Technology Reseller - v10

01732 759725 NEWS : VENDORS 10 Learn all about billing Union Street Technologies, the company behind the aBILLity billing platform, has released a series of video tutorials based on its six training courses. The training videos are available free of charge from the company’s partner support portal. Head of Sales and Marketing Vincent Disneur said: “By making our training programme available in video format, our user community of 3,500 billing professionals can freely access the training they need whenever they need it. This has the dual benefit of making the training required to gain USAP qualification, the industry’s first billing qualification, much more accessible and cost effective.” www.unionstreet.uk.com Spitfire completes network upgrade Internet telephony service provider and ISP Spitfire has completed a major upgrade of its network, replacing its PSTN interconnect switch with a new platform dubbed the Next Generation Switch (NGS). The Spitfire NGS has been developed in-house using open source software to perform basic telephony functions, with Spitfire creating its own proprietary switching, routing and control software code. Following extensive interoperability testing with BT, the platform was rolled out last summer. Benefits include greater flexibility to configure customer diverts (Spitfire will soon be offering the option to configure these through the customer portal) and the ability to offer fully resilient SIP trunks that allow for automatic failovers and more complex disaster recovery scenarios. Spitfire Engineering Solutions Director Dominic Norton said: “With the ending of the public ISDN network by 2025, Spitfire’s ability to offer our customers and partners resilient SIP trunk connectivity, based on our advanced IP engineering skills, gives us a critical advantage in the UK market.” www.spitfire.co.uk Vapour Cloud invests in in-house service desk Vapour Cloud has brought its service and support in-house, following a five-figure investment in a new service desk, six months of planning and two months of beta testing. Having previously used a variety of external support systems, the company decided to establish its own capability to improve the consistency of its technical service infrastructure. Vapour cloud services director Steve Dempsey said: “All incoming client support calls and emails now come into one central internal system and are picked up by a single dedicated team. We haven’t just invested heavily in our technical capabilities; we’ve reallocated internal resources and recruited more cloud and customer service experts, too, in order to staff the six-strong desk effectively. The result is a more streamlined, efficient and dependable approach to customer service, which ultimately relies on strong, clear lines of communication.” www.vapourcloud.com Hosted cloud telephony provider Xelion is celebrating a successful Mobile World Congress (MWC), where it recruited several new European channel partners and held negotiations with its first American distribution partner. UK Managing Director Dave Reynolds said: “The show was an outstanding success for us. We took 50 channel partners from across Europe to the event, including six from the UK, and they were all deeply impressed with what they saw and our roadmap for product development. 2018 is proving to be a very good year for us.” Xelion recently expanded its operations into the Republic of Ireland after securing Capstone as a channel partner. Capstone plans to take advantage of the product’s open architecture APIs to seamlessly integrate CRM solutions and other third- party apps with the Xelion service. www.xelion.com A successful MWC for Xelion Dominic Norton CompTIA updates network credential CompTIA has updated its CompTIA Network+ credential to take into account current networking technologies in both wired and wireless environments. “CompTIA Network+ validates an IT professional’s abilities and skills to work with any network regardless of the platform,” said Tazneen Kasem, CompTIA product manager. “That’s especially important in today’s environment, as networks have grown increasingly complicated with the introduction of the cloud, virtualisation, software defined networks and other emerging technologies.” In addition to multiple-choice questions, the CompTIA Network+ exam includes performance-based questions with a hands-on element. https://certification.comptia.org Cloud consultancy service launched by NetApp NetApp has launched a new consultancy service, Cloud Value Management (CVM), to help businesses find their full potential in the cloud. Developed in collaboration with Minet Technologies, a procurement solutions company, and Heymann & Partner, a technology law firm, CVM has two main components: a three-day interactive, inter- disciplinary workshop that provides an overview of the technical, legal and business aspects of a hybrid cloud environment; and a ‘hybrid cloud readiness’ workshop that assesses how cloud can contribute to a business’s objectives. www.netapp.com Safer transactions Security firm Trusted Knight has launched Protector Air, a cloud-based solution that deploys in-stream between consumers and businesses conducting financial transactions to protect both from cyber-attacks and fraud. Protector Air protects a website from direct attack on the infrastructure, frameworks and application logic; the user from endpoint and browser-based malware, such as keyloggers and banking Trojans; communications from service disruption through distributed denial- of-service (DDoS) attacks; and transactions by incorporating anti-fraud intelligence. www.trustedknight.com