On Tuesday October 25^th, we hosted the seventh iPECS Insights Forum of 2022. These monthly webinars help us share important information with our community of partners and are designed to be informative, interactive, and inspirational.  

October’s webinar was hosted by Ericsson-LG Enterprise’s UK partner, Pragma. CEO, Will Morey, led the webinar which was centered around how Pragma has reached 100,000 iPECS Cloud subscribers.

Pragma has seen some stunning growth in the past year. The iPECS Cloud platform has seen a 38% growth in the UK over last 12 months, double that of the UK industry average. iPECS ONE and iPECS Analytics services have also seen significant rises in attachment rates over the past year.

Pragma has also used its Candio platform, which launched in 2020, to add better value for clients through white-label digital services. They have also partnered with Ribbon Communications to provide expanded MS Teams and Zoom services to the enterprise market.

The UK Market

Will explained that in the UK market, just 38% of businesses have switched to the cloud, with just over 60% still using PBX telephony. There is a huge opportunity for cloud communications to penetrate that PBX market in the years to come. The UK is a reseller-heavy market in terms of communications, with resellers operating their own billing. This allows Pragma resellers to deploy cloud effectively throughout their market.

Pragma’s journey

Pragma began in 2012 solely as a hardware distribution business. In 2016, Pragma recognized the value of cloud, and effectively partnered with Ericsson-LG to successfully deliver the iPECS Cloud platform to the UK market. The iPECS Cloud service expanded, and the arrival of more digital services through the Candio platform, iPECS ONE and Teams Integration. In 2020, Pragma switched priorities and is now established as a primarily cloud-based service provider. Reaching 100,000 cloud subscribers and winning Best UCaaS provider at this year’s Comms National Awards are testaments to their continued growth.

Pragma’s Cloud Platform

Pragma’s Operations Director, Grace Lawless, explained the challenges and benefits to becoming a primarily cloud-based provider. While shipping costs are vastly reduced, more resource has to be put into approving orders, provisioning, billing, and technical support.

Grace also provided an overview of Pragma’s cloud infrastructure. With two data centers, Pragma offers end users geographic redundancy, meaning even if one site encounters an error, there will be a seamless failover for all users.

Pragma has designed a technical stack built around ease of use. They constantly review the services that support both customer interactions, and financial transactions, to ensure they continually provide a great service.

Pragma is now focusing on creating APIs that will support their next 100,000 users. Pragma is working alongside partners such as GetCrisp, to customize the iPECS portfolio to provide bespoke platforms to customers.

Next, Grace provided a demonstration of Pragma’s Power BI platform that reports on all of Pragma’s data sources. This provides a better understanding of their service offering, and how it can be improved.

Power BI notifies the Pragma team when certain changes are made, such as when a customer leaves. This allows Pragma to analyze trends, and work alongside resellers to proactively improve their service.

We’d like to thank Will, Grace and the Pragma team for sharing their guidance and formula to cloud success. We hope to welcome you on the next iPECS insights session in November 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.