Automated Transcript
Matthew Barnett, Channel Director South: Hi, and welcome to Gamma’s podcast, and today we’re going to be talking about SIP, and indeed the move from SIP to UCaaS. I’m joined by Ed Savory, Head of Sales for Pragma, a recently acquired Gamma business, and my name is Matt Barnett. I’m Head of the channel for the UK in the South. So Ed, a big topic, probably worth you starting with putting a bit of context around today and what we’re going to talk about.
Ed Savory, Business Development Director: Of course. Yeah, the landscape of business communications is rapidly evolving. There’s still many businesses out there relying on legacy PBXs, which is a growing risk, and I think the stats show that we’ve still got over half the market to go that are still sitting on a legacy PBX with SIP or even, dare I say, ISDN connected to it that need to make that move to UCaaS.
Matt: And that’s about 7 million seats I think, so still a significant chunk of the market to go. I mean, obviously the cloud presents future proofing. I think that’s clear, we can talk a bit more about some of that future proofing, some of the applications. I guess what this does mean though is we’ve got a change in landscape in terms of players.
Ed: There’s been some real drivers for change. I think you and I have been in the industry quite a long time, and I think some of the historic brands that we’d be aware of that work with major players. Your Toshibas, your Panasonic, your Samsungs, they’ve exited the market. They’re no longer players that we hear and come across. Still, lots of those systems out there that need to be moved. But we’ve seen newer players enter the market, delivering newer technology and a different offering.
Matt: I mean, if anything, as a salesman of PBXs for many years, it’s frustrating how reliable these things have been. So, you’re right, you know, we’ve got end user customers out there that have been sweating these assets for the years. I mean, Gamma introduced themselves into the SIP market early in 2007 and that wasn’t without its challenges, because in those days, much of the connectivity in the UK was nowhere near as solid as it is today. So it’s quite cutting edge at the time, and sometimes the PBXs couldn’t even keep up. But once they got to a point where they were comfortable and we were comfortable, SIPs been a, you know, a long stay player in our industry. What do you think the inflection point is now, where we finally really need to move these last few… say last few, these last seven million users from what is a legacy system over to the cloud?
Ed: I think skill set of engineers that perhaps look after these systems is becoming more and more unusual. You know, it’s the skill set that’s going to be diminishing. There’s not as many people out there. I think the risk of parts, so they’ve got an asset that they’ve sweated, and the risk is there every day. If that system is to crash, the risk is they’re looking at refurbished parts at best. If they can find refurbished parts, expensive parts, because there’s not many of them and then find an engineer that can actually fix it. So there’s a huge risk there to a business. So I think moving forward is to consider how communication in a workplace has changed, how these people now want to communicate, can their legacy technology compete with some of the things that they want to use, video and other technology that have come into play in recent years. I think then there’s flexibility and scalability. It’s very easy to scale a cloud solution. Again, something that PBXs are limited to. They all have a capacity. It’s not as easy to add to it. So flexibility, scalability as a business grows, then I think integrated into modern systems, and the telephony solution is still key to most businesses, but there are other business critical tools that we’re seeing businesses want to integrate to. Whether that’s something like Google or Office 365, whether it’s a CRM, whether it’s an EPOS system. There’s all these different things that come into play now that perhaps weren’t there when they purchase their PBX.
Matt: And I think a lot of people out there… I mean, obviously, we saw a massive acceleration of cloud adoption during COVID, so I think a lot of people ended up actually working in a very hybrid environment where they’ve still got their legacy PBX, they’ve still got the main lines of numbers coming in through that route. But actually, the reality is they’ve got a workforce that are now also using other technologies, whether that be simple mobile phone or whether that be Microsoft Teams or one of the other platforms. So I guess moving into a full cloud environment where you can bring all of that together, and have a bit more control over the employees and how they’re all communicating is probably quite key, and we certainly see that as a driver for a lot of the solutions I’ve seen sort of rolled out in the last six to 12 months definitely. But certainly, a changing environment. So, you mentioned scalability. Scalability is important. The great thing about the cloud is you can flex up, flex down. I remember back in the day, if you needed one extra user, you had to buy a card with 24 ports that cost about the same as a small family hatchback. So, you know, the fact that we’ve got the ability to scale up and we’ve got the ability to flex in terms of contracts, obviously great. But flexibility is a lot more than that isn’t it? Because you mentioned the way that people are communicating. I know you’ve had a lot of work in this area with Pragma. What are you seeing as some of those key technologies now?
