Technology Reseller - v15 2018

technolog y reseller.co.uk NEWS : VENDORS 05 CityFibre to extend full fibre to five million homes Following its acquisition in June by Antin Infrastructure Partners and West Street Infrastructure Partners (a fund managed by Goldman Sachs), CityFibre has announced a £2.5bn investment plan to expand its full fibre network in the UK. This will see the roll-out of full fibre connectivity to five million homes in 37 towns and cities where CityFibre already has critical fibre spine assets. This represents one third of the Government’s 2025 target of 15 million homes and one- fifth of the UK consumer market. Greg Mesch, CEO of CityFibre, said: “Our rollout will soon bring to scale an innovative wholesale network, providing internet service providers and mobile network operators with greater choice and unrivalled technical capabilities, benefiting all sectors of the market.” With Vodafone as its first consumer ISP customer, CityFibre’s fibre-to-the-home builds are currently underway in Milton Keynes, Peterborough and Aberdeen. Construction is due to start in Edinburgh, Stirling, Coventry and Huddersfield before the end of the year and in Cambridge, Leeds and Southend-on-Sea in 2019. Zyxel’s heroes Zyxel is offering Ally Partners at least 15% extra margin with a new Hero product category covering key switch, wireless and security products. Zyxel Hero products are selected for their ability to help SMEs address the triple challenge of managing network traffic, security and dispersed employee bases. https://partner.zyxel.eu Greg Mesch International expansion drives profit growth for Agilitas Following significant international expansion in the last 12 months, channel services provider Agilitas IT Solutions has announced a 23% rise in turnover to £9.5 million and a 53% increase in profits to £2 million in FY 2018. Agilitas CEO Shaun Lynn said: “This growth is the result of Agilitas delivering world-class services solutions for customers on both a UK and global scale. Our ever-expanding services portfolio is making our proposition increasingly attractive to more and more channel businesses that are looking to remain relevant to their end user customers by delivering ‘best-of-breed’ solutions. We are confident we can continue this upwards momentum in FY19.” For nearly 30 years, Agilitas has been helping major OEMs, IT resellers and managed service providers extend their service capability and improve service delivery levels to customers. Agilitas manages spare parts inventories across server, storage and networking technologies and delivers complementary technical services including cloud services, technical training, technical support, product repair and specialist engineering resource. It now trades in 60 countries, 80% more than 12 months ago. Kaseya acquires SaaS data protection specialist Kaseya has strengthened its services offering with the acquisition of Spanning Cloud Apps, a leading provider of data protection for SaaS applications. Founded in 2010, Spanning has more than 10,000 active MSP and enterprise customers worldwide and achieved 50% year-on-year growth in 2017. It will retain its headquarters in Austin, Texas and will continue to operate as an independent business unit under Kaseya. Following the announcement of its acquisition, Kaseya is adding Kaseya Office 365 Backup powered by Spanning to the Kaseya Unified Backup Suite. This fully integrated solution enables Kaseya users to provide a comprehensive backup and disaster recovery solution for Microsoft Office 365 and benefit from recurring revenue opportunities and significant margin potential. www.kaseya.com UK winners Exertis and Computacenter were amongst the winners at NEC Display Solutions Europe’s 2018/19 Display Trends Forum EMEA Partner Awards held in Valencia, Spain in October. Exertis (UK) was named Top Distributor 2018 – Large Format Displays , with Computacenter (UK) winning the award for Top Reseller 2018 – Desktop Displays . www.nec-display-solutions.com UK first for Voiceflex Voiceflex Ltd, a SIP and hosted telephony carrier, is the first service provider in the UK to qualify as a Unify Cloud Service Provider for the deployment of Circuit, Unify’s cloud- based communication and collaboration solution for mobile and distributed workforces. The partnership will enable Voiceflex to deliver Circuit and the OpenScape Cloud application to partners via its channel- only model. Paul Taylor, Voiceflex Sales and Marketing Director, said: “I have been monitoring Circuit as a standalone UC application for some time and, as a SIP carrier, the possibilities are endless, not only for Circuit with OpenScape, Circuit with Nebula (the hosted telephony application launched four years ago by Voiceflex), but also Circuit as the UC app for on-premise solutions.” Rob Wiles, VP Channel Sales UK&I, said: “This partnership proves that the service wrap our partners deliver is what differentiates Unify’s products. I firmly believe that the hosted telephony space is a race to the bottom in terms of pricing and vendors are struggling to provide value. This partnership with Voiceflex ensures that, together, we deliver competitively priced and market-leading collaboration applications.” Unify is one of the world’s leading communications software and services firms, providing integrated communications solutions for approximately 75% of the Fortune Global 500. Second update in 3 months Datto, a provider of IT solutions delivered through Managed Service Providers (MSPs), has updated its cloud-based professional services automation tool, Autotask PSA, for the second time in three months. The 2018.2 update enables MSPs to improve resource allocation and client collaboration through highly configurable ticketing and timekeeping functionality, a redesigned Client Portal homepage and new contract visibility options. Find out more at www.datto.com/business- management/autotask-psa. Paul Taylor