After concerns of long-term sustainability of the Bristol City Council ICT Support Services to schools, an overhaul of the service was needed in order to create a comprehensive survival strategy of which CentraStage is a key part.

Bristol City Council have a team of 14 technicians who support 110 schools and have been providing ICT and Curriculum Support to local schools over 8 years, and now support 110 schools.

Click the above image to watch the webinar recording or click here to read the Bristol City Council case study.

by James Fletcher l November 11, 2011 l No Comments »

CentraStage (http://www.centrastage.com), the leading provider of cloud based remote monitoring, management and IT automation software today announced the appointment of Jon Gibbs, ex LANDesk VP to drive CentraStage’s expansion into the US markets.

With over 20 years of high-tech sales and sales management experience, Mr Gibb’s main expertise lies in building global sales channels from the ground up. He has been given the role of Vice President of North America for CentraStage and is responsible for marketing and finance whilst overseeing the business development into the US market.

Commenting on the appointment Christian Nagele, CEO at CentraStage said: ‘We are very pleased to welcome Jon on board, his past experience and skills are exactly what we need to carry out a successful expansion and make our mark on the US markets. Jon is going to play a key role in the success of this expansion and it is an absolute pleasure to have him working with us.’

Prior to CentraStage, Jon was Regional Director of Greater China Sales for LANDesk Software. Based in Beijing, China, Jon managed the sales operations for three offices throughout China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Jon reported directly to the VP of Global Sales and had full P&L and revenue responsibility for the entire region.

Jon Gibbs commented: ‘CentraStage really break the mould when it comes to providing a cloud-based service and I’m very excited about working with such an innovative company and playing a key role in their continued international expansion.’

by James Fletcher l November 7, 2011 l No Comments »

The Carphone Warehouse has been using digital signgage instore since 2009 (Retail Technology May/June 2010).  Dave Newman, Carphone Warehuse channel platform manager, updated Retail Technology: “We now have over 2,500 displays within our estate in the UK. We are using the very latest technology from 3D displays to touchscreens to enhance the customer experience while instore.”

Newman explains that, having a digital signage solution within the store estate gives the retailer the ability to deliver easily updated an tailored multi-platform messaging. “Using CentraStage to remotely manage our digital signage has enabled us to manage a massive direct marketing estate with minimal labour costs.

“At the click of a button we can deploy a new message out within minutes. And it enables us to tailor each message for either a single machine or group of machines through the profiles or filtering facility.”

Read the article in: Retail Technology (Page 20).

by James Fletcher l November 3, 2011 l No Comments »

The rise of remote working, accelerated by the explosion in smart phones and tablets as business tools is forcing businesses to look beyond traditional IT management products, to a new breed of web-based technologies that give them centralised visibility and control of their IT assets, regardless of location, network or user.

We are currently seeing the SME market driving the adoption of these new technologies. Enterprise organisations, often seen as the early adopters of new technology in order to gain competitive advantage, are still largely wedded to the established high-end IT management tools that are tortuous to deploy, complex to manage and very expensive, in fact the very antithesis of the web 2.0 IT management technologies.

In a financially constrained environment businesses look to address their ‘must haves’ and looking at cost not only in terms of money, but also in terms of the human resource, and costs of set-up, deployment and on-going management.

The SME IT sector is perfectly positioned to take advantage of cloud-based IT management technologies due to the widespread adoption of outsourced IT contracts – small businesses outsourcing their IT to other small businesses. There are estimated to be over 15,000 IT service providers in the UK, the large proportion of whom fall into this category.

For these small, often owner-managed businesses, adoption of IT management technology has previously been prohibitive from both a cost and time perspective; however new breed remote monitoring and management tools remove technical and commercial barriers to entry. They can simply sign-up, deploy and they are up-and-running, with the benefits to their business almost immediate.

With no minimum contracts, no minimum commitments, and a pay-as-you-go pricing model so favoured by SaaS providers, the cost of the technology for businesses is proportionate to customer revenues.

I believe the future lies in three key principles – simplicity, choice and integration.

Simplicity – the provision of a core IT management platform that contains the key requirements for an increasingly mobile workforce:

• Audit, so you know what’s out there
• Monitoring, so you know what’s gone wrong, or is about to go wrong
• Deployment and configuration, so you can automate your routine IT tasks
• Remote support, so you can provide one-to-one device management when the need arises
• Reporting, giving you complete visibility of your environment.

With the majority of businesses reportedly using less than 30% of the functionality of their office software, I believe choice and the ability of businesses to only have and only pay for the functionality they need is integral. Think of it as the Appstore for IT management.

Finally, integration, the holy grail of IT management is a single technology that ‘does everything’. We’ve yet to see it, so technology tends to be built around a framework that will integrate easily with other software.

Fundamentally, adoption of IT management technology amongst SMEs will be driven by wider economic market conditions – growing business looking to take on more clients, or grow their IT estate, without throwing additional headcount at their IT support function, or struggling businesses looking for efficiency savings. That said, by removing the two key inhibitors to adoption – cost and complexity – the right tools can dramatically accelerate market penetration of remote monitoring and management tools.

On the enterprise side, it will be the adoption of tablets and smartphones that forces IT departments to look outside of the established technologies, and to consider some of the new pretenders and we believe they will be pleasantly surprised by what they see – well-featured, robust, cost-effective and flexible IT management technology that delivers an eye-watering ROI and a ground-breaking simplicity.

Featured in: Business Computing World.

by Christian Nagele l November 3, 2011 l No Comments »