Author: Nick Farrell

Record highs in Europe’s technology and business services market

Posted on November 2, 2021 by - News

Europe’s technology and business services market reached a record high in the third quarter, paced by surging demand for cloud-based services, even as spending on managed services slowed for the third straight quarter, according to an ISG report.

ISG is forecasting the market for cloud-based services (IaaS and SaaS) will grow 25 percent globally in 2021, up from its 21 percent growth forecast last quarter. The firm also is raising its forecast for managed services growth to 10.1 percent, up from its prior forecast of nine percent.

Belfast City Airport halves IT costs with Nutanix

Posted on November 1, 2021 by - News, Products

Nutanix claims that George Best Belfast City Airport has halved IT operational costs in the data centre as well as enhanced performance, security and availability to cope with rapidly escalating post-Covid business demand by migrating its legacy IT infrastructure to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.

With the job of enhancing the airport’s IT services to cope with growth whilst, at the same time, cutting escalating costs, newly appointed Director of Information Technology Brian Roche realised the need for a lot more than a simple hardware upgrade.

Roche said: “It wasn’t just a matter of replacing the infrastructure we needed to move away from the existing managed service model as it was no longer delivering value for money. We also identified significant opportunities to enhance our backup and disaster recovery processes.”

Bytes sees profits grow

Posted on November 1, 2021 by - News

Bytes Software Services saw its profits and sales rise due to strong demand for security, cloud adoption and remote working solutions in the first half of the year.

Gross invoiced income rose 26.3 percent year-on-year for the six months ending 31 August 2021 to reach £638.2 million, while revenue, which is adjusted for IFRS and stated after the netting adjustment for cloud and critical security license sales, grew 13.7 percent year-on-year to £251.4 million.

Adjusted operating profit, meanwhile, grew 22 per cent to £25 million and adjusted earnings per share rose 17.9 percent to 8.48.

Tech Data launches new Amazon programme

Posted on November 1, 2021 by - News, Products

Tech Data has launched an AWS Trusted Partner Programme (TPP) to enable its AWS resellers to fast track their progress.

The outfit said that resellers who join the programme will be recognised with official Tech Data AWS Trusted Partner status and will access additional resources, expertise and bespoke business growth planning.

The company said that the programme is aimed at partners who have already made a clear strategic commitment to invest in and grow their AWS business. Invited partners will complete a Tech Data cloud maturity assessment, which provides insight into the current capabilities and future AWS growth objectives. Tech Data’s expert, in-house AWS team will use the information gathered in this assessment to create a tailored growth path for each participating partner business.

Risk Ledger scores £2.1 million in seed funding

Posted on October 29, 2021 by - News

Cyber security company Risk Ledger has today raised £2.1 million in seed funding.

The funding round was led by Finnish VC Lifeline Ventures with participation from Seedcamp, Firstminute Capital, Episode 1 and Village Global.

The company has been attracting the interest of new customers including the NHS Test and Trace, wealth management giant Quilter, and tech unicorn Snyk and others.

Haydn Brooks, founder and CEO at Risk Ledger commented: “The past 18 months have been a period of rapid growth in the company. We grew our client base and our user numbers have sky-rocketed despite the significant economic disruption caused by the pandemic. We have expanded the product into non-cyber security factors, including ESG and financial supply chain risks. Testament to the wider scope of the platform, we are now engaging procurement leaders in companies as well as their information security counterparts. This investment will help us grow our team and operations to fully capitalise on the heightened focus on supply chain security driven by all the new regulations and high-profile breaches.”

Companies have different ransomware risks

Posted on October 29, 2021 by - News

A report from Osirium Technologies shows that companies have different ransomware attack risks particularly when businesses depend on outsourced IT.

The Osirium Ransomware Index suggests that while some companies have unavoidable attacks, others have good security but could still be at risk of an attack by proxy – via their supply chain.

Of the 1001 UK IT managers surveyed for the research, 77 percent expressed a growing concern that despite their company having a good protection system in place.

Just over half thought that while some attacks are avoidable, others aren’t – which underlines the opportunities for vendors and channel partners to assist customers in identifying and understanding where the very real ransomware threats lie and supporting them in protecting their businesses accordingly.

Across the respondents surveyed, 39 percent estimated it would take a week for their business to recover from a cyberattack – with 47 per cent admitting it could take a month or more. 

Arrow hits the Circle

Posted on October 29, 2021 by - News

Arrow Business Communications has acquired IT consultancy and solutions provider Circle Group – the VAR’s fifth acquisition so far this year. Yes, M&As are them.

Circle made £25 million in annual revenues after getting is paws on Fabric IT earlier this year. It offers services in areas including managed IT support, Microsoft Cloud and cybersecurity.

Arrow which was somewhat proud of its £50 million war chest for acquisitions from private equity firm MML Capital Partners at the start of this year, has also bought collaboration solutions provider Pescado, cloud MSP AIMES, SD WAN service provider UK-tec and networking business Complete Networks this year.

Arrow Business Communications CEO Richard Burke said: “I believe this acquisition completes Arrow’s solution portfolio and ensures we continue to provide relevant solutions across our three customer demographics of enterprise, public sector and mid-market.

HelpSystems snaps up Digital Guardian

Posted on October 28, 2021 by - News

More M&A! HelpSystems today announced the acquisition of Digital Guardian, an SaaS provider of data loss prevention (DLP) solutions for large and mid-sized organisations.

The team and solutions from Digital Guardian will be incorporated into HelpSystems’ data security portfolio, and combine with powerful security solutions such as GoAnywhere, Clearswift, Agari, and Titus.

