Category: News

HP has moved to calm its partners that Apogee will not receive any preferential treatment after the vendor gets its paws on the managed print outfit.

HP has plans that it would acquire the Maidstone-based partner earlier this month sparking fears that the maker of expensive printer ink would favour Apogee over its other channel chums.

However the outfit has issued a statement saying it would be business as usual for the channel and HP staff will not be running Apogee.

HP print president Enrique Lores said it was important that Apogee will continue to operate as an independent subsidiary of HP and the reporting line for that business will sit outside the HP UK and Ireland operation.

“None of our partners receive preferential treatment and in the same way that we manage all our partners regardless of product type, we have the same commercial relationships as any other partner and they will have the same access to tools and partner programmes that are offered today.”

Value-added outfit Exclusive has added Elastifile as the latest addition to its global BigTec cloud portfolio.

Elastifile is known for its enterprise, cloud file storage solutions which enable cloud workflows with minimal deployment and management issues.

Martin Bichler, Group Vendor Manager at BigTec said: “Cloud infrastructure transformation is, alongside cybersecurity, perhaps the greatest commercial opportunity for channel partners to lead customers toward a positive digital future, which is why Elastifile’s innovation aligns so well with our global BigTec vision. The global enterprise IT shift to ‘everything-as-a-service’ is accelerating the obsolescence of traditional data infrastructure, so end customers want their transition to new technology to be frictionless with clear ROI. Elastifile fits into our broad set of compelling BigTec solution offerings around enterprise hybrid cloud that are addressing significant demand across the channel ecosystem.”

The global distribution contract “significantly” extends the market reach of Elastifile and follows the vendor’s initial BigTec EMEA agreement struck last year.

Bamiyan Gobets, VP International Sales at Elastifile said: ” We feel we have found the ideal partner to support our channel growth objectives with service providers and VARs worldwide. The BigTec brand, backed by Exclusive’s global market reach and unparalleled specialist cloud competency, adds significant value and gives us a great market advantage.”

This means that there is an opportunity for Elastifile resellers wherever customers want to cloud-burst peak demand, migrate workloads, or create true hybrid workflows that span architectures – be it supporting containers, VMs, on-premises infrastructure, or public cloud.”

Computacenter has reported a record revenue of £2 billion with its UK sales rocket 29.5 percent.

For the six months ending 30 June 2018 the channel giant saw overall revenue rise 18.1 percent year on year, while adjusted profit before tax increased 24.3 percent to £52.1 million.

Computacenter said that its UK revenue growth was bolstered by two “very large margin-dilutive” contracts, valued at £34.1 million and £36.7 million, which brought margins down by 80 basis points.

Mike Norris, CEO at Computacenter, said: “While the second half of the year is a more difficult comparison to the first half, due to the outstanding performance in H2 2017, 2018 is proving to be a year of significant progress particularly for our technology sourcing business.

“The buoyant market conditions are being driven by a number of factors specifically, but not limited to, the need to increase network capacity, the constant need for enhanced cybersecurity, workplace upgrades and a move to the cloud. While it is impossible to predict how long these buoyant market conditions will continue, most of these drivers have significant momentum.

“As always, Computacenter will continue to focus on the long term, investing in our business, innovating our offerings and enhancing our customer service.”

Computacenter saw around three quarters of its revenue come from what it refers to as technology sourcing (previous called ‘supply chain’) in H1, while the remaining quarter came from services.

In the UK, revenue rose to £858.1 million driven by product sales, but services declined 4.5 percent to £225.1 million, which Computacenter attributed to two “challenging projects” requiring additional resources.

The firm had previously warned that services would be hit by the conclusion of a large contract, but said that it has managed to retain a “large element” of this customer’s IT operations. Nonetheless, it branded its services performance as “disappointing”.

Margins on the product side of the business were brought down by 80 basis points as a result of the two large contracts.

In Germany Computacenter’s revenue rose 11.4 per cent to €984.1 million (£886.69 million ), driven by growth in both its product and services divisions.

The technology sourcing arm saw sales jump 13.6 per cent to €679.5 million while services grew 6.8 per cent to €304.6 million .

Overall, adjusted operating profit grew 53.1 per cent to €36.6m in Germany.

Computacenter however warned that a lack of available talent in Germany is a “growth inhibitor”, adding that some of its German operations could be run from outside the country in the future.

Earlier this year Computacenter opened up a services centre in Poland to support its German business.

Sales in France meanwhile were down 1.2 per cent to €262.2 million, but Computacenter stressed that this was down to a particularly strong H1 last year. It added that the first half of this year matched its H1 from 2016.

Adjusted operating profit in France grew by 41.2 per cent to €2.4 million.

IT security spending is about to cost a quarter more thanks to the low supply of highly skilled talent, and regulatory changes.

Beancounters at Gartner said that security spend is set to rise 12 percent from $101.54 billion to $114.15 billion this year. But it will be part of a general increase in security costs which will eventually hit $124.12 billion

Siddharth Deshpande, research director at Gartner said: “Security managers aspire to help their organisations use their technology platforms to become more competitive and contribute to the growth of the company. Persistent skills shortages and regulatory changes like the GDPR in Europe are driving continued growth in the security services market.”

He said the segment that will rake in the biggest bucks is security services, which are expected to account for ten per cent of IT security expenditure.

Gartner added that highly publicised data breaches, have reinforced the need to view protecting sensitive data and IT systems as a vital business investment.

Deshpande  said security and risk management has to be a critical part of any digital business initiative. Identity and Access Management, Identity Governance and Administration, and Data Loss Prevention will all be impacted by the large rise in demand.  The second and third biggest security segment earners are expected to be infrastructure protection and network protection systems.