Ed: Like you say, we’ve really seen over recent years the way that customers want to communicate with businesses they’re trying to contact is not just voice anymore. We’ve seen a huge array of things like email, social media becoming more and more important. WhatsApp. People want to bring these services into one place and crucially want one portal to manage all these custom communication types. Ideally, if you’ve then got a customer that’s contacted you in multiple ways, the business needs a way to able to see all those communications, manage them all in one place, and have simple access to them. So we’ve seen a growing adoption of the omnichannel solution, so we’re able to offer a full omnichannel solution with email, with social media, with SMS, with web chat as well. You know, all the medias that you could can think of, and we’re seeing increase in demand for that, and even among small businesses. I think there was a perception a couple of years ago that contact centres are large, and if you’re going to have a contact centre, it’s going to be expensive. It needs to be a certain sized business. We’ve not seen that at all. I mean, our second adoption of our contact solution was a full omnichannel offering for a seven user business where they wanted to give the flexibility of their customers to contact them when they wanted to, and in the method that they prefer to contact them. So they rolled out the full media offering of every single channel, and that really opened I think our eyes to the fact that anybody can be a contact centre in this new way that businesses want to communicate.
Matt: I think that’s another sort of tick in the box for that scalability isn’t it? Because typically, you know, in days gone by, where you had a legacy system, the investment in contact centre technology was a significant pound notes upfront investment in, you know, a big box with a lot of flashing lights on it. So ultimately, it would only ever scale if you had, you know, 50, 100, 200 agents, whereas now with cloud technology, you can literally have one agent, two agents, and actually really drill down into somebody’s job role and which elements of the portfolio could add value to that particular user.
Ed: Exactly, and we can be flexible. On your point of flexibility there that when someone takes the contact centre, the omnichannel offering, you can select which media types that individual deals with. So we’ve got numerous rollouts now where a number of the business are just voice plus WhatsApp, or voice plus email, voice plus social media. You’ve got that flexibility to pick and choose. It’s not a one license serves all. You can really be flexible in how you offer it to different types of users.
Matt: So we talked about some of the drivers for change. Legacy equipment, harder to get a hold of now, end of life. Should be on the risk register, alongside the fact that people need to communicate in different ways. It’s not just voice – it’s about other things. I guess the final part of the puzzle, and one that you see used a lot in terms of terminology in the industry, CX, or what we would refer to in long form as customer experience, and I guess the importance around that is that people’s customer experience, journeys if you like, horrible word journey, but used it so I won’t back down. People are looking for a frictionless experience now, you know, whether they’re picking the phone up to talk to their insurance company, or whether they’re trying to buy goods from anyone; Amazon, whoever it may be. The world’s changed, the pace of how we transact has changed, so the technology that you’re building into your platforms and Gamma has been building into ours is really giving us the ability to provide customers, end users, with the chance to deliver a superb customer experience, a frictionless customer experience to their customers.
Ed: So what can we as the Gamma group offer to help with this transition? Well, as you know, there’s a comprehensive portfolio of products available through Gamma, including obviously now iPECS as well.
Matt: I mean, you know, to have Pragma and the iPECS portfolio over to Gamma side of the fence is just fantastic. I mean, it’s given us so much more breadth and depth in what we can do, and we’ve been talking about some of it today in terms of things like omnichannel and WhatsApp integration. And I think, more importantly, a level of agility that perhaps we didn’t have before. You know, when we can actually, you know, work with developers at pace to get systems talking to each other, you know, we’ve really opened the door to a lot of technology. I think equally as important with the Pragma and the iPECS suite is how well it reverse engineers itself as well. So we shouldn’t forget the backwards compatibility, and it’s brilliant that we can move forward. It’s brilliant we can embrace all this new technology, but do you know what? You know, if you’re selling a phone system to someone who runs a garage, they still want to be able to ring a bell in the garage when the phone’s in use. They still want to operate a door entry system that might not be IP-based.
Ed: Press a night mode button if they want to go down the pub early on a Friday afternoon.
Matt: Yeah, or deliver telephone handsets in, you know, listed buildings where it’s hard to get, you know, Cat 5 or Cat 6 technology, and we need to deliver this on good old twisted-pair. Yeah, that stuff still exists, it’s really hard to do that, you know, with a solution that was built for cloud only, and where iPECS just absolutely comes to life is it does all the cloud stuff, but equally, if you need to put a small box on site that will help you deliver some of that more sort of legacy-based technology, we can get the two to work together, and that for me is a huge tick in the box.
