Category: News

AMD sends in the axemen after poor results

Posted on November 2, 2022 by - News

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.”

Lomas exits Ingram Micro

Posted on November 1, 2022 by - Moving People, News

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.”

Dark times are good for clouds says Nadella

Posted on November 1, 2022 by - News

Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEOMicrosoft 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.

 

Contact Centres-as-a-Service business increasing

Posted on November 1, 2022 by - News

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 organises a new office in a distillery

Posted on October 31, 2022 by - News

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 pushes sustainablity

Posted on October 31, 2022 by - News

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 creates lebensraum by merging with German counterpart

Posted on October 31, 2022 by - News

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 expands Caerphilly facility

Posted on October 21, 2022 by - News

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 be more serious about second hand products

Posted on October 21, 2022 by - News

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 releases Confidential Compute

Posted on October 21, 2022 by - News

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.

Enterprise IT spending is recession-proof

Posted on October 20, 2022 by - News

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.

Supply chain shortages still not improving

Posted on October 20, 2022 by - News

Ingram executive director John Tonthat has warned that the supply chain crisis was still not improving.

Distributor’s forecasting for 2023 with its largest vendors including Cisco, HP, Dell and IBM “all show products that push back well into the back-half of 2023”.

He said that while client device shortages were improving the datacentre with compute, storage and networking products was still a mess.

Addressing the gathered throngs at the GreenPages’ Cloudscape 2022 conference, Tonthat said that across the three tiers of compute, network and storage- network is particularly hampered by supply chain through Q4 of next year.

 

GCHQ publishes advice on supply chain attacks

Posted on October 20, 2022 by - News

GCHQ buildingThe National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which is part of GCHQ,  published new guidance to help organisations effectively assess and gain confidence in the cyber security of their supply chains.

It follows a significant increase in cyber-attacks resulting from vulnerabilities within supply chains in recent years, including some high-profile incidents such as the SolarWinds attack.

The guidance, which can be found here, is designed to help medium and larger organisations effectively assess the cyber risks of working with suppliers and gain assurance that mitigations are in place.

Supply chain attacks can cause far-reaching and costly disruption, yet the latest government data shows just over one in ten businesses review the risks posed by their immediate suppliers (13 percent), and the proportion for the wider supply chain is just seven per cent.

Partners should be doing more for customers

Posted on October 19, 2022 by - News

Hosting and cloud services company, Leaseweb Global has released a report claiming that 84 percent of UK IT professionals think their IT partners are capable of providing more value to their organisations.

The research, spoke to 500 UK-based IT professionals’ experience with IT channel partners over the last two years, raising questions regarding the quality of the relationship between organisations and their channel partners.

Overall, the results indicate that, while many were satisfied with factors such as their partner’s ability to provide informed advice and support business objectives, there is still work to be done in matters of budget and risk sharing.

Reseller and distributors seem happy with life

Posted on October 19, 2022 by - News

Happy man portrait

Context’s latest ChannelWatch survey claims that resellers and distributors are generally happy with their lot.

The market watcher says that resellers and distributors were satisfied with the range of services on offer, including billing, pre-sales, product availability, customer portals, supply chain and configuration services, and financial and field support.

The only areas where there was a hint that more work could be done was around “lead generation to help secure new customers”, where the scores have failed to increase over the past three years.

Distribution has been vocal about its determination to invest in support and services, with much ploughing investment into developing cloud marketplaces over the past couple of years.