Ericsson-LG distributor Pragma unveiled iPECS Cloud to partners during its annual conference held at Whittlebury Hall near Silverstone on February 4th. The launch comes at a time when Ericsson-LG's confidence in the UK market has soared to a ten year high.
The Pragma-Ericsson-LG partnership is paying dividends with a 30% rise in sales of on-premise systems last year and significant advances made into the mid-market and larger enterprise space; and in a show of bullish ambition the vendor is eyeing third place in the UK vendor league having moved up to fifth position in MZA's latest market report.
Will Morey, Director and co-founder of Pragma, stated: "Cloud evangelists say that the PBX is dead and cloud is the only option. We all know that isn't true.
"But cloud is showing healthy growth and our partners expect an increasing proportion of their customer base to move to the cloud over the next few years.
"So we've made significant investments in taking iPECS-CM and turning the product into a fully virtualised feature rich and reseller friendly cloud platform."
iPECS Cloud has four engagements models: Dealer, reseller, VSP and full service provider. Everything is wrapped into a portal with four levels of access.
Ericsson-LG has a clear roadmap to develop new features, functionality and capabilities for iPECS Cloud with version two planned for release in May, version three in September and another next year.
"Every step of the way Ericsson-LG ensured that iPECS Cloud upholds a reseller-centric business model with a strong commercial proposition, simple deployment and bundles for leasing propositions," added Morey.
"Proprietary and feature rich functionality is also key. All on-premise kit is cloud-ready, so customers can move to the cloud 'as and when', and partners can build up these future upgrade opportunities."
Pragma partner Lily Comms MD Chris Morrisey welcomed news of Ericsson-LG's progress. "With the launch of iPECS Cloud we are able to offer our prospective and current clients a choice of on-premise, hybrid or cloud communication systems without sacrificing features, all under the Ericsson-LG brand," he stated.
"No longer is Ericsson-LG a telephony manufacturer, it is a communications provider focused on applications and software in addition to the base proposition which is telephony.
"This aligns with how we are positioning ourselves in the market, not as a telephony provider, but a communication solutions specialist."