Ed: And that’s Ericsson- LG’s Heritage, you know, 30 plus years of providing these on-premises PBX technologies has transitioned this way into their cloud product and made our offering quite unique. So I think these people that have had legacy PBXs for many years want to make the transition, but perhaps cautious because I think they’re going to lose certain things. I think iPECS is a perfect fit for that type of customer.
Matt: Well, I think what it gives us, and the bit why it’s so important to Gamma, you know, we’ve got a huge SIP base, and a lot of that SIP base we can move straight onto a cloud platform. And that will happen, and that has been happening. We’ve been, you know, we’ve been very positive in the market over the last 10, 12 years. Horizon has become, you know, a very popular product, but some of those legacy PBXs are still out there maybe are just hesitating slightly because there’s one or two things that they’ve got so used to doing, and actually they feel they don’t want to be without those things. And where iPECS really adds to our portfolios we can address those, so it allows us to take more of the available SIP market that should be moving into a cloud territory, if that makes sense. It’s probably important to say SIP’s not dead, by the way. You know, we are seeing SIP now as a maturing product if you look at it from a sort of, from a marketing linear curve. It’s now mature product, and in fact we are seeing, you know, some of that beginning to churn slowly. But there’s a reason for that; A, we’re moving into cloud technology, that’s what we’re talking about today. But also, there’s other things happening in the market, you know, we have customers that have decided to deploy their own solutions in their own networks where, you know, they want to have their own SIP and do their own aggregation, for example. And we have products that can enable that, like IPHC. We’ve also got application specific SIP, so one of the obvious ones to point out would be… yeah, Microsoft Operator Connect or OC, which is specifically SIP for Teams, and we will see different iterations of SIP coming out that are application specific, so it hasn’t gone away, and it’s not going to go away, I’m sure, for some time. SIP as a technology is still absolutely, you know, an intrinsic part of what we’re all doing, we’re just seeing less of it in that traditional ISDN30 replacement market, which was typically where we’ve been operating since 2006.
Ed: And you mentioned Operator Connect there. I think there’s a number of businesses out there that are perhaps still running the legacy PBX, but alongside that, have been running Teams for the last few years. Perhaps, you know, started to adopt Teams or Zoom during the pandemic. I think those customers that recognise Teams is important for their business, but they need to make the transition away from that PBX. Operator Connect is a key part of the portfolio that could help. Yeah, and look, Operator Connect, and having Microsoft in the portfolio, is massively part of what we’re doing. You know, if we’re to believe the industry statisticians, over 30% of our marketplace will go down the Microsoft route. It’s a huge part of what we’re doing, and one of our fastest grown products frankly. But to have both Ericsson-LG, and also to have Cisco in the portfolio, we really have been able to create something that caters for a huge percentage of that SIP base. So moving people to alternative technologies with the Gamma portfolio, you know, has really become easier today than it’s ever been, you know, whether or not you’re going down that Team’s route, whether or not you need hybrid type technologies, which you can absolutely cater for with Ericsson-LG, or whether it’s a pure cloud play with Cisco and with Webex. So we have, you know, really got great coverage from the portfolio across all of those elements.
Ed: I think it’s fair to say there’s something for every type of customer out there that needs to make the transition.
Matt: And we’ll continue to add to that. We’re working very closely with Cisco at the moment, so Webex is being launched in the next few weeks, and that part of the portfolio will no doubt grow and strengthen over the course of the next few months. And alongside that will be other new technologies that will complement that, so building out that portfolio and making sure that we’re ticking as many boxes as we can for those people that are moving, you know, from quite complex PBX environments into the cloud. That’s something that, you know, is very much top of our priority.
Ed: And I think we can’t have a discussion around moving customers to UCaaS without mentioning AI. It’s certainly a buzz phrase within industry at the moment. Using technology like AI, using things like sentiment analysis, transcription, without needing to move to our omnichannel offering that we discussed earlier. So we introduced a product last year called CONNECT for the iPECS portfolio, which brings to the average business that doesn’t want to take the leap into CCaaS, because they don’t need to yet, for whatever reason, the ability to have full transcription of all their cause, to have sentiment analysis of their cause, bringing in and enhancing that AI technology to do that. Coupled with the fact that it can integrate to anything that can give us an open API that you mentioned earlier, it means we can actually start to give the technology to these businesses that are not quite ready to make the omnichannel CCaaS leap, but still enhance all the most current technology.
Matt: And transcription services, I mean, that’s something we can now offer across both portfolios. Whether that be Cisco or Ericsson-LG, and it’s a game changer, I must say, for some of these incredibly lazy and rubbish at taking notes on meetings and calls. Having that transcription being automated in the background, it’s just absolutely phenomenal.