Helpsystems said that in addition to extending its DLP capability, this acquisition further improves the company’s ability to categorise, or classify, data and protect it across a wide set of applications and operating systems.

HelpSystems CEO Kate Bolseth said the companies’ global customers look to it to provide them with powerful solutions and services to support all of their cybersecurity needs, and the data protection expertise the Digital Guardian team brings to HelpSystems is second to none.

CDW buys Sirius Computer Solutions

Posted on October 28, 2021 by - News

It’s M&A time again! IT solutions provider CDW has announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to buy Sirius Computer Solutions for $2.5 billion.

CDW says the takeover, which is expected to close in December, will “significantly accelerate” its services and solutions capabilities, as well as enhance its ability to solve customers’ “increasingly interconnected and complex technology challenges”.

For those who came in late, Sirius specialises in providing secure, mission-critical technology-based solutions to around 3,900 large and mid-sized customers.

The company generated net sales of $2.04 billion in 2020, which it attributes to a service-led approach, broad portfolio of hybrid infrastructure solutions and staff expertise.

Synaxon UK reshuffles

Posted on October 28, 2021 by - Moving People, News

Synaxon UK has brought in Peter Mulvihill as Category Manager and Jane Haack as Key Account Manager, in a bit of a reshuffle to encourage growth.

Mulvihill will be responsible for managing Synaxon UK’s growing vendor and distributor portfolio, which includes major names such as Lenovo, Microsoft, HP, Dell, and APC. He brings two decades of experience working in distribution and reseller procurement and joins the channel services group from PC gaming systems specialist, Overclockers, where he spent the last three years as Purchasing Manager.

Haack will be responsible for liaising with Synaxon UK’s partners and recruiting and enabling additional partners for EGIS – Synaxon’s online procurement platform, Synaxon Distribution, Synaxon Managed Services (SMS), and the EGIS eCom e-commerce platform. She has previously worked in sales roles at managed services specialist Datto, and web content management provider, Altis.

UK spooks look to the cloud to boost AI

Posted on October 27, 2021 by - News

The UK’s spooks are working with Amazon to boost the use AI, using cloud analytics and other technologies

GCHQ has signed a deal with AWS that will see the agency’s most classified material stored in a high-security cloud system.

The deal is worth up to £1 billion. It will let GCHQ, MI5, and MI6 – the UK’s three spy agencies – to use AWS’ cloud to boost the use of AI, data analytics, speech recognition and other technologies for espionage.

British agents can share information from overseas more easily and carry out faster searches on each other’s databases.

Softcat sees profits and sales rise

Posted on October 27, 2021 by - News

UK reseller giant Softcat saw its sales and profits rise over the past year.

CEO Graeme Watt said revenue for the 12 months ending 31 July 2021 stood at £1.16 billion, an increase of 7.4 percent, while gross invoiced income stood at £1.94 billion which was up 17.7 percent from the prior year.

Gross profit rose 17.2 percent to reach £276 million while operating profit increased by 27.4 percent to £119 million.

Watt identified “strong public sector demand” and “further recovery in the corporate sector” as two factors which were behind the growth of the business over the past year but said the company is in a good position across all sectors.

He thought the figures were related to the fact that companies are returning to some level of normality in terms of the way they trade and the way they behave with parties.

Remote workers are a big security threat – shokka

Posted on October 27, 2021 by - News

A recent survey of UK cyber security, IT and business professionals commissioned by WatchGuard Technologies has come up with the surprising statistic that 75 percent of respondents believe that remote workers pose a greater IT security risk to their business than office workers.

We say surprising, in that while 75 percent is a big figure, it is what has been said for ages. What is more surprising is that 25 percent don’t see it as a threat even though it has been said for ages.

The report said that 83 percent of respondents feel that cyber-attacks on their business will increase over the next 12 months.

When it comes to identifying specific threats, phishing attacks are still at the top of the list, followed closely by ransomware. Over half of the organisations polled said that they had experienced an end-point attack targeted at end-user computers and mobile devices over the last 12 months.

Irish Xperience bags a green duck

Posted on October 26, 2021 by - News

Northern Irish MSP Xperience has acquired East of England based Green Duck, an MSP which offers cloud, cybersecurity and other managed IT services.

Xperience’s MD Iain O’Kane said the outfit wanted to make at least three acquisitions as part of a plan to expand in the UK and double its revenues over the next three years.

The Green Duck acquisition will “combine two businesses with a common focus on delivering the best digital transformation solutions for companies across the UK” along with synergies such as hoisin sauce and pancakes (we made the last two up).

O’Kane said: “Growth across the UK is a strategic priority and Green Duck was a natural fit for our business with a similar culture and values.

Black Box and Avaya expand European partnership

Posted on October 26, 2021 by - News

Black Box and Avaya have expanded their partnership to Europe to offer Black Box client’s enterprise-wide unified communications and cloud-based collaboration solutions built on Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral.

This makes Black Box an Avaya Cloud Office-certified partner in Europe and a strategic partner for Avaya OneCloud UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) and OneCloud CCaaS (Contact Center as a Service) solutions around the world.

Avaya UK&I senior channel director Ali Hastings said that it was thrilling to have Black Box as an agent for Avaya Cloud Office and as an Avaya partner in the UK and Europe.

“The extensive customer base that Black Box has across the market will help us accelerate the adoption of Avaya Cloud Office across Europe at a time when unified communications are becoming more important by the day.”