Technology Reseller v11

technolog y reseller.co.uk BULLETIN : TRENDS 05 Near doubling of compromised data records The number of data records lost, stolen or exposed increased by 88% last year to more than 2.6 billion worldwide, according to the Gemalto Breach Level Index . Since 2013 nearly 10 billion records have been affected at a rate of 58 records every second. Last year, 86% of the 1,765 data breach incidents reported occurred in North America. Gemalto says the figure is so high because US organisations have had to reveal breaches for a number of years. It expects figures for European organisations to rise as a result of GDPR, which mandates data breach reporting. Last year, the UK had the second highest number of incidents after the US, with 33,124,246 compromised records (down from 54,468,603 in 2016). One breach alone, at the NHS, accounted for two thirds (26,000,000) of data records compromised. Half of data incidents in the UK involved a malicious outsider (48%) and over one third (39%) were the result of accidental damage, such as improper disposal of records and misconfigured databases. Even so, accidental loss accounted for 88% of all compromised records. Phil Bean set to drive next phase of growth at Channeliser Channel partnership specialist Channeliser has appointed Phil Bean as Sales Director. He was previously Managing Director of Stonemere IT Limited, where he increased turnover by 631% in four years. In his new role, Bean will be responsible for building the Channeliser customer base and increasing subscriptions to the services it has developed to help companies form the partnerships needed to deliver complex IT solutions. These subscription-based solutions provide Community-as-a-Service functionality with all the tools necessary to engage partners at every stage of the partnering process, viz. partner recruitment, partner engagement and managing the partner ecosystem. www.channeliser.com Collaboration technologies take greater share of AV budgets One fifth of meeting room AV budgets are now being spent on collaboration technologies, such as interactive displays, video conferencing and wireless presentation solutions. A Futuresource Consulting survey of 2,500 end users in the UK, USA, Germany and France shows that while display technologies still take the largest slice of budgets for the estimated 11 million meeting rooms in Europe and North America, this is changing in line with evolving working practices. This is especially true of large meeting rooms, where over 60% of AV spend is now allocated to non-display technologies. Anthony Brennan, Research Analyst at Futuresource Consulting, said: “With 11% of employees working from home at least three days a week – up three percentage points on the last time we ran this research – the role of the meeting room continues to change. More of us are wirelessly sharing content to a web conferencing platform or harnessing interactive technologies to get our point across, and the usage is only going to increase.” He added: “As the landscape continues to broaden, companies will increasingly demand a multitude of features from their meeting room tech. The winners will be the technology providers who can deliver engaging, flexible solutions that work seamlessly and encourage collaborative working without getting in the way or adding extra layers of complexity…There’s a cosy, big money position for the vendor who can offer a full meeting room solution that covers all the needs of companies across different meeting room sizes.” Futuresource Consulting’s analysis shows that suppliers of professional audio products, such as commercial speakers and high-quality microphones, are also benefiting from these trends. In the US, for example, 28% of AV hardware budgets for large meeting rooms are being invested in audio. In addition to greater demand for professional-grade ceiling and column speakers as meeting room sizes and budgets increase, Futuresource Consulting Associate Director McIntyre-Brown highlights greater interest in professional microphones. He said: “Corporations are becoming more attuned to the importance of high quality audio when making conference calls, which is helping to grow demand for dedicated microphones. We’re seeing a range of form factors gradually sliding into the mix, particularly in medium and large meeting rooms, where extender mics are being used in tandem with conferencing phones.” One third of SMEs have no CRM One in three UK SMEs with revenues of between £5 million and £250 million still doesn’t have any CRM technology in place and continues to rely on spreadsheets, claims CRM company Workbooks. Its new report, The State of the CRM Market 2018 - An SME Perspective , states that the main reasons to adopt CRM technology are to improve the productivity of customer-facing employees (66%), to enhance the customer experience (62%) and to reduce operational costs (49%). There are obstacles too, notably the complexity of migrating and integrating data from an array of sources into one place, cited by more than half of respondents. Other challenges include not having the resources to get things done (40%); a lack of IT skills (38%); poor understanding of the processes underpinning the business (38%); cost (38%); and resistance to change (34%). The most popular features of a CRM system are contact management functions (cited by 89%); reporting and dashboards that enable SMEs to make sense of all the data they gather; mobile access (cited by nearly half); sales order processing (cited by almost one third); and social media functionality (11%).  John Cheney, CEO of Workbooks, said: “There are still too many SMEs that consider CRM to be too expensive and too complicated to implement. With the new legislation around GDPR and e-privacy and the onus on businesses to improve the way they deal with data, it will become more and more critical for business to have tools like CRM to manage their data.” www.workbooks.com   2017 TheYearof InternalThreats andAccidental DataBreaches BREACHLEVEL INDEX Findings from the 2017 POWEREDBY The State of the CRM Market 2018 - AN SME PERSPECTIVE The new i3HUDDLE 3.0 interactive touchscreen is designed to support easy collaboration in smaller meeting rooms. Great for video conferencing, whiteboarding, wireless presenting and collaboration with remote team members, it features a simple, intuitive user interface – for example, the home screen has just four options (conference, whiteboard, present, co-create) – and easy integration into Windows environments. A useful new feature is the integrated motion sensor that supports automatic start-up and shutdown. www-i3-technologies.com