Author: Nick Farrell

Total computers gets backing from Boxxe’s Phil Doye

Posted on November 24, 2022 by - News

Boxxe owner Phil Doye has announced that he has made a minority investment in Total Computers and will become a board member of the Kettering outfit.

Doye acquired Boxxe three-and-a-half years ago when it was known as SBL.  Before that he had built up and then flogged off Kelway to CDW.

In a statement, Doye stressed that he had known Total CEO Aidan Groom and CRO Kevin Goodall for “many years”.

“They have created a business that is uniquely positioned to help customers keep up with the pace of digital transformation and technological innovation.

Nokia and Inria tie in research deal

Posted on November 24, 2022 by - News

Nokia and Inria announced the renewal of their common research deal for the next four years.

The pair have been working together since 2008 having pooled permanent scientists from the two partners with a newly created pool of PhD and post-doctoral scientists, with the strategic aim to solve the key scientific challenges linked to the evolution of networks and network applications.

The focus of the joint research is on the benefits of network and distributed resources for contextual and personalised experiences in the digital connected world.

Highlight adds reporting to its SaaS platform

Posted on November 23, 2022 by - News

Highlight introduced a new Actionable Insights SaaS offering to its Service Assurance Platform.

The move will give managed service providers a tailored reporting environment to enable the fast production of interactive and graphical service reports.

Actionable Insights uses APIs to draw standardised network service data from the Highlight Service Assurance Platform and then visualise service performance metrics into multiple interactive dashboards.

Highlight Technical Account Manager Craig Smith said: “Customer service management reporting has traditionally been resource intensive. Successful managed network services rely on clear and open communication.  Actionable Insights enables service providers to quickly produce interactive, clear and visually pleasing service reports but without the resource-heavy process of manual collation and formatting.

VMware sees sales rise

Posted on November 23, 2022 by - News

VMware CEO Raghu Raghuram said the company’s sales met expectations this past quarter, rising one percent, aided by double-digit subscription revenue growth.

Raghuram said that in the past quarter the company unveiled many new offerings across our portfolio, including VMware vSphere 8, VMware vSAN 8 and VMware Aria.

“We remain committed to and engaged in helping customers transform their businesses and unlock the full potential of multi-cloud.”

Sales for its third quarter of fiscal year 2023 came in at $3.21 billion, up from $3.18 billion a year ago. Net income for the quarter, meanwhile was down 42 percent to $231 million from a year ago when it came in at $398 million.

VirtualDCS brings Jeniya Klimova onboard

Posted on November 23, 2022 by - Moving People, News

VirtualDCS has a new channel account executive.

IT backup, recovery and data management expert, Jeniya Klimova, who has spent the past five years working at global software company, Veeam, has joined the team at cloud computing and disaster recovery specialists, virtualDCS, as a channel account executive.

The company has changed its course to focus on providing infrastructure, backup and disaster recovery services which provide UK data sovereignty, to IT partners that want to offer cloud-based backup services to their clients and end-users.

VirtualDCS CloudCover services feature best of breed solutions from Veeam, which is the world leader in backup, recovery and data management solutions that deliver modern data protection.

Dell’s overall revenue fell

Posted on November 22, 2022 by - News

While Dell Technologies’ infrastructure business was celebrating its revenue numbers, its efforts were not enough to see the grey box shifter’s overall revenue for its third fiscal quarter to fall.

For its third fiscal quarter 2023, which ended October 28, Dell reported total revenue of $24.72 billion, which was down six percent compared to the $26.43 billion reported for its third fiscal quarter 2022.

The biggest impact to Dell’s fiscal third quarter 2023 came from a significant 17 percent drop in revenue for the company’s Client Solutions Group — which includes hardware desktop PCs, notebooks, 2-in-1s and thin clients, software, including end-point security, and peripherals, such as monitors, printers and projector — to $13.78 billion.

This included a 13 percent drop in commercial revenue to $10.75 billion, and a 29 percent drop in consumer revenue to $3.03 billion.

HP expected to announce muted results

Posted on November 22, 2022 by - News

Maker of expensive printer ink, HP, is expected to announce disappointing fourth quarter earnings results today after the markets closed.

The cocaine nose jobs of Wall Street have been consulting their tarot cards and concluded that HP will announce an EPS estimate of $0.84 ( down by 10.6 percent Y/Y) and a revenue of about $14.68 billion (down 12.1 percent Y/Y).

While those numbers are not too bad, HP has beaten EPS estimates 75 percent of the time and revenue estimates 38 per ent of the time.

Over the last three months, EPS estimates have seen no upward revisions and 15 downward. Revenue estimates have seen no upward revisions and 12 downward.

