On Tuesday 25^th of May, we hosted the fourth iPECS Insights Forum of 2021. These monthly webinars help us share important information with our community of partners and are designed to be informative, interactive and inspirational.

Partners were welcomed to May’s webinar by Gyein Shin, Ericsson-LG Enterprise’s Account Manager for UK. May’s session was designed to show how the UK has achieved great success in the cloud market, despite the challenging circumstances of the past year.

Gyein invited Pragma’s Managing Director, Tim Brooks, to introduce the webinar and provide his view on how the UK cloud market, and especially Pragma has adapted to the new normal.

Tim explained that the UCaaS market in the UK is expected to grow to 14.5 million seats in the coming year. This is driven by the fact that during the pandemic, providers such as Pragma worked to migrate a huge number of customers to the Cloud, to meet the demands for a more flexible working environment.

Pragma achieved this by working closely with Ericsson-LG Enterprise on promotions such as a 3-month free cloud trial, and by creating a comprehensive set of video guides to a variety of iPECS Systems, reducing the need for site visits. This allowed Pragma to create a sustainable recurring revenue stream that will allow them to further develop their cloud offering and continue advancing despite the highly competitive UK cloud market.

The UK market was hit harder by the Covid19 Pandemic than many others due to a variety of reasons. Lockdowns had a huge impact on sales and there were shortages in systems due to port congestions and space bookings. This also led to a skyrocketing cost in procurement and logistics. All of these situations created risk and had to be countered.

2020 also created a huge amount of uncertainty, and these created new market trends. Cloud services were adopted in huge numbers due to the desire for business continuity and commercial flexibility. The need for home working and team collaboration from various environments were also crucial. Services such as iPECS ONE have seen success in the UK market due to the way that they help to solve these demands.

The UK’s communication landscape is very crowded. Even as on-premise competitors such as Panasonic are discontinued, there are many competitors in the instance-based and collaboration markets that are emerging all the time to meet the increasing demand created by the rise of flexible working.

Pragma has adapted to respond to each competitor. By focusing on converting on-premise customers to cloud, launching iPECS ONE and continuing their focus on strong customer care they continue to thrive and stand-out from the competition.

The trends in the UCaaS Market in the next 6 years point towards the continuing importance of disruptive technologies such as IoT, AI and APIs. The ability to work remotely will also be in high demand moving into the future as the need for a traditional office environment is in decline. Finally, there is an increasing move towards digitization, and this creates new opportunities for services to improve collaboration and critical business services in a remote environment.

During the webinar Gyein introduced some of the latest and best iPECS case studies from the UK. The first of these was the PCS Union who had iPECS ONE effectively introduced to 295 extensions over 10 different sites, allowing them to support remote working.

Gyein also mentioned the case of Everyone Active, a sports and leisure management company who effectively switched from a Mitel system that was reaching capacity, to an iPECS Cloud solution that was provided to 90 sites and nearly 1000 users across the UK. Everyone Active will also take advantage of the iPECS Analytics service arriving soon.

iPECS Cloud also provided unique solutions for the expanding medical sector in the UK. Grove Medical was one practice that benefitted from adopting iPECS Cloud over their previous Avaya RingCentral solution. iPECS Cloud’s reliability and flexible billing options make it the ideal solution for the healthcare industry.

Pragma are a leader in the UK cloud market and their progress allows Ericsson-LG Enterprise to develop our sales and marketing approach as well as the way we develop our digital transformation services across the world. We’d like to say a big thank you to all of the Pragma team.

The next iPECS insight session will be hosted in June. We hope to welcome you then to share your thoughts and learn from our industry experts.

“iPECS insights is a forum where we can collaborate, share ideas and learn best practices to drive success and growth of the iPECS brand and portfolio globally. We will invite subject matter experts to lead each of the iPECS insights sessions which will last for no more than 2 hours and cover a range of technical and marketing focus areas.”