It’s Not What You’ve Got but the Way That You Use it

… Making the most of Microsoft Learning Tools for Education

Have you ever stopped and properly looked at all the tools that your computer can offer you? Not just the obvious Office and web browsers, or even the games beyond Solitaire – who doesn’t like the odd sneaky game of Solitaire? – but at SketchBook and Drawboard, Maps and StickyNotes, not to mention the wealth within the MS app store. If you haven’t – and we’d be willing to bet that you haven’t – then how can you expect your customers to? And if they don’t look, how can they know what Microsoft has to offer?

We always get questions about how Surface devices fit in with education, over the next few weeks and months we’ll be looking at some of the best tools currently available for your customers, starting with MS learning tools.

The ThinkPad has been around for 25 years. Here’s some tech which, um, hasn’t.

As the Lenovo ThinkPad brand reached the ripe old age of 25, the brand has gained a reputation for reliability and high performance. With the red trackpoint button and eye-catching logo, a ThinkPad is instantly recognisable. Whether your customers are after a slim and light device, an ultra-powerful portable workstation or a versatile 2-in-1, there’s a ThinkPad for them.

To celebrate the huge 25-year milestone, we decided to reflect on some tech that, in contrast, hasn’t quite stood the test of time…

MiniDiscs and MiniDisc Players

Despite launching the same year as the ThinkPad, MiniDiscs couldn’t quite knock portable CD players off the top of the tree. When MP3 players launched, MiniDisc players were doomed.

A day at the Microsoft Surface Partner Briefing

By Sam Thrower

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of attending the Microsoft Surface Partner Briefing. A quarterly, first hand opportunity to hear from some of the key players within the Microsoft Surface team about the latest product information and the potential opportunities for the months ahead. It’s been a pretty incredible 5 years for Microsoft Surface on their device journey and from the sounds of it, this is only the beginning …

It was a great day at the Everyman Cinema in Canary Wharf and I came away feeling enlightened with lots of valuable insights into where we’re going next on this incredible Surface journey, insights which I will share with you below….

HP ZBook 15u G4: Feature-Rich & Budget Friendly

Does anyone ever look back on IT hardware with fondness? Has a friend or colleague ever said to you, “You know what, I really miss my Dell Precision 380”? Yeah, that’s what I thought. We’re living in a technological boom, and it’s a great time to be working in IT and following the changes as they happen.

It doesn’t require a great stretch of the imagination to say that those who have benefited most from the constant advances in IT hardware are those who need the most power. For example, gone are the days when designers were using workstations the size of fridge-freezers with 1 gig of RAM in a desperate bid to keep on top of their workload (albeit slowly). Devices have simultaneously slimmed down, risen in performance, and gotten cheaper. And this means that designers are given more flexibility in choice of tech, and that they can finally use workstations that look as appealing as the content that’s being created on them.

Zeroing in on Advanced Cloud Solutions for the SMB

ZenZero began as a small business with big ideas. The plan was to deliver IT solutions to the SMB, so that their clients could rely on enterprise-level technology while working on a more modest scale. A personal, efficient and knowledgeable service soon won ZenZero fans and customers, but the team saw room for improvement.

Small and medium sized businesses have a very distinct set of needs. The likelihood is that they won’t have a dedicated tech department, or even managers, so everything – all forms of support and advice – will need to come from their external solutions supplier. And that’s what ZenZero specialise in; providing bespoke, customer-focused IT products, help and guidance to growing companies. Although already a gold-rated Microsoft partner, ZenZero were experiencing one major difficulty; an inflexibility in service delivery.

HP’s Big Answers to the Security Conundrum

Here’s a sentence you might not be used to seeing: It’s not possible to be fully protected against every security risk in IT. Maybe that doesn’t surprise you. After all, how do you even begin a conversation about security when it comes to IT? If we accept that full protection isn’t possible, then where do we start? Well, with HP actually. And here’s why.