Ed: Now it transcribes all your Teams calls, all your voice calls. It’s there for every type of call that you make.
Matt: We come at this very much from a wholesales perspective where the real sort of value is sort of delivered from our portfolios through our partner channel, and the one thing that really has come to light in recent years and months is how they have skilled up over the period of time that I’ve been working with Gamma. I mean, I’ve been with Gamma now coming up 12 years, and we have a super professional channel with people that have got the transition from legacy to cloud down to an absolute T now, to the point where, you know, making significant changes to a customer’s environment is something that seems to just become second nature, whereas when we started out on this journey 12 years ago, all seemed quite hard and difficult. Do you see the same sort of thing, you know, over the period of time that you’ve been managing the roll out of iPECS?
Ed: Definitely. We’ve had to see people transition, including ourselves, from an on-premise, you know, distributor, as we were an on-premise, you know, reseller if you like, that was out on the road installing boxes every day, to a true CCaaS and UCaaS provider. It’s a different skill set, a different type of person, and I think having that skill set and that transition that you mentioned there makes it easier and more comfortable for the end user. It can be quite daunting thinking that you’ve got to change this technology because it’s going, and you need to have somebody that understands what they’re doing, to handhold you through that, to make it seem easy and less complicated, I think it is absolutely vital, and they do that really well.
Matt: There’s so much more they can wrap around the edges of what we do. I mean, obviously our portfolio is growing, we can do a lot of things now with the technology we’ve got access to. But that said, you know, our partners are great at wrapping around things like, you know, the local area and wide area networks, the wireless land infrastructures, and Microsoft licensing, whatever it may be, and we actually become, or be an important part, you know, a part of a much larger solution. It’s just interesting how that’s changed as well really.
Ed: We’ve seen the adoption… a lot of our partners, I’m sure yours as well, of IT services as well in providing that whole wraparound service. We’ve seen them evolve into providing IT as well, and actually, can be a one-stop shop to provide everything that customer needs to enhance their communications at every aspect.
Matt: Yeah, we used to talk about conversions many years ago. 99, 2000, I’m showing my age now, and everybody spoke about it, but nobody actually really did it, and I think, certainly in the last sort of five or 10 years, you know, that’s completely changed, and understanding both sides of the coin in terms of IT and telephony has really become key to the success of many of our partners. So, Ed, look, we talked about moving this SIP base over into the cloud, you know, not just in recent months. This has been a project that ultimately most people in telecoms have been sort of working on a period of a number of years. But in terms of events occurring in the industry, the Switch-Off has to be something that’s probably going to help, you know, fuel the fire and get people to move, you know, quicker.
Ed: Yeah, the events obviously been push back slightly, so we’ve got a little bit longer, but I think we need to look at those compelling events as an opportunity and go back to the stats that we said at the beginning. That 7 million number that you mentioned at the beginning. That presents a huge opportunity, and for all of our partners out there, that’s a huge chunk of the market to go after an opportunity to sell any of the services that we’ve talked about today. We talked about the 7 million SIP that doesn’t take into consideration the dare I say, ISDN and analogue customers still out there that have got the Switch-Off date that they’re working towards. I think they all need to be gathered together and treated as one opportunity, and with the breadth of portfolio that we’ve got, it’s a fantastic opportunity for our partners to really get out there. Embrace that opportunity and sell a technology that’s going to suit those businesses and help their transition.
Matt: And given where Gamma are currently, given where our portfolio is, I think, you know, we’ve probably got an unprecedented level of choice, especially in terms of bringing Pragma and iPECS into the Gamma family, which is, you know, really extended our reach, I think, which is quite important. It’s probably worth reflecting on some of our other sort of key benefits if you like, and we don’t talk about it perhaps as much as we used to, but still very relevant is our product portfolio sits within our own core network. So gamma run a tier one network that covers the whole of the UK, it’s built incredibly resiliently, and in terms of the amount of money that we’ve spent and invested in keeping that network up to date and ensuring that we never run that network at greater than 50% capacity, it’s probably one of the most reliable tier one networks in the UK. It’s business only, so we’re very much focused on the business customer. We’re not in the quad-play market alongside some of the other players, and for us it’s always been about delivering business communication and quality of service across that network, and that hasn’t changed. I mean, that’s quite important, and when you marry that with technologies such as Cisco or Ericsson-LG and the iPECS product, and indeed Microsoft, and what we’re doing with OC, you know, that you’re putting it on a really solid footing and, you know, that the infrastructure powering that… that’s behind that is amongst the best infrastructure that’s available in the market.
