
THe move is part of Dubber’s cunning plan of putting AI on every phone, transforming voice data into a source of value for Enterprises and Governments globally.
Speik was formed in 2019 through a merger of Aeriandi and Voxygen. Voxygen had been supplying a hardware-based recording platform to Telefonica and Aeriandi had been providing PCI compliance solutions in conjunction with leading UK service providers including Vodafone and Gamma. Speik is headquartered in Oxford and has 38 employees in the UK and Europe.
LGC buys Safefood 360°
LGC announced the acquisition of Safefood 360°, a suppljer of food safety and supplier management solutions platform.
The acquisition expands LGC’s supply chain assurance offering which includes BRCGS’ leading certification scheme, Informed Sport and Informed Choice nutritional supplement endorsement marks and AXIO Proficiency Testing.
Safefood 360° supports compliance with major food safety and supplier management requirements globally and offers users the opportunity to manage quality-reporting, workflow, documentation and audit requirements effectively and efficiently, as well as driving continuous improvement in operations.
Ian Kilpatrick exits Novias
Ian Kilpatrick has departed Nuvias and set up a new venture designed to encourage children into STEM careers.
Kilpatrick co-founded Wick Hill in 1978 before it was flogged to Rigby Group as a $150m-revenue cybersecurity VAD in 2015.
His next venture is designed to encourage young people into STEM careers, with a focus on primary schools and particularly getting more girls and minorities involved in science and engineering.
The business is called STEM Generations and will sell workstations into primary and secondary schools to encourage adoption of STEM learning into curriculums, where Kilpatrick says where investigative science has lagged since it was removed from SATs in 2009
Cognizant buys AI specialist Inawisdom
AWS AI expert Inawisdom has been snapped up as part of Cognizant’s $1 billion 2020 acquisition drive.
Ipswich-based AWS Premier Consulting partner Inawisdom was founded in 2016 and been growing like crazy. It saw revenue rocket to £9.5 million in its fiscal year to 30 September 2020.
Cognizant said it will fuse Inawisdom with Contino, another company in its Digital Business group, to provide end-to-end cloud-native AI and machine learning solutions. It acquired London-based Contino in 2019.
Expect everything by subscription
The decoupling of hardware and software is going to drive a move towards subscriptions according to Dave Locke, chief technology adviser at WWT.
Locke said that the divorce of hardware and software is breaking down traditional upgrade cycles and allowing for businesses to make more flexible investments in commoditised hardware, choosing the right tools for their needs.
He said that the trend of ‘whitebox hardware’ will drive demand for software subscription services throughout 2021.
Snowplow hires Tessian’s Sapru
Tessian’s former CRO has been hired by the London-based analytics firm Snowplow to take advantage of what it says is its 2020 booming sales.
Abhirukt Sapru will be the outfit’s Vice President of Sales, as the behavioural data management platform provider looks to build on its strong 2020 growth.
While at Tessian, Sapru was the Chief Revenue Officer, Head of Business Development and Head of EMEA/APAC.
Snowplow said that Sapru will lead the Snowplow team in establishing and driving its global “go-to-market” strategy to provide global data teams with the capabilities to collect and “operationalise behavioural data at scale”, if that makes sense.
Sharp encourages its channel into IT services
Sharp Business Systems is now encouraging its channel to take more IT services and support out to market as it plans a wider expansion in the UK.
The company has been chatting to its senior partner channel to push IT services so that they can make new offerings based around the outfits’ collaboration visual solutions.
The business ramped up its marketing activity back in September to reach out to SMEs to stress that it is now talking about much more than print.
The company said the plan was working really well and customers are signing and asking it to do business to help them.
Avaya announces COVID-19 vaccine solutions
Avaya has announced a suite of digital communications solutions to address the unique challenges related to COVID-19 vaccine administration.
The company said the solutions are designed specifically for healthcare providers and government agencies and can be applied on top of any existing infrastructure to assist with the critical requirements of successful administration of the vaccine.
Avaya OneCloud CPaaS includes HIPAA-compliant innovation that has been on the front lines of COVID-19 response, used by healthcare providers and government agencies for Contact Tracing, responding to high volumes of medical inquiries, and rapid notification services, for example.