HP are leading the way as an OEM by including vital security features with their Elite range of devices. With such a vast amount of considerations to be made, it’s no longer viable or fair to leave security up to end users, which is why HP have introduced some innovative new features into their premium product line, equipping users with some vital security tools from the get go.

Portable gaming: An industry on the move

By Carl Oxley

Ever since Nintendo launched the first Game Boy in 1989, the world of portable gaming has been witness to a very gradual but notable rise. As graphics improved, more games became available and, most importantly, with huge leaps in memory and the continuation of Moore’s Law, the consoles themselves became increasingly portable. As such, the market has undergone a consistent growth that has recently hit an unprecedented peak.

Data, data everywhere - Securing the Internet of Things Q+A

By Lee Prior & Paul Harman






















Take a look around the typical home 10 years ago and you could probably count the number of devices connected to the internet on the fingers of one hand for the most part, but take a look around that same home today and you’re likely to run out fingers before you run out of devices. Computers, Phones, Games Consoles, TV’s even ligtbulbs, thermostats and doorbells in some cases, and these are going to be joined by a whole host of other things in the coming months and years.

Westcoast Ignite – A fresh new vision

By Lee Prior

As the Marketing Manager for all things HPE here at Westcoast I’ve seen a lot of changes over the past 12 months. Acquisitions like Simplivity and Nimble have expanded the HPE offering, and added to an already deep roster that includes Aruba, Synergy, 3Par and Point Next not to mention industry leading Server and Storage products like Gen9/10 and the ever reliable MSA series.

With so much evolution happening so quickly it can be a challenge to keep up and make sure we’re serving up the information our partners need in a relevant and easy to use format, but we’ve been doing our best and think we’ve got a great tool in the shape of our brand new Westcoast Ignite Portal.

Westcoast Unveils New CSP Business Boosting Initiative

PRESS RELEASE

Distributor Westcoast has launched a brand new programme offering exclusive, long-term support for its CSP (cloud solutions provider) partners.

The Westcoast Cloud Development programme offers resellers a range of tailored benefits all designed to help support their CSP business and accelerate their growth in the cloud.

Partners signing up for the programme will move through a series of development levels - supported by Westcoast every step of the way. As they progress they will have opportunities to unlock additional benefits and rewards to further aid their cloud journeys.

Looking to 2020 – IT trends in the Media Sector

By Loren Stow

The International Data Corporation (IDC) forecasts global IT spend will exceed £2tn by 2020, and while PC, tablet and smartphone sales show signs of plateauing, the market’s 3.3 percent upward trajectory over the next four years will be sustained by the digital transformation found on third-party cloud and mobility platforms.

Healthcare will remain the fastest growing sector in the run-up to 2020 with a projected 5.7 percent rise in IT spending, followed by the banking, media and professional services sectors at 4.9 percent each. So where are the opportunities in each of these sectors? Where do their technological challenges lie? And, what technology-specific solutions will each sector look for as 2020 looms large on the horizon?

In this blog series we take a look at each sector in more detail in the coming weeks, however if you’d like to request a copy of the complete white paper, please click here. In case you’ve missed them, we’ve already taken a look at the Healthcare & Banking sectors.

The 6 Steps to a Decluttered Desk

Desks! Love them or hate them, let’s start with a truth that might hit a bit hard: you probably spend more time at your desk than you do in your living room at home. With that out of the way, the good news is that they’re a lot easier to declutter and tidy than a living room is. How, you ask?

Arista - The Master of One

By David Anthony

HPE’s partnership with Arista is the latest stage in the rebalancing of their switching portfolio. Arista’s products focus exclusively on ultra-low latency and software defined data centre switching, ideal for financial services and service provider networks. This is the perfect complement to HPE’s Comware operating system switch range for the traditional, on premise, data centre and Aruba at the ever-evolving intelligent edge.

What makes Arista stand out in these sectors? It concentrates exclusively on that end of the market, focussing all its resources there. Arista has never tried to be a Jack-Of-All-Trades, it just masters one. Arista switches use two specific features to achieve this, EOS and SysDB.

