Cisco has been showing off a new pack of “lighter-weight specialisations” designed to match customers’ changing buying habits.
The networking king claims the new products will enhance partners’ ability to deliver more comprehensive solutions and help its channel to battle the ongoing backlog of business.
Cisco said that it began rolling out the new solution specialisations in September and noted that cross-architectural solutions were in high demand, particularly among cross architects.
Lumen and Colt Technology have entered into an exclusive arrangement for the proposed sale of Lumen’s Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) business to Colt for $1.8 billion.
The envisaged transaction involves Lumen flogging its EMEA business, including its terrestrial and subsea networks, data centres and network equipment to London-headquartered Colt.
When the dust has settled Lumen will invest in core businesses that are expected to drive long-term, profitable growth.
Lumen President and CEO Jeff Storey, said: “This transaction would enhance our focus so we can invest more efficiently in our most strategic opportunities – our key Enterprise and Quantum Fiber initiatives – and partner with regional leaders like Colt in Europe and Cirion in Latin America to continue serving our multinational enterprise customers.”
Channel outfit Highgate IT has made its four-day working week trial permanent.
The company trialled the idea in April and has decided to make it a permanent feature after a successful six months.
IT found that service levels remained consistent, productivity increased and targets were hit or over-achieved.
Highgate managing director Stuart Marginson said that companies needed to find a balance between the wellbeing of employees and the success.
“We wanted to support our employees and ensure the right resource was available across the business. By not doing so, we risked overloading our employees, which could hurt their well-being and undo the positives that the four-day week brings.
CompTIA’s CEO Todd Thibodeaux has warned that the IT industry is no longer attractive to the kids of today.
He noted that the industry is only the fifth most desirable career globally, coming in behind sales, hospitality, healthcare and general business roles.
Speaking to the gathered throngs at the organisation’s 2022 EMEA Member and Partner Conference in London Thibodeaux said that there were about 10 million working age people out there looking for new job opportunities.
However, they were spurning the IT industry as if it were a rabid dog. They believe a tech career takes longer to train for, is harder to understand and is more expensive to learn than other more desirable careers.
AMD reported third-quarter 2022 results showing net income falling 93 percent to $66 million and a year-over-year operating loss of $64 million.
The company said it would take cost-cutting measures, including controlling headcount growth.
AMD’s executive vice president, chief financial officer and treasurer Devinder Kumar said: “We will prioritise the key investments for product roadmaps and long-term growth while taking several near-term cost management actions, including prudently controlling operating expenses and headcount growth, while actively managing inventory in line with our revenue expectations.”
Ingram Micro’s sales director Gary Lomas, is exiting the business and joining global integrator Onnec.
Lomas started at the distributor in 2020 and spent seven years at value-added reseller Logicalis in various sales director roles before joining the Ingram Micro company.
“I would like to thank Ingram Micro, Comms-care, Matthew Sanderson and Simon Day for giving me a chance to work for such a fantastic company for the last 2.5 years, which is full of so many talented people.”
Kevin Sparks, chief growth officer at Onnec, added: “We are delighted to welcome Gary to the team, with many years of experience within the IT industry this will be invaluable in what promises to be an exciting year for our company as we continue to help our customers with large scale build and IT transformation projects across the globe.”
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said the weaker global economy has the chance to prove the need of public cloud.
For those who came in late, Public cloud allows Microsoft customers to control ramping up and ramping down based on demand, which could also help customers with growing energy costs, it is claimed.
“The thing, though, from a customer perspective – the best way for them to align their spend with what is uncertain demand is to move to the cloud”, Nadella said.
“So we see the value prop of the cloud. So the big winner in all of this will be public cloud because public cloud helps businesses offset the risk of demand risk.”
Azure Arc has more than 8,500 customers, more than double a year ago, Nadella said. Azure Machine Learning revenue has increased more than 100 percent for the last four quarters.
A recent study from Juniper Research has found that the total number of calls handled by Contact Centres-as-a-Service platforms will be nearly 48 billion by 2027 — an increase from 20 billion in 2022.
This growth of 135 percent will be driven by leveraging 5G networks to implement advanced voice technologies including 5G-interactive calling and Artificial Intelligence-Interactive Voice Response.
CCaaS provides cloud-based contact centre infrastructure hosted by third-party service providers. It enables on-premises contact centres to use cloud-based infrastructures to service multiple technology channels.
Pax8 has opened a new office at The Distillery in Bristol, making a ‘multimillion-pound’ bet that working from home think less of it if they get the chance to work from a distillery.
Founder and CEO John Street touted Bristol as one of the nation’s “top tech hubs”.
Street said the Colorado-HQ distributor hopes the opening of its new Bristol office yesterday will help ‘propel significant growth’ in its UK business.
“It’s such an exciting time for Pax8 as we continue to expand across EMEA,” he said.
Softcat’s next CEO says that the business is continuing its sustainability efforts.
Graham Charlton was chosen as the channel player’s next CEO when Graeme Watt moves into the chairman role next August.
Charlton said that Softcat had continued to drive its sustainability initiatives and was determined to keep pushing for higher standards.
“We are putting a lot of time and resource into tackling this at all levels to how we report progress, but also how we understand scope three emissions – they’re not fit for purpose at the moment, and they’ve got to evolve if we’re going to get this right together,” he said.
Westcoast has created some legroom for growth by merging with German counterpart KOMSA.
The Reading-based distributor said the move would hand it access to the German market and boost its prowess in the unified comms market.
Westcoast will take over the shares from KOMSA’s founders and KOMSA chairperson Kerstin Grosse said that it was “the biggest step in the company’s history”.
The merger creates an outfit with revenues of more than €5.5 billion, 2,200 employees and brings together more than 400 technology partners with 30,000 retail partners.
Centerprise International has extended its Caerphilly premises to expand its PC building and configuration services.
The 70,000 sq ft IT operational facility costs £6 million and will add “significant production capacity” for PC building and configuration services, the Basingstoke-headquartered outfit said.
Centerprise employs 40 staff in the region. The new facility extends its 50,000 sq ft hub.
Vendors need to embrace refurbished products according to Canalys chief analyst Alastair Edwards.
While many vendors want punters to splash out on the latest and greatest hardware, if they are really serious about circular economies they are going to have to be more serious about refurbishing existing gear.
“Vendors are claiming their commitments to circular economies and to reducing waste in the supply chain, but all of you in the vendor community are still paid on selling new products, and this creates a fundamental contradiction”, he said.
“As a result, we see vendors holding back the ability of channel partners to sell refurbished and second-hand IT products by not recognising those products in compensation schemes and targets. This is creating immense frustration for the channel.”
“We see many of you channel partners that want to do this, and your customers are asking for it.”
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) has released its first Confidential Compute solution powered by AMD EPYC processors to its partners.
Oracle claims the product allows customers to enable Confidential VMs with the help of AMD Infinity Guard and AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) and Secure Memory Encryption (SME).
These features take advantage of security components available in 2nd and 3rd generation AMD EPYC processors available in all OCI’s E3 and E4 shapes.
Beancounters at Gartner have said that enterprise IT spending is “recession-proof” and predicted that next year’s 2023 global IT spend will be 5.1 percent more.
Big G noted that inflation has cut into consumer purchasing power, business IT spending will rise next year with more than 69 per cent of CFOs planning to increase their spend on digital technologies.
Gartner VP analyst John Lovelock said: “”Enterprise IT spending is recession-proof as CEOs and CFOs, rather than cutting IT budgets, are increasing spending on digital business initiatives.
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