Category: News

Two tier model still the best way

Posted on October 16, 2020 by - News

The classic two-tier model, where the skills and assets of distributors and resellers are used, is still best way for vendors to get higher returns from their go-to-market strategy according to research from the Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC).

The industry organisation has issued its latest “Distribution’s edge: An economic analysis of routes to market for ICT products and services report” which contrasts benefits of going direct, using a single-tier model, or opting for a two-tier go-to-market strategy.

The report made the point that choosing to go direct – something startups often do to try to keep control of the sales process – was more expensive and limiting than working with distribution, which could reach customers via a wide network of resellers.

Those choosing to operate direct also faced high selling, general and administrative (SG&A) costs, limits to scaling caused by staffing levels and challenges getting to small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers, it said.

Contact centre industry suffering

Posted on October 16, 2020 by - News

With the COVID-19 pandemic posing steep challenges to the contact center industry worldwide this year, providers are facing additional uncertainties in Europe and the UK amid the looming no-deal Brexit and changes to UK regulations affecting temporary workers, according to a new report ISG report.

The report with the punchy title “2020 ISG Provider Lens Contact Centre  – Customer Experience Services report for Europe and the UK” found trade and labour issues remained high on the industry’s agenda even as the pandemic brought rapid changes in consumer behaviour.

Reforms to the UK’s IR35 regulations, which limit the role of temporary worker, came as a blow to many public- and private-sector enterprises that hire freelancers, experts, digital consultants and other types of independent workers.

The new rules could open up opportunities for organisations willing to collaborate with providers, startups and technology vendors for “near shoring” or offshoring of labour. Meanwhile, negotiations over the UK’s exit from the EU continue to loom over the region even as many countries, especially Italy and the UK, were hit hard by the pandemic.

Cohesity teams up with Amazon Web Services

Posted on October 15, 2020 by - News

Cohesity has formed a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to address a growing need for flexible, available, scalable, and reliable data management. The pair are  bringing to market a new Data Management as a Service (DMaaS) offering.

The DMaaS solution is designed to provide enterprise and mid-size customers with a radically simple way to back up, secure, govern, and analyse their data, managed directly by Cohesity and hosted on AWS.

Amazon said that as data continues to grow exponentially, many organisations are looking to manage data in ways that allow their IT teams to focus on policy versus infrastructure, provide consumption-based pricing, accelerate the move to the cloud, make it easy to derive value from data, remove data infrastructure silos, and support multiple use cases — including data backup and archiving, disaster recovery, file and object services, copy data management, and analytics.

BT adds Zoom

Posted on October 15, 2020 by - News

BT is expanding its cloud-based audio and video collaboration managed services by adding  Zoom Meetings to its portfolio.

The move follows the signing of a new carrier agreement between the pair, with BT becoming the first global provider to offer a fully managed Zoom Meetings service to its customers.

The service will play nice with BT’s global voice and will have end-to-end experience monitoring and enhanced security.

BT will also provide Zoom Rooms, Zoom’s extendable software-based conference room offering.

Finance and insurance industry are back up failures

Posted on October 15, 2020 by - News

A report from Veritas Technologies claims that the finance and insurance industries are failing to maintain data backups, visibility and scalability in their digital transformation ambitions and journey to the cloud.

The Veritas 2020 Data Management in a Multi-Cloud World: Finance and Insurance report explores the pressures facing both industries as they continue to transform to meet competition, compliance, flexibility and security challenges. The report said that while that cloud adoption is experiencing strong growth, with 48 percent of organisational data stored or managed in the public cloud. IT decision makers in finance and insurance expect this figure to rise to 78 percent in just five years’ time.

The disruption caused by COVID-19 has accelerated this process. Prior to the pandemic, 50 percent of respondents listed cloud adoption among their top three organisational priorities. Following the outbreak, this has shot up to include 62 percent of finance and insurance IT leaders. Cloud has become a central tool to help companies cope with modern working practises, which have only been exacerbated by working from home during the pandemic.

Barracuda teams up with Toshiba Tec on managed services

Posted on October 14, 2020 by - News

Barracuda MSP solutions will be offered as part of Toshiba Tec’s expansion of its managed IT services offering.

Toshiba Tec provides industry-targeted solutions, enabling organisations in document management, critical information, and cost and resource efficiency, it claims, which it delivers via a direct sales force as well as an indirect dealer network of over 130 UK resellers.

Toshiba  Sales Director Ben Gaston said that managed services have long been at the core of his outfit’s offering, so it was a natural progression to move into managed IT services, a market which we are focussed on positively disrupting to offer real help to our customers.

“This extension to our portfolio was a logical progression in our aim to better support businesses and lift their operational burdens.The natural next step was to enhance our excellent service delivery by adopting responsibility for our customer’s wider IT infrastructure. Fast forward to today and Barracuda MSP are now helping us take this to the next level.”

Firms pushed to digital transformation programmes says Dell

Posted on October 14, 2020 by - News

Dell Technologies released results from a global study that shows organisations are shifting their digital transformation programmes into high gear and are on the path to accomplish in a few months what would normally have taken them years.

The findings, updated biennially in the Dell Technologies’ Digital Transformation Index (DT Index), indicate organisations are accelerating transformational technology programmes during the global COVID-19 pandemic.

