Automated Transcript
Ed Savory, Head of Sales at Pragma: So my name is Ed Savory, I’m Head of Sales at Pragma, an acquisition earlier this year by Gamma, and I’m here with Ahed Alkhatib, the Global Head of Sales and Marketing at Ericsson-LG Enterprise. So we’re here to talk about all things Ericsson-LG. So Ahed, your first attendance at Gammaverse and being part of the Gamma family, how are you finding today?
Ahed Alkhatib,Global Head of Sales and Marketing at Ericsson-LG Enterprise: Delighted, it’s been an absolute joy to be here. The scale of the event, the number of partners that are here. I guess the technology and innovation talk, totally aligned with where we see the market, where we’re charting our courses. So it’s very exciting to be part of it. And of course, I had the opportunity to meet with some of the Gamma management team the day before, so a lot of this stuff, talking around what we’re doing and getting aligned on what is required, both by them for their channel and for their market has been both insightful and inspiring and exciting to be part of it all.
Ed: Excellent. And on that scale and excitement, how do you feel about the Gamma relationship and the excitement within the business? What opportunities do you feel that could bring?
Ahed: Well, look, I think from my perspective, I’m going to go back to when we started this thing with Pragma, and I think we built such an awesome value proposition and quite a disruptive commercial model. And I dare say that Gamma took notice, and I think the decision to bring us into the family and then leverage that value proposition and the disruptive approach that we have is going to give them another channel into the marketplace that complements what they’re doing. And I spent a little bit of time on stage with Microsoft and Cisco as co-panel members, and I think what really came out to me is that we all have different strengths and weaknesses. There are parts of the market that we address better than Cisco and Microsoft, and there are parts of the market that they’re going to address a little bit better than what we do. It’s this co-operation, this collaboration, this complementary solution offering that we’re going to take to market. And I think Gamma has done well to recognise that there isn’t one size fits all vendor to address the market requirements. Having this ecosystem of complementary vendors in their partner system is what’s going to help them differentiate their value proposition in the market and take a greater share of the market moving forward.
Ed: It makes the proposition so strong for the partners here today; they’ve got that choice.
Ahed: Totally.
Ed: Excellent. And we’re approaching the end of 2024. In terms of Ericsson-LG, how’s the year been so far?
Ahed: Well, look, we’ve had an exceptional year. Cloud growth for us is still double digit, 20-30% year-over-year growth, so that is the star, the hero of our business is the growth. What’s really interesting and what’s really cool about our business at the moment is in recent times, it’s been the UK market that has kind of been driving the greater share of the growth. But now, with the South Africans coming on board and we’re doing some amazing things there, the Australians as well, the Italians are doing stuff, the Greeks are now on board, I was in New Zealand a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve done a pivot there as well in terms of our go-to-market and our wholesale model. So there’s a lot more growth in addition to the stuff that we’re doing here that is driving and propelling our growth. The other interesting thing, and I know it’s this unsexy thing to talk about, is that the premise remains robust. We’re seeing it taper off, to be sure, but with the exit of some of the larger premise vendors in the market, it has presented us with some opportunity to take on some partners that are not yet ready for the migration or the evolution to cloud. We’re kind of making do there because, you know, my view on this is very simple: every premise customer today is a future cloud customer for us because we provide the most optimal journey for an Ericsson-LG premise partner or premise customer to take that journey into cloud. So for us, the focus and the growth and the strategies are all around cloud, but there’s still opportunity, and there’s still demand for the legacy premise systems.
Ed: Huge opportunity. And you’ve heard a lot of talk today about this SIP to UCaaS migration. There are a lot of customers still in the UK sat on on-premise solutions. You mentioned the vendors dropping away. We’ve seen another vendor pull out this year, so we’re still seeing some of those opportunities, although we’re vastly cloud in terms of new business. I think us and Gamma see that iPECS is a fantastic fit for that SIP to UCaaS migration.
Ahed: Totally agree, and I think that’s been one of our surprises and surprise learnings. Originally, we anticipated and believed that the value proposition we were offering with iPECS Cloud was that migration for Ericsson-LG prem users to reuse the handsets, the user experience that is on par or parity with what you had with prem. What was interesting for us once we engaged and launched and grew the business here is that we were signing on Ericsson-LG Prem partners because the value proposition that we had around the telephony functionality and the UCaaS capabilities was aligned with what the requirements were. So the opportunity, as you say, is to go back into that installed base, not only our install base but the installed base of some of the other legacy vendors who don’t have a value proposition to cloud and capture that market share as well. So I think there’s a lot more opportunity to be had in the UK market for us, to be sure.
Ed: Hugely exciting to look forward to going into next year. Speaking of 2025 and the future, how does 2025 look for Ericsson-LG? What are your key drivers going into the new year?