Ed: I’m pleased to say, as part of the acquisition, plans are underway now to bring iPECS cloud into that environment, so it’s going to be moving from our environment into the Gamma infrastructure, which is only a huge positive as you say. It’s been bulletproof for many years, so it’s a real enhancement to the iPECS offering that it’s going to benefit from that resilience and that bullet proof infrastructure that it sits on.
Matt: I guess, look, the important thing, you know, from my perspective as somebody that’s going out championing Gamma and our network and our portfolio, is that we are providing solutions that are future-proofed, and that businesses need, and of course, businesses and the needs of businesses are changing all the time. The workforce that’s coming in don’t want to communicate in the same way that, you know, an old duffer like me does. So, everything’s moving to the mobile, everything’s moving to social media, and certainly they’re much more comfortable with, you know, the plethora of soft phones and technology that we’ve all been using of recent years. Anything particular that sticks out for you that recently, that’s made a difference in those terms?
Ed: Yeah, I think… so we’ve mentioned the omnichannel piece earlier that encompasses the social media element and the WhatsApp, but I think one thing we haven’t touched on is the anywhere integrated mobile solution that we have as part of the iPECS cloud portfolio. This has been able to deliver a native SIM, so it could be an eSIM, or it could be a physical SIM into a mobile device that is an extension of the cloud platform. So, you can extend the UC capability to those roaming, those mobile users, so whether that’s somebody that does a lot of time driving, whether it’s site to site, you know, I’m thinking of care at home type people that are out visiting different, you know, different people from day to day. We can really extend the full extent of iPECS cloud to those users, so all their calls are recorded, all their calls can be reported on, and the technology we touched on earlier, AI transcription, again all of those conversations can be transcribed by any other user that’s sat in an office using a soft phone or an old fashioned desk phone. So, I think that’s a real key part of those users that you’ve mentioned that are coming into businesses that are so used to a mobile, and they don’t want, you know, a legacy handset as they see it. They can just bring that mobile in as part of the UC portfolio.
Matt: Just reminds me of something somebody said to me many years ago, and if he ever looks at this see we’ll chuckle but, you know, work is a thing you do, not a place you go, and that really the industry has changed to that point now where, you know, nobody is really tied to a physical handset, and we use such a, you know, an array of products and services to communicate wherever we are, however we want to, I guess.
Ed: And that’s where the eSIM has been absolutely, you know, magnificent for us really. You’ve got big people that come into businesses that are no longer given a business mobile. They want to bring their personal mobile which has a data contract, so we could just drop an eSIM into that with no data, and that eSIM is their UC extension of their place of work. So, wherever they are, you know, they’re part of the solution on a simple device that they’re used to using.
Matt: Yeah, superb. I guess in summary, you know, we’ve covered a lot in a small in a small space of time. I guess the summary is still lots to go, another 7 million odd seats that we can move from legacy to cloud-based services. Lots of choice from the Gamma portfolio. Whether you want to put that against a Microsoft solution an Ericsson-LG solution, a Cisco Webex solution, we’ve got plenty to choose from in terms of overlaying additional services. So, we talked about omnichannel, probably didn’t mention yet call recording, and we talked about transcription. We’ve got most of the things covered there as well, and obviously the compelling event, you know, the Switch-Off is coming, and it’s getting harder now to service these legacy platforms that ultimately the customer has been sweating for many years now. So, there’s a lot of reasons why we know… we should be quite positive about the next few months and years. I mean, it seems to be a lot to go at, and I think Gamma’s in a much stronger position now than we’ve ever been in. So certainly, that gives me a great level of positivity.
Ed: I think, from our point of view, we’re excited about the opportunity. I think our partners should be as well, and excited to be part of the Gamma portfolio and what that may bring over the coming years.
Matt: And obviously, for anybody watching, listening to this, I mean, the call to action from us would be make sure you get in touch with Gamma. Make sure you get in touch with your BDMs and your account managers if anything that we’ve spoken about today has piqued your interest, or resonated with something that would help you, then do pick up the phone and talk to us. We’ve got a significant sales team that are happy to come out and meet with you and discuss your particular requirements. So just to wrap up finally, I’d like to thank Ed Savory from Pragma, now part of the Gamma team, for joining me on today’s podcast. If you do need any further information, as I’ve said, do reach out to your account manager or BDM, and they will be there to help you. Thank you.