In one of the first global studies to measure business behaviour because of the pandemic, Dell’s 2020 Index found that 72 percent of UK organisations have fast-tracked some digital transformation programmes this year. This is compared to 80 percent globally and 75 percent across Europe. In addition, 72 percent of UK organisations are re-inventing their business model.

The DT Index is a global benchmark indicating organisations’ status of digital transformation and their performance across the globe. The survey included 4,300 business leaders (C-suite to Director) from mid-size to enterprise companies across 18 countries.

iManage scores Swiss legal contract

Posted on October 14, 2020 by - News

iManage has scored a contract with Swiss law firm Walder Wyss.

The legal eagles have decided to use iManage’s RAVN powered Knowledge Unlocked product for content analysis and identify similar matters or trends, and provide updated intelligence on legal principles while respecting security and confidentiality.  It is all integrated with Microsoft Power BI and provides Knowledge teams with powerful analytics that enable content to be kept relevant.

Urs Bracher, Legal Engineer and Head of KM at Walder Wyss said: “Lawyers are busy people – most of them don’t have time to tell us how they’ve been using the knowledge management system.

“Having Knowledge Unlocked means that we don’t have to guess or rely on just a few lawyers telling us what type of knowledge management assets they find most useful, or where they need more help. We can look at the data and have insights into users’ needs that allow us to better address their requirements,” Bracher said.

Nuvias has new CEO

Posted on October 13, 2020 by - News

Unified comms outfit Nuvias has appointed Jeremy Keefe as the new CEO –  its current CEO Steve Harris will become executive chairman.

Keefe’s was Polycom’s regional SVP of UK, Ireland and Benelux. His 18 year channel career includes work at Computacenter, Westcon, Avaya and Citrix.

Harris dubbed Keefe “an exceptional leader” who was “familiar with our business from his time in Polycom. He has great experience and knowledge of the UC market across Europe and is well known to our customers and partners”.

PC market growth surges

Posted on October 13, 2020 by - News

Beancounters at Canalys have added up some numbers and reached the conclusion that remote working has lead to a boom in PC sales.

The PC market grew at the fastest rate in a decade during the third quarter of 2020, thanks to the surge in demand for hardware due to offices physically closing and employees working from home.

Recently released Canalys data shows the global PC market climbed 12.7 percent from a year ago to reach 79.2 million units in Q3 2020 as it continued to benefit hugely from the COVID-19 crisis.

Sophos picks two new sales leaders

Posted on October 13, 2020 by - News

Sophos has announced two new appointments to its sales team. Sophos has promoted Erin Malone to senior vice president of sales for Americas. Kevin Isaac has joined Sophos as senior vice president of sales for Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

Sophos  chief revenue officer Michael Valentine said: “Malone and Isaac are strategic additions to the Sophos senior leadership team, and their decades of expertise will be pivotal in helping partners evolve their security strategies to defend against today’s persistent attackers.”

Channel to see more merger and acquisitions

Posted on October 12, 2020 by - News

SSC boss James Rigby has said that the Channel could see more mergers in the coming months and said that his outfit could do  small acquisitions to bolster its customer base.

Addressing the assembled throngs at the Canalys Channel Forum Rigby said that SSC will not be doing anything huge, but new business is always a challenge.

“SCC, along with a number of the other bigger players, have that end-to-end capability on the infrastructure, so we have broadly got the portfolio of services we want and we now need to layer volume on top of that, and more clients”, he said.

Flogging hardware by subscription is a marketing lie

Posted on October 12, 2020 by - News

Computacenter CEO Mike Norris (pictured) has told the cameras at the Canalys Forum 2020 virtual conference that subscription based hardware sales were a marketing lie.

“If I was a vendor, I would want a consumption model. I see absolute logic in why I would want to sell as-a-service and not sell capital goods. Vendors have to be careful because I don’t think customers want to buy that way if they can avoid it.”

Norris claimed some vendors were “fixated” on consumption models.

2020 was the year of Channel profits says Canalys

Posted on October 12, 2020 by - News

While the year has gone down in history for being packed full of doom and gloom, analyst outfit Canalys thinks that it has been pretty good for the Channel.

The technology sector has had a stronger year than many would have expected at the start of the pandemic. Over the past three quarters, the tech industry as a whole has increased by five per cent. Distribution across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) has increased by four per cent, as have resellers.

Canalys CEO Steve Brazier (pictured) addressing the assembled throngs at the outfit’s Channel Forums event, said that while GDP across EMEA was expected to fall by nine percent this year, the tech world had defied gravity and come out fighting, helping customers solve real problems caused by COVID-19.

“Technology has won, the channel has won, distributors have won – it’s  turned into a very good year and we couldn’t have predicted that. The channel in Europe will see the most profitable year ever.”

He said that several factors, including higher revenues, created all that but there has also been a focus on spending and costs.

HPE wants channel to focus on SMEs

Posted on October 9, 2020 by - News

HPE’s CEO Antonio Neri said the company will focus on the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) market with its channel.

Talking to the assembled throngs at the Canalys Channels Forum EMEA he said it was clear that there is more scope for the channel to make in-roads into the SME segment.

“Together with our partners, we have made incredible progress, and I am more optimistic about the future than ever. Next year, we will increase our focus on SME for partners and will introduce enhancements and new initiatives, promotions and solutions to enable our partners to assess sales in our core business and drive share”, he said.