01732 759725 38 COLLABORATION In 2020, Morey built a separate business, Candio, to meet demand from resellers for digital products that they could add to their portfolio to increase recurring revenue and stickiness with customers. “We came up with the idea of finding very high value products at a very low cost that we could push out through digital campaigns and which people were happy to have added to their bill. Our first service was something called Web Listings. What that does essentially is enable a business to manage all of its online identity through a single portal (e.g. Apple Maps, Facebook, Instagram, Google Business Profile), create that entry once and then broadcast it out. “We saw that grow incredibly. At the end of our first year, we had added 50,000 business subscribers to the platform, and we have continued that kind of growth trajectory this year, while adding new services like Dark Web Monitoring. “The important thing to understand about those two businesses is that they’re 100% channel. Everything we do is through resellers. We are a 100% reseller business and always optimise every business process and every aspect of what we do to serve the reseller.” Morey was exploring ways to keep growing the two businesses when he met Dean Mayer, owner of Techland, a longstanding business (it will be 40 in March 2023) with strong parallels to Pragma in that it has huge amounts of specialism, capability and support invested in one vendor, in its case Ribbon, and a 100% channel approach. “There was immediately a sense of being two very similar businesses with a similar culture and a similar outlook. We both believe in strength in depth and capability and expertise. Resellers want an expert on the end of the phone, not someone who knows a tiny amount about 50 different products.” In March, the three companies came together, creating a group with 50 employees (35 from Pragma/Candio and 15 from Techland) and a community of 250 resellers, with Dean Mayer taking on the role of CFO and Morey taking over the role of CEO from Pragma co-founder Tim Brooks, who has a shareholding but no leadership role in the merged entity. Crossover appeal “EnableX started off as a trading group name,” explains Morey, “but it has become more and more relevant to everything we’re doing, because we’ve seen a huge amount of crossover between the different businesses – Pragma with its Ericsson LG UCaaS technology, Candio with its software as a service, high impact subscription products and Techland with Ribbon and its products.” This has given resellers more opportunities to address the needs of their customers at a time when the role of the reseller has never been more important in helping organisations develop a strategy for digital transformation and new ways of working. “We live in a world of change, but, actually, we believe some things are constant and don’t change, like businesses wanting a trusted adviser who really works to understand their business and deliver bespoke, customised technology. “If you’re a metal fabrication company, you probably don’t want to spend all your time thinking about how technology works; you probably want to focus on doing what you’re really good at. So the reseller, I think, has remained the constant in the market. They’re as relevant today as they were 10 years ago when we started our business because they’re able to be that trusted adviser to so many businesses. “That role of trusted advisor hasn’t changed – being able to take a multitude of different technologies from the voice world, from productivity applications like Office 365, through to the data network and connectivity, to the mobile phone contract and pulling all those bits and pieces together into a coherent technology strategy. That is what our resellers absolutely excel at.” Secure IP communications Today, those technology strategies increasingly involve collaboration and communication via Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google and Webex by Cisco, which makes Techland’s offering of Ribbon A new power in the distribution world was born in March, with the creation of EnableX from the merger of Pragma, exclusive UK distributor of Ericsson LG unified communication solutions, Candio, a provider of white-label digital services, and Techland, a Value Added Distributor of UC enablement products and managed services for Ribbon Communications (amongst others). Since then, CEO Will Morey and CFO Dean Mayer, previously owner of Techland, have been integrating the three companies and developing their respective product offerings to provide new opportunities for resellers – especially the group’s 120 Pragma resellers. Will Morey co-founded Pragma in 2012 to distribute the Ericsson LG PBX, with the objective of eventually becoming a cloud business, which it now largely is, following the introduction of the iPECS cloud proposition in 2016. “That grew very, very quickly and was clearly accelerated by the pandemic, as many of these things were, to the point where we’re now almost exclusively a cloud UCaaS (unified communications as a service) provider. We’ve got approximately 100,000 subscribers on the platform, who consume that service.” Will Morey, CEO of EnableX, is encouraging resellers to make the most of the Group’s expanded offering and seize the opportunities presented by massive take-up of cloud collaboration solutions like Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Ericsson-LG iPECS, Google Workspace and Webex by Cisco Ribbon development Will Morey
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