Ahed: Well, look, we’ve been stretched on multiple fronts, okay? So if I can reflect a little bit and speak to the engagement that we’ve got with the multi-level engagement that we have with Gamma at the moment, so there’s a whole group around Gamma talking to us around the operation and management part of the platform, integrating that into the OSS/BSS of Gamma, making that part of the Gamma portal, using those APIs to unify that engagement and that experience into Gamma. Very key for us. There’s also a requirement around APIs to enable a much richer set of engagement or interoperability with third-party applications. It’s strange, once that we’ve had to do that enable us to get into certain businesses. Then on our side, the continued innovation around developing iPECS One, continued innovation about developing our call centre application that we’re doing, and pressing forward on that, not to mention the other stuff that we also need to do around security, resiliency, and continued enhancement around those things. So it’s an operation management bit, it’s a feature-function piece, and it’s an API integration as well as an OSS/BSS integration. So there, as I said, we’re being multi-level engagement torn in all different directions. I guess the good thing is that the requirements that are being driven and being requested, they’re uniform across the business, so whatever we do here is going to have value and applicability for what we need in other markets. It’s not so unique in terms of being bespoke to the point where it’s just a UK thing. It’s really a global thing, and that helps us tremendously.
Ed: You mentioned APIs a couple of times there. I think we can’t have a conversation like this without mentioning APIs without mentioning AI as well. I’m just interested on Ericsson-LG’s stance on AI and how that’s going to come into what these businesses do on a daily basis.
Ahed: Yeah, look, AI’s got a lot of hype, and it means a lot of different things to a lot of people. From our perspective, it’s really about delivering real business value and real business function. Insights in terms of what’s going on in your network is a form of AI. But I think there’s also stuff that we’ve done with Cosoft and GetCrisp to integrate into the iPECS One application, to be able to do speech-to-text conversion, sentiment analysis, meeting summary recording, integrate that into a CRM, to be able to reference later on to give you that insight and intelligence and understanding of the customer engagement that you had, so that you can build on that and be ready to act on stuff rather than just having it all integrated. It’s very key. There’s a lot of different layers, I think, to AI that we need to peel back, around analytics, around engagement, CRM integration, and other things that are all critical parts of that value process or value chain that enable a better customer experience.
Ed: It’s been key for us in speaking to the customer experience there. We’ve seen a shift where customers want a better customer experience. Customers want to interact with them in different ways other than just voice, but they don’t always want to go to a full CCaaS proposition. So having AI involved with sentiment analysis, transcription, and so on at that level, I think, is key to the way the market’s going.
Ahed: It’s very interesting that you raised the CCaaS thing. This is another kind of platform, and when we talk about CCaaS, it’s the omnichannel contact centre CRM, but we’ve got opportunities, for example, where all they’re looking for is a queuing function, like a small doctor’s office, for example. They’re not looking for a full-blown contact centre. What they’re really looking for, and I don’t even like calling it a contact centre, is intelligent call management and routing functionality in the business because they haven’t got a slew of helpdesk agents sitting around taking phones. So for us to be able to deliver some value around call management, call routing, intelligent call management and call routing in the business is a form, of a feature of a contact centre application, but that really adds value to a small doctor’s office or a lawyer’s office. And being able to manage queues and transfer calls amongst different associates is really key, but it’s not a full CCaaS value prop. It’s something very specific to a vertical that adds value to the way that they do business.
Ed: I think iPECS conquers that part of the market well, and obviously, we’ve got the full CCaaS offering as well if we need to. So it’s a product set that never ends, really.
Ahed: I think that’s a very important point to consider as well. We’ve come to the realisation in recent years that we can’t be everything to everybody, and building an ecosystem of partners is critical to our success, especially when it comes to contact centers. There’s no one dominant kind of contact centre vendor globally; it’s very localised both in terms of feature function, ways of working, and local service and support. So for us, we’ve got a number of different contact centre partners that work in different markets, whether it’s in Israel with Aspire, Australia with Sidetrack, or here with DuckTiller. All of these guys bring different things to the table and are very specific to the market. There is some overlap that we can leverage globally, but then there’s also the very specific localised experience that’s also important. We’ve found that that’s adding value to the way we go to market and addressing a real requirement on the ground in the country for the partner and for the customer. And so that’s been very key for us as well.
Ed: You mentioned global a few times there. One thing that was really interesting to the guys at Gamma was we were lucky enough to join you at the Ericsson-LG Global Partners Conference in March earlier this year, which was over in Thailand. Understand plans for another GPC in the New Year in Cambodia?
Ahed: Absolutely. We’ve chosen Cambodia as the place for our GPC in 2025. A little bit off the beaten track, you know. We’re trying to create an experience that will be memorable and exciting. But I think for us, really, the GPC is an opportunity to get the partners together from all over the world, and the most important thing there is really the sharing of knowledge and experience and understanding that the partner community has huge experience, expertise, and competence. That informal communication, as well as the general conference that we have on the day, is critical to improving the knowledge base, the experience of the partners, and, you know, we’ve got a phenomenal, wonderful partner community that is very collaborative and always very eager to share and help each other out. We find that part of the conference is the most critical.
Ed: Agreed, it’s always a fantastic event, and I’m very much looking forward to it. So, just leads me to say thank you for flying halfway around the world to join us here at Gammaverse. Hope you’re enjoying it, and look forward to catching up with you a bit later for a few drinks.
Ahed: Sounds awesome, thanks for having me.
Ed: Thanks very much.
