Good times/Bad times

We round up who's breaking out the bubbly and who's falling flat in the channel of late

Good times

Eating your own dog food
"They may take our electricity, but they will never take our ability to do business!" That was what we'd like to imagine Jabra bosses hollered at their staff before charging off through the Surrey floods to work from home.
The vendor may have been forced from its Egham HQ as the high water levels meant the electricity board had to power down the building, but it certainly enjoyed the last laugh as all its staff simply fired up their Jabra headsets and worked remotely.
"If we didn't have a UC platform, we would've been forced to shut up shop for a while," beamed Jabra's marketing department, no doubt already planning their exotic summer holidays funded by their impromptu PR-win bonus.

G-Cloud suppliers
Throwing a tantrum is the wrong way to go about getting your own way. Unless you're a G-Cloud supplier, that is.
The public sector platform has taken a battering recently after research found that most authorities didn't even know what G-Cloud was, let alone ever bought anything from it. The fact January was a record month for the framework, with an extra £15m of sales, was not enough to ease the concerns of suppliers, who came together to compile a long list of demands.
Perhaps overwhelmed by an army of angry IT providers and bean counters, G-Cloud promised to improve. We wonder what else can be achieved by a good old-fashioned strop... if the next issue of CRN is a little late, you can assume management gave in to our demands and let us out for some fresh air.

Ageing owner-managers
SCC has pledged that its buyout of print services player M2 will be "the first of many" deals as it hits the M&A trail to boost its higher-margin business.
The UK's largest privately owned VAR confirmed the deal, for an undisclosed sum, last week and chief executive James Rigby was swift to reiterate his desire to "proactively seek service-led acquisitions".
Owners of high-margin channel business who are starting to keep one eye on spending more time in the Algarve might wish to buy Mr Rigby a pint and ask for five minutes of his time when next they see him.

Bad Times

2e2 creditors
The £257.2m secured debt pile left by fallen integrator 2e2 remains more than 90 per cent unpaid more than a year after it hit the wall.
A biannual progress report from administrator FTI Consulting reveals that just £19.8m had been repaid as of the end of last month, an increase of less than £1m on the previous update. The former trading entity 2e2 Group Limited found only an extra £2,000 with which to pay debtors during the past six months.
In better news, JP Associates, a firm "specialising in debt recovery", has thus far been paid the best part of £400,000 by FTI, out of a wider total of more than £3m in administrator's fees.
Keep up the good work, guys - and remember to check for change under the sofa cushions.

Luddite criminals
The Metropolitan Police is set to hashtag and FaceTime its way into the 21st century as it plans to spend £200m on technology including tablets and wearables over the next three years.
Last year the Met found itself criticised for its ancient IT, with a report claiming 70 per cent of its systems are redundant, and that 85 per cent of its annual £250m tech budget was spent merely on keeping the lights on.
Bobbies will now be armed with gizmos such as tablets and body-worn cameras, with the aim of improving their mobility and allowing them to better capture evidence. Though they should be warned: last time I blithely wandered around London brandishing my tablet, it was swiftly taken off me by a gang of hoodie-clad kids claiming to be "the iPad inspectors".

Cloud-shy disties
Any distributors hanging on to product-wholesaling business models have been told in no uncertain terms to head cloudwards, with a brace of reports claiming the channel's middlemen have a key role to play in the cloud.
A CompTIA study claimed that distributors can become "the nexus of cloud computing", with both vendors and
resellers reliant on their services. Disties were particularly urged to develop datacentre capacity, as application providers would prefer to work with them than potential rivals such as Google and Amazon.
Meanwhile, a Context survey found that 53 per cent of VARs want more cloud support from their distribution partners, and are calling out for a greater range of services.