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Apple continues to snub channel at its own cost

Posted on November 22, 2022 by - News

While Apple claims to be trying to install serious hardware in corporations, it is hamstringing its own efforts by ignoring the channel.

On its fourth-quarter earnings call, Apple CFO Luca Maestri revealed that Apple’s enterprise business grew “strong double digits” in its fiscal 2022, picking out Cisco’s Mac programme as a case study for its progress here.

However senior director analyst at Gartner, Ranjit Atwal, said that Apple’s share in the enterprise PC market as “creeping up” and not becoming the market player that it believes.

Cisco lets staff go despite record profits

Posted on November 21, 2022 by - News

Cisco posted its largest quarterly revenue total in the company’s history during its first fiscal quarter of 2023, but still managed to lay off staff.

Cisco Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins said the tech giant saw an easing of supply chain constraints and component shortages during Q1 2023. This shift allowed Cisco to deliver hardware, which has released software subscriptions that “were sitting in backlog,” the company’s CEO said during the company’s first quarter 2023 earnings call.

But despite a positive start to the fiscal year, Robbins took to the earnings call to confirm plans to fire staff including members of Cisco’s Collaboration segment. Employees will be notified on Thursday of the coming job cuts, Robbins said.

IT distribution growing says Context

Posted on November 21, 2022 by - News

IT distribution outfits expect to see decent growth as the year winds up, but there are signs that negative economic conditions will have an impact going into 2023.

Beancounters at Context have added up some numbers and divided them by their shoe size and concluded that the industry faces economic headwinds, including high inflation, exchange rate fluctuations and the cost of living crisis.

Context said that the channel is still feeling optimistic and expects there should be 3.7 percent year-on-year growth in 2022.

The numbers are better than had been expected when Context looked at prospects for this year back at the start of 2021, when it predicted 3.2 percent growth. The analyst firm is expecting a strong finish to the year, but has then talked of market conditions “softening” moving into 2023.

Driscoll exits Nuvias after sale

Posted on November 21, 2022 by - Moving People, News

Lee Driscoll has said he is leaving Nuvias following its sale to private equity-backed peer Infinigate.

He joined Nuvias in 2015 via its acquisition of Zycko, shortly after Rigby Private Equity founded Nuvias.

His 30-year career in the channel also includes stints at the Rigbys’ previous distribution ventures, including ETC and SDG.

Nuvias announced the sale of most of its business to Switzerland-based peer Infinigate in July.

Driscoll feels that it is the right time to take a break from the industry.

IGEL gives up on thin clients

Posted on November 18, 2022 by - News

Thin client player IGEL has told its partners and customers that it is giving up making thin client hardware in March next year and will move to software offerings and hardware from its partners.

The company said that its chums Lenovo, HP and LG will give partners access to nine different thin client offerings and the firm has also developed partnerships with software players, including Microsoft, Citrix and VMware too.

Simon Townsend, IGEL’s field chief technology officer for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), said it had kept partners in the loop as it had been winding down its hardware operation so the development would not come as a surprise to its channel.

European IT distributors in 2022 will still see growth

Posted on November 18, 2022 by - News

IT market researcher Context thinks that revenue growth for European IT distributors in 2022 will be 3.7 percent against the previous year.

Context claims the data is “even more significant” after two years of high growth during the pandemic and a miserable IMF GDP forecast which recently downgraded global growth from 4.4 percent to 3.2 percent for 2022.

Excluding telecoms, Context predicts 5.8 percent growth in Q4 2022, followed by a softening in successive quarters brought about by the recession and reduced backlogs.

The analyst firm explained its forecast is based on strengthening infrastructure and software and services, driven by business demand across servers, networking and storage.

Advertisers losing billions to bots

Posted on November 18, 2022 by - News

Polygraph is warning advertisers about an internet scam which is stealing tens of billions of dollars every year.

The outfit’s marketing boss said that click fraud had become a billion dollar crime

“Advertisers are paying advertising networks to display their ads across the internet. Little do they realise that many of the ‘people’ clicking on the ads are bots.”

According to Vanes, criminals are using bots as they can accurately simulate a real person clicking on an advertisement.

End of Story at Civica

Posted on November 17, 2022 by - Moving People, News

Public sector software supplier Civica has announced that its CEO Wayne Story will formally retire on 31 December.

He will be succeeded by Lee Perkins who will take become the new group CEO.

Civica founder and group chair, Simon Downing said that during his tenure, Story expanded Civica’s global reach and increased software product capability while retaining the company’s culture and values.

“His leadership in successfully navigating us all through an unprecedented global pandemic – providing calm and clear direction and a reassuring ‘voice’ in uncertain times has left the business in such a strong position.”