Technology Reseller v44

01732 759725 16 NEWS : RESEllers Martin Hess Telefonica Tech UK&I brand launched Distec partners with Teltonika Manchester-based hybrid technology solutions provider Distec is meeting the needs of customers in the smart manufacturing, retail, utilities and transportation sectors through a new partnership with Teltonika Networks, a Lithuania-based provider of rugged network devices for secure IoT and M2M communication. The partnership adds multiple new products to Distec’s IoT solutions portfolio, including modems, gateways, routers and ethernet switches suitable for use in the most complex areas of Industry 4.0, Smart City and Green Energy. www.distec.co.uk Trustack gets vCreative The forced cancellation of a family fun day and sponsored walk has proved no impediment to Trustack’s fund-raising activities, with staff at the MSP raising £7,200 for the Tiny Lives Trust through a variety of virtual fund-raising activities. The sums raised enabled the MSP to honour its 2019 commitment to help fund the charity’s vCreate service, which allows parents to receive real-time, video updates and photos of babies in the Neonatal Unit at Newcastle’s RVI Hospital. Rachel Hardwick (above), Funding and Partnerships Officer at Tiny Lives, points out that this service has been particularly useful during the pandemic, when opportunities for face-to-face contact have been severely reduced. She said: “Being able to see videos from the ward of their little ones has been absolutely vital for parents who have been isolating, and when there have been restrictions on visiting. It has always been an important service, but it has really come into its own during the pandemic.” Over the last three years, Tiny Lives has used the service to send 1,123 videos and 2,651 photos to 371 families, and also supplied iPads and accessories to the Neonatal Unit. www.trustack.co.uk Academia retains ‘Rank 1’ status The Academia Group has secured Rank 1 status on the Apple Equipment and Services Framework for Higher Education for the fifth year in a row. Chief Commercial Officer Mark McCormack said: “We’ve maintained Rank 1 for 5 years and have seen the framework mature over the years; the vast majority of universities are now truly receiving the value-add and choice they desired six years ago. It was not easy at the outset, particularly when we were competing with a seamless online store by the manufacturer, but over time we have managed to develop operations in-house, which include our own IT Asset Disposal company, and have invested heavily in the back-end technology to allow us to transact efficiently and dove-tail into every university’s procurement system via a range of integrations.” He added: “This framework has taught us that we need to have tailored and bespoke service offerings for the HE sector. It is no longer just about boxes arriving next day. We’ve launched a new ‘as-a-service’ model with students and staff working/ learning remotely in mind. This includes a new Managed Service featuring a virtual helpdesk, which enables us to control all IT assets in one place, and our own private cloud and MDM solutions.” The Academia Group, headquartered in London, employs over 150 staff and has an annual turnover of £80 million. It recently set up two new business units, Managed document services and Telecommunications. https://academia.co.uk/ apple-he-framework-2021 / CANCOM UK&I is now operating under the Telefónica Tech UK&I brand, following its acquisition for € 398 million at the end of July. A Microsoft Gold Partner in nine disciplines, with a headcount of more than 600 professionals, Telefónica Tech UK&I will offer a range of professional and managed services in advanced IT, cyber security and multi-cloud solutions. As part of its UK&I expansion plans, Telefónica Tech recently strengthened its Global Security Operations Centre (SOC) with an additional 5,000 square foot of office space in a new purpose-built facility at Catalyst Inc (Belfast). The expanded Irish operations centre will enable it to deliver specialist cyber security services to a wider range of customers in the UK and Ireland. Martin Hess, CEO of Telefónica Tech UK&I, said: “I am delighted to announce that we are launching our new brand as Telefónica Tech in the UK and Ireland. The significant investment in our SOC, including in capital infrastructure, in our technology and in our people, is to ensure we have an offering that meets the requirements of organisations with complex and sophisticated cyber security needs, such as in the health sector where we have market- leading expertise.” Redstor a game-changer for Protos Technologies Protos Technologies, the Michigan-based MSP formerly known as Baseline, has tripled the amount of customer data it protects, from 123TB to 460TB, in the first 18 months of its partnership with Redstor, a global data management and protection SaaS business. Bruce McKnight, IT consultant at Protos, cites a number of key selling points of Redstor’s Data Management and Protection platform. These include high levels of automation and support for a broad range of modern and legacy data sources, including cloud-native, containerised workloads and a growing array of SaaS applications, like Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Salesforce and Xero, all of which can be managed through a single app. McKnight said: “A lot of people have not yet gone to the cloud. As they do that, we say ‘in the same way that we protect your Exchange servers, we can seamlessly transition to 365 and on the same pane of glass’ and they really like that.” He added: “For any business onboarding customers in their thousands, there has to be automation. What Redstor is doing is a game-changer. It has been transformational in helping us to fully digitise our business operations and scale more quickly than ever.” Redstor software is purpose-built for MSPs. In addition to rapid deployment, with zero upfront costs and no need to purchase and install hardware, its proprietary InstantData technology reduces Recovery Time Objectives from hours to seconds for near-zero downtime. https://redstor.turtl.co/story/ protos-case-study/