5 Key Learnings from Microsoft Inspire

By Michael Freeman

2017 has been an incredible year for the technology industry. This was displayed with Microsoft holding their largest Partner Conference to date; the attendee numbers were through the roof and we saw the highest number of female delegates than ever before, showing promise that our industry is ever moving onwards and upwards.

The location was Washington DC, one of the most iconic cities in the world and home of the United States congress. This was the perfect setting for many of Microsoft's hard working and innovative partners to gather and share their knowledge and wisdom. I personally met some truly inspirational people who are doing both important and incredible work on Microsoft's platform and beyond.

HPE Gen 10 - A New Compute Experience

By David Martin

HPE’s annual Discover event is often the platform from which new ideas and innovations are launched, and Las Vegas saw a pretty important one this year as, with much trumpeting and fanfare the latest iteration of their market defining server series was introduced to a waiting world.

You can very often tell how excited a vendor is about a new product, solution or innovation by the focus it is given at every opportunity, and if that holds true then HPE are very excited indeed about Gen 10 and everything it has to offer, and in truth they have every right to be excited.

Would your business be protected from a vicious Petya Malware attack?

By Adam Hartley

A new variant of the Petya malware family was discovered on Tuesday 27th June 2017. The Petya family of malware is not a new one and was first seen and classified in March 2016. Juniper researchers have previously blogged about this malware in the past. This previous version of the Petya ransomware is available to cybercriminals to purchase as a service (Ransomware-as-a-service or RaaS) rather than developing their own malware.

If you're not quite sure what Petya Malware is, in simple terms it's a vicious computer program that steals your computers information and makes it unreadable to the computer. If your computer cannot read the data then it is lost to you and you will have to pay the creators money to get your data back.

Stay ahead of the curve in gaming with Samsung's new gaming monitors

So they’re up to their ears in RAM, they’ve got a graphics card as powerful as the sun, a super-powered processor, and an SSD that’s faster than Usain Bolt on roller skates. So what’s the modern gamer missing? The answer is right in front of your nose. Like the cruellest of bosses, end-users itch to squeeze every ounce of performance out of their mega machines – often without updating the thing that actually displays the fruits of their labours: the humble monitor.

Until relatively recently monitors were a non-entity in the arms race that is PC gaming, not because they weren’t considered, but because they weren’t available. Things have changed since then, and Samsung’s latest offering is indicative of just how important having the right monitor is. The technology giant doesn’t just raise the bar; rather it straps the bar to a rocket and sends it to new celestial heights.

10 steps to increase your StoreOnce sales by up to 35% with NinjaProtected+

By Billy Robinson

Data is the currency of the modern business, and you don’t have to look back as far as Feudal Japan to see what happens to organisations that fall victim to data loss. Despite this though, it’s a fact that customers sometimes struggle to control their backup environment and understand problems like: backups lasting over a week, failures, data retention and that’s why HPE has developed a tool to get backup systems under control: The Ninja Protected+ Assessment.

Windows Server: The Support Available

By Phil Lamplugh

Windows Server 2016 has been out for a while now, so I thought it would be a good time go through all of the support that you can get from Westcoast.

First of all, one of key selling points of Westcoast overall is that we don’t use any sort of voicemail system here. Every time you call during our office hours (and sometimes outside of them), you’re guaranteed to speak to a human straight away.

Why your customers want you to discuss HPE Synergy and composable infrastructure

By Stuart Wareham

Remember when HPE (HP in old money) brought Blades and the virtualised infrastructure to the channel over a decade ago? That was a land mark moment for the evolution of the data centre. To reduce rack space, operating costs and drive efficiencies that an IT manager could not only visualise but also deliver the ROI that the business demands.

HPE Blades are still here, in fact there will be Gen 10 Blades released this summer. What do Blade customers want and expect from their IT infrastructure in 2017? The answer is a composable infrastructure – but do they know that and what does that mean? Isn’t that just another phrase banded about the channel like Hybrid IT, hyper-converged and the cloud? Let’s look at composable infrastructure in more detail.