Technology Reseller v20 2019

01732 759725 20 NEWS : VENDORS The husband and wife founders of tech firm UKFast have donated £5m to a charitable trust set up to give a helping hand to disadvantaged young people. Lawrence and Gail Jones, who set up the cloud hosting firm in 1999, are placing the funds directly into the UKFast Community and Education Trust, which seeks to improve the education, training and development opportunities available to young people experiencing poverty, abuse, discrimination, exclusion and neglect. The trust also supports individuals and organisations looking after young people with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions. In addition, UKFast is committing 5,000 volunteering hours annually to community projects through the trust and value-in-kind donations of the firm’s facilities including its 500-seat auditorium, which has hosted a series of free cinema screenings during the school holidays. UKFast has invested nearly £10m in digital skills education programmes in the last decade, establishing partnerships with 60 schools across Greater Manchester and reaching 60,000 young people. It has also funded a breakfast club at Holy Name RC Primary School and provided 22,310 meals for children across Greater Manchester as part of a Holiday Hunger initiative in 2018. www.ukfast.co.uk UKFast founders donate £5 million to charitable trust SciChart honored for innovation SciChart, which combines knowledge from the gaming industry and professional desktop applications to create big data charting and visualisation software for financial services organisations and scientific research companies, has received a Queen’s Award for Enterprise for Innovation. Its cross-platform charting products support real-time, dynamic data visualisation on desktops, mobile devices and embedded systems. Swyx diary date The Colosseum Theatre, Essen, Germany is the venue for this year’s Swyx Partner and Technology Conference, taking place on September 26. Attendees will receive exclusive insight into developments in UC and IP telephony, market trends and Swyx’s new products. Coinciding with Swyx’s conference, sister company Centile will be holding its bi-annual Customer Summit for international service providers in Cannes, France on September 25-26. www.swyx.com/sptc19.html Third acquisition for BSO Ethernet network, cloud and hosting provider BSO has strengthened its capabilities within the wholesale telecoms, cloud and technology sectors with the acquisition of IX Reach, a global provider of network services. BSO’s third acquisition in the last 18 months, following those of Apsara Networks, a supplier of radio frequency connectivity to financial markets, and PROceau, a high availability and business critical managed hosting and IaaS company, makes it the largest privately owned telecom operator in the world. IX Reach has a network covering 170+ points of presence (POPs) across North America, Europe, Asia, the Middle East and Africa; a customer base that includes 300+ carriers, ISPs, content providers and networks of all sizes; and a partner ecosystem of more than 70 cloud, IXPs, data centre and SaaS companies. www.bsonetwork.com Panintelligence wins maiden US order Leeds-based analytics and business intelligence (BI) software company Panintelligence has won its first US order through Coventry-based software vendor PCMS. The white-label arrangement with the global retail technology company will see Panintelligence ‘Pi’ data analytics software used in thousands of stores across the US, providing retail managers with a visual overview of stock management, customer footfall, PoS transactions and other information. PCMS’s customer base includes Marks & Spencer, Waterstones, John Lewis and Waitrose in the UK and Bass Pro Shops, Best Buy Mobile and Walgreens in the US. BigChange and Sage strengthen relationship BigChange, the Leeds-based provider of mobile and office IT for paperless working, has become a Sage Developer Platinum Partner. BigChange’s JobWatch Sage 50 integration tool enables the exchange of financial transactional data between the two systems. By eliminating the need for dual keying, it improves invoicing speed, accuracy, cash flow and debtor levels. Martin Port, CEO and Founder of BigChange, said: “Achieving Sage Platinum Partner Status represents an important milestone for BigChange and reinforces our position as a provider of business IT, but with a unique offering for businesses that rely on mobile workforces.” He added: “The BigChange Sage integration allows financial control and management to be extended beyond the office, seamlessly connecting those involved at the front end of the business to the back office as part of a fully digital, paper-free and real-time IT solution. That ultimately means improved cash flow and profitability, backed by a complete digital audit trail.” www.bigchange.com L-r: John Tomlinson PCMS; Ken Miller and Hollie Dyson, Panintelligence; Andy Bourke, PCMS; Zandra Moore, CEO, Panintelligence