Category: News

Misco relaunches

Posted on July 2, 2019 by - News

The new incarnation of Misco has opened its doors after UK Computer Group announced it had bought the rights to the name last month.

For those who came in late, Misco went bust in 2017. Still based in Wellingborough, the outfit has Dell EMC, Lenovo, Acer and HP among its vendor partners.

Adam Muir, director of product management at Misco, said the company had strong relationships with most of the market-leading vendors and distributors across the channel.

IDE Group has AIM shares suspended after profit slide

Posted on July 1, 2019 by - News

London’s AIM market listing has suspended IDE Group shares following the failure to publish 2018 results on time.

Under AIM rules, companies had until the end of June to release their financials for 2018.

IDE did actually publish results on Friday last week, but they were not audited, and IDE said it would work to get audited figures out in early July. The company’s pretax loss more than doubled, with revenue falling 24 per cent.

Organisations are experiencing unacceptably high levels of data loss and downtime

Posted on July 1, 2019 by - News

Nearly a third of organisations have lost data as a result of a data centre outage in the past year, while more than 42 per cent said they had experienced a period of downtime.

According to a new survey conducted by Unitrends more than half of the respondents said they had to recover at least some of their data from the cloud at least once last year, while 11 per cent in total had to recover data from the cloud five times or more. Surprisingly, however, more than half of respondents said they tested their data recovery capabilities once a year or less.

Vice president of product management, Unitrends and Spanning  Joe Noonan said: “It is concerning that most enterprises don’t really know for sure if they can recover their applications after a downtime event as they test rarely or not at all. The need to continuously test recovery tools is critical to ensuring speedy business restoration.”

Miss Group scores BGF cash

Posted on July 1, 2019 by - News

Manchester-based Miss Group has secured a £13 million follow-on investment from BGF to support its international acquisition strategy.

Founded in 2014, Miss Group is an international web hosting business that offers a range of services to the SME market, such as web hosting, domain registration, VPS and dedicated servers.

Following BGF’s initial investment in August 2018, Miss Group acquired Hemsida24 and Heymo to grow its reach across Scandinavia. The deal saw the company add 14,000 customers and €1 million EBITDA to the business. The acquisition of FS Data in March 2019 of FS Data brought 30,000 more customers to the business and £1.5 million EBITDA. The follow-on investment from BGF will support further European acquisitions as Miss Group embarks on its next phase of growth.

Couchbase opens in Manchester

Posted on June 28, 2019 by - News

Enterprise-class multi-cloud NoSQL database outfit Couchbase has opened a new facility in Manchester, UK.

The new office, located in the Northern Quarter, will accommodate up to 80 members of Couchbase’s engineering and support teams who will help enterprises such as Tesco, BT and Sky accelerate the innovation of their enterprise-critical applications.

Customer Thermometer launches a new channel partner programme

Posted on June 27, 2019 by - News

Feedback outfit Customer Thermometer has launched a new channel partner programme for UK and US markets. The programme will help partners sell its cloud-based email feedback solution to drive easy subscription-based revenues.

The new channel programme will make it easier for an MSP, VAR or Microsoft Cloud Service Provider to sell and distribute its software, enabling them to quickly benefit from easy and additional SaaS revenue from every customer email signature or PSA/ CRM system integration.

Extreme buys Aerohive Networks.

Posted on June 27, 2019 by - News

Extreme Networks has bought cloud-managed networking outfit Aerohive Networks.

Under the deal Extreme will acquire all of the outstanding shares of common stock of Aerohive at a price of $4.45 per share in cash, representing an aggregate purchase price of approximately $272 million. Accounting for Aerohive’s net cash balance of $62 million at the end of March, the deal is equivalent to an enterprise value of $210 million.

CTI Digital appoints Steve Gale as London head honcho

Posted on June 26, 2019 by - Moving People, News

CTI Digital has appointed Steve Gale to oversee its London office.

Gale will move from the agency’s Manchester office to the capital next month to manage its strategic operations and work directly with clients based in the south of England and Europe.

As managing director of its London office, Steve will play a key role in future acquisitions and the pan-European growth of CTA Digital, the agency said.

SysGroup snaps up HNS

Posted on June 26, 2019 by - News

MSP SysGroup has snapped up Hub Networks is a managed connectivity and co-location solutions provider for £1.45 million.

Adam Binks, CEO, SysGroup, said that its second acquisition of the year fitted in with its strategy: “The acquisition of HNS further complements our existing managed services, enabling us to offer our customer base an even wider range of enterprise-grade managed connectivity services alongside our existing managed IT services portfolio.

Technology laggards face extinction

Posted on June 25, 2019 by - News

Companies will die unless they transform their approach to technology innovation, a CBI-Oracle report has found

A joint report from CBI and Oracle – ‘Bigger, Faster, Stronger’ has found that being a big company is no longer enough. Many larger businesses are struggling to transform digitally and are suffering.

UK business fear the SD-WAN myths

Posted on June 25, 2019 by - News

Businesses in the UK are holding back on SD-WAN deployment because of unfounded myths surrounding the technology, according to a new study by Cogeco Peer 1.

The main myths identified are security concerns (42 per cent ), cost concerns (38 per cent ) and a fear of disruption to day-to-day business (35 per cent ). This is followed by worry about a lack of skills to implement (34 per cent ) and being worried about a lack of understanding around the technology (26 per cent ).

The study, questioned 300 UK based IT decision-makers across the education, financial services, and retail sectors, found that the education sector (47 per cent ) is the most concerned about security issues, followed by retail (43 per cent ) and financial services (36 per cent ).

For IT decision-makers, the following priorities were revealed for the next 12 months:

  • Network security 61 per cent
  • Improving cloud performance 44 per cent
  • Improving application performance (44 per cent )
  • Increasing network agility (41 per cent )

The study found that businesses understand the role SD-WAN can play in their digital transformation, with 74 per cent  of respondents believing the technology is crucial to enabling the process. It is also seen as the future of connectivity, with 77 per cent  of respondents believing it will ultimately take over the WAN landscape in the future.

Tom Adams, Director of Product Marketing at Cogeco Peer 1, said: “There are clearly a number of perceived risks around SD-WAN that are preventing UK businesses from realising its benefits. It is time for the technology industry to come together and educate UK businesses about the potential SD-WAN brings. If the industry doesn’t unite, there is a danger that businesses will be left behind and unable to remain competitive.”

Dave Tracey, EMEA channel sales manager at Cogeco Peer 1, said: “The technology industry is often seen as at the cutting edge in delivering future benefits and implementing new ideas. However, the myths surrounding SD-WAN are stifling UK business growth and harming their chances of success. Vendors and channel partners must work together to prove these myths wrong and educate organisations on the technology’s benefits. It is also clear that SD-WAN packages need to come with consultancy and support to unlock the technology’s potential.”