Ecwid sees huge EU growth
Global software-as-a-service (SaaS) e-commerce outfit Ecwid said that its new signups across the European Union grew by 143 percent in the first half of the year and regional transaction volume increased by 150 percent compared to last year.
Ecwid announced partnerships with key European payments providers, including: Giropay, SOFORT, iDeal, SEPA, Klarna, and PayPal Plus. Ecwid has seen tremendous growth over the last several months in the region, along with similar growth in North America, fortifying its position as a category leader.
KCOM partners with Giacom
KCOM has joined forces with Giacom to create a UK Microsoft provider “powerhouse”.
Hull-based KCOM and Hessle-based cloud services outfit Giacom say their new partnership signals the creation of a Microsoft powerhouse that will let firms across the region access the IT giant’s cloud based products and services more easily than ever before.
This partnership boosts the cloud application engineering capability that KCOM already offers its large enterprise and public sector customers through its national business.
Channel players might not be in a strong position
Next year could see a big shake-up for the channel with many players waking up and finding they were not in as strong a position as they thought, warns island VP Sales EMEA Johnny Carpenter.
Carpenter said that while employees will go back into offices to some degree next year, organisations will start to build everything around a remote site infrastructure and working practice. Many were caught unawares by the current pandemic and so will be keen to ensure they are in a position to implement working from home plan as and when needed.
However, the biggest change will concern channel partners as he thinks a lot of them are now going to have to move into a world where they weren’t necessarily well-positioned before.
“Traditionally, partners were trusted by the end customer, particularly as an MSP, as they would sell the customer servers and local software and would manage it. However, organisations are now understanding their own capabilities and are questioning MSPs on how they can be more agile”, he said.
Global Efficiency Group launches
A new alliance of information management technology suppliers has launched today with six key companies signing up.
The Global Efficiency Group (TGE Group) brings together six leading specialists in information and document lifecycle management, to offer tailor-made solutions to some of the largest international professional services firms and big corporates across the globe, based on a uniform framework for project execution and collaboration. Collectively, TGE Group represents one of the largest and most experienced pool of iManage resources available globally, enabling a unified approach to meet ongoing global demand for the iManage Work Productivity Platform.
Members include Ascertus in the UK and mainland Europe; Office Information Australia (OIA), covering the Asia Pacific region; Eficio, with a presence in Canada and France; Lexsoft covering Spain and Latin America; Ounet Sistemi, based in Italy; and Co-Operative Computing in South Africa.
Counterfeit and illicit trade are pervasive warns report
The Alliance for Gray Market and Counterfeit Abatement (AGMA), a non-profit organisation focused on intellectual property (IP) protection for the high-tech industry is warning that the counterfeit and illicit market in It is getting out of hand.
The Alliance has issued a report titled, “Brand Protection Insights from Industry Leaders in Grey Market, Counterfeit and IP Fraud Mitigation”, which spotlights the trends and challenges related to counterfeit, fraud, grey market risk and prevention, and supply chain security that are impacting the high-tech sector.
The report notes that E-commerce has been on a rapid growth trajectory, providing a large conduit for fraud. Fraudsters are savvier, sharing information among each other and producing counterfeit at an accelerated pace. Brand protection programs are being impacted in ways they never imagined, with increasing scope and scale. Mitigating counterfeits, reducing channel grey market and preventing various fraud are more crucial to brand survival than ever.
Virgin survey reveals problems in legacy networks
Virgin Media Business Wholesale has released the findings of a survey that indicate legacy networks have been one of the problems faced by customers when dealing with the coronavirus, and more flexibility will be needed as they start to recover from the pandemic.
The Virgin Media Business Wholesale survey revealed that one-third of senior IT managers viewed their channel partner relationships as purely transactional.
A similar number said they felt their channel supplier lacked the knowledge and expertise to guide them through their networking challenges and 27 per cent said their partner did not have the right technological solutions to meet their current demands.
The research found that almost half of the CIOs quizzed were finding it difficult to support remote working with their existing infrastructure, and the same volume were struggling to meet customer demand. There was a reluctance to upgrade networks, with less than a quarter viewing it as a priority.
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