On the 23^rd of February 2021 we hosted our fifth iPECS insights forum. These monthly webinars help us share important information with our community of partners and are designed to be informative, interactive and inspirational.

February’s Presentation was hosted by Ahed Alkhatib, Ericsson-LG Enterprise’s Global Head of Sales & Marketing. The topic of this month’s webinar was how a subscription-based model can help both partners and customers to gain more value from their services.

Ahed detailed how subscription-based sales models are now a dominant force in many notable industries. Companies such as Netflix, Microsoft and Ford have made great strides in pioneering a service model in the public consciousness. As a result, this way of selling services is now an accepted part of the global market. In the telecoms industry we are witnessing the same story.

The UCaaS industry is now $80b in size. The field is growing exponentially for a variety of reasons as Ahed explained. The first and foremost of these reasons is that it is what customers are now demanding. Customers now require a great experience alongside their products, and this is best delivered through a subscription model.

We have seen this demand emerge gradually throughout many of the technology services that businesses use daily. Storage was the first service to move to a cloud subscription, followed by office applications, CRMs and now UC services.

Ahed explained how the rise of social distancing was another catalyst for the rapid growth of cloud subscription services. Cloud services were incredibly supportive to those businesses who used them whilst maintaining a remote workforce. Many users loved the fact that when you subscribe to a UCaaS platform you gain access to future innovations and updates as they arrived.

The communications industry is constantly evolving. Being able to provide customers with a continually updating service that is well-maintained is a fantastic way for both your business and your customers to stay ahead of the competition.

Guest speaker Will Morey was invited to share his experience of switching to a subscription-based model. Will is Sales and Marketing Director of Pragma, who have had an incredibly successful deployment of their cloud service amidst a crowded UK market.

Will explained how Pragma went from having zero recurring revenue streams to having Cloud subscriptions as a core part of their offering. Will explained some of the many benefits as well as the challenges of switching to a subscription-based model.

Will was keen to emphasize the way that Pragma successfully introduced Cloud services while still supporting their existing on-premise solutions. He explained that there is a change of mindset needed from everyone in the business to transition from being a distributor to a service-provider. This mindset is ingrained in everything that Pragma does, from billing to customer support.

Finally, Will and Ahed both reiterated the revenue benefits to adopting a subscription model. Businesses who operate with a high level of recurring income were valued far higher than those who did not, and this was reinforced by the uncertainty caused by Covid 19.

Adopting a subscription-based model opens up many new avenues for our global partners. From new ways to expand their business through additional services such as software assurance to opportunities to build greater customer relationships. Subscription based sales models are opening up exciting possibilities for the future of business communications.

The next iPECS insights session will be hosted in March 2021. 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.