Tim Brooks kicked off proceedings with a round-up of the previous year which saw Pragma grow by 30% in top line sales. Pragma managed to buck the market trend in on-premise sales and actually captured 7% (up from 3%) of the market in the sub-100 sector. According to figures published by MZA this puts Ericsson LG in the top five vendors in the UK. Brooks explained in his opening speech that this success is down to several significant mid-market wins by partners where they have beaten other top vendors like Mitel and Unify to certain deals.
Brooks said "We have actually grown 30% with five fewer partners than the previous year! We want to grow with you (ie. with resellers) and not by recruiting more partners."
Will Morey was extremely excited to launch the latest addition to the portfolio, iPECS Cloud. On stage he said "We have been testing it since July and although we promised it would be ready last year we wanted to make sure we got it right."
iPECS Cloud brings all the features from the current iPECS proposition and delivers them from the cloud. The system is designed to scale with customers as they grow and can serve businesses of all sizes from multiple locations. Through the portal customers can add on-demand services with same day provisioning for great flexibility.
The day was rounded off by an appearance from ex-formula 1 driver Johnny Herbert who delivered an inspiring speech about his career and how he overcame a serious crash to get back to the top of the F1 sport.
In the evening, attendees were treated to a black-tie dinner, some Rockaoke, and a string of awards. Steffan Dancy, Managing Director of Peterborough-based reseller Rydalcomms, picked up an award for 'New Partner of the Year'
Dancy commented "The award we won was for New partner of the year, this was awarded to ourselves and Cloud Source Technologies, it was neck and neck. I am more than happy to share this award with Carl and his team at Cloud Source. We meet, along with a few others, once a month in the city to share ideas on how we can grow, learn and be successful at what we do.
The team here at Rydal Comms have done a fantastic job in selling and delivering the IPECS solution. Their hard work has paid off and I would like to thank them for living our values day in day out!
The event allowed us to see the new hardware on show, the roadmap of the new ‘cloud’ offering (which we will be selling) and how we can best solution sell into our existing customer and new future clients. It’s also great to network with other like-minded companies who really want to push innovative products/solutions forward into UK businesses. The community within Pragma’s distributors really do want to help each other and this is worlds apart in comparison to other relationships we have."