Q: You’ve joined Pangea as Chief Product Marketing Officer. What does the role actually involve?
My job is to make cellular IoT addressable to the channel. That means shaping the product portfolio, the commercial models around it, and how it’s all packaged and positioned for partners.
The wider IoT market has a problem here. Opening up an IoT conversation with an organisation can quickly become a very broad discussion about business processes, how they operate, their infrastructure — and while those are exciting conversations, they’re not always conducive to building a pipeline.
So a big part of what I’m responsible for is turning IoT from a concept into defined, repeatable products the channel can sell confidently. That means working across everything from how we structure tariffs and use cases to how those propositions are structured so partners can have conversations with customers confidently
Pangea connects around 600,000 live services across a wide range of scenarios. My work now is to harness the intelligence that estate gives us — understanding where the strongest opportunities are — and translate that into propositions that make the opportunity tangible for partners.
Q: You came into cellular IoT from a fixed connectivity background. What’s fundamentally different — and was there anything that surprised you?
There are more parallels than you’d expect. The same challenges around simplification, clarity of message, understanding customer pain points. I’ve come from Virtual1 and PXC, so I understood how Pangea goes to market and what partners need to get to grips with a technology.
What’s been genuinely useful is the two-way translation. The Pangea team were translating the cellular world to me, and I was translating back how you express those same concepts from a fixed perspective. That matters because the two worlds are converging. With exchange closures and copper switch-off, cellular and fibre increasingly need to come together to deliver solutions for businesses. Being able to connect the language and the commercial logic is valuable.
There is, of course, a whole new world of acronyms. And in some cases completely different terms for the same thing. That’s part of the learning curve. But the underlying commercial and channel dynamics are more familiar than the terminology suggests.
Q: IoT is growing rapidly as a global market, but cellular connectivity is still underdeveloped across much of the UK channel. What do you think has held it back?
Perceived complexity is the biggest factor. There are a lot of new acronyms, and when a technology isn’t widespread in the consumer space, there’s no bedrock of ambient awareness for the channel to fall back on. With cloud or mobile, there’s a level of everyday familiarity that makes it easier to start conversations. IoT doesn’t have that yet.
Which is a shame, because it’s extremely adjacent to what the channel already does. The channel connects things to the internet — people, places, objects. IoT is a more specialist extension of that, not a completely different discipline.
That’s ultimately what Pangea is here to do: take away the complexity and help partners understand how to get into the market, how it connects to what they already sell, and how their teams can become articulate in the technology. Sometimes it’s as simple as helping partners ask their customers: what do you connect that isn’t a mobile phone?
Q: Fixed and mobile margins are under pressure across the channel. What makes the commercial model for cellular IoT structurally different for resellers?
The value IoT is creating in the market is very visible. Recent acquisitions of IoT businesses show what IoT revenues contribute to valuations — up to three times that of traditional communications products. We’re seeing compound annual growth of around 25% in IoT, with over 100 million items connecting via cellular last year in the UK alone.
For a channel under real pressure in traditional fixed and mobile services, IoT remains one of the few areas with genuine growth and margin opportunity. The economics work differently because you’re managing high volumes of connections across distributed estates, and if the operational infrastructure is designed properly — platform-led provisioning, automated billing, self-service management — the cost of serving each additional connection doesn’t grow at the same rate as the revenue.
That’s where the margin leverage comes from. But it only works if the proposition is designed for it from the outset.
Q: What has to be in place operationally for that margin profile to hold as volumes grow?
Operational overhead and onboarding cost are real deterrents for partners who already have diverse supply chains and wide portfolios to manage. Getting into IoT directly — dealing with multiple operators and platforms — is complex and costly.
To give you a sense of scale: to provide a comprehensive range of solutions, Pangea has built relationships with 15 mobile networks and covers 30 platforms. Multiple operators run multiple platforms, so the underlying landscape is genuinely fragmented. We’ve brought all of that together into one portal — one place to order, configure and self-serve, far more simply than the market makes possible by itself.
That’s the work that makes scale viable for partners. We’ve simplified the IoT supply chain so the channel can take advantage of the opportunity without significantly driving up their cost to serve.
Q: Pangea’s portfolio spans backup, rapid deployment, IoT devices, body-worn video, building monitoring. How do you take that breadth and turn it into something partners can navigate?
We’ve already started. Earlier this year we launched more defined solutions for body-worn video and building monitoring, and I think we’re just beginning to scratch the surface of what’s possible when you translate the world of SIMs, networks, data, tariffs and technologies into use cases that partners can discuss directly with customers.
The intelligence from Pangea’s live estate is key to this. When we can see where the strongest opportunities are across our 600,000 connections, we can deliver simplified products and propositions that meet real demand. When conversations become use-case-driven rather than technology-driven, the opportunity becomes tangible for the channel.
Q: Where do you see partners unintentionally creating complexity when they try to build IoT propositions?
The detail matters in any part of the market — whether you’re talking cloud, security, UCaaS or IoT. To pretend there’s no complexity would be disingenuous.
Where partners can come unstuck is trying to go too far into IoT too quickly. My advice would be to start with something adjacent to what they do today, and often that’s cellular as a complement to fixed connectivity. In a world where resilience for fixed connections is harder to achieve with the removal of copper, cellular plays a clear role — providing resilience for business-critical internet access, supporting temporary locations, or delivering primary connectivity in hard-to-reach areas.
That’s a comfortable first step without needing to dive into complex building management, logistics solutions, or workplace automation, all of which require specialist vertical knowledge to make a real impact.
This is part of why we’ve brought body-worn video and building monitoring solutions to market. Once confidence is built in those more traditional connectivity use cases, partners can start having conversations around defined use cases, which are more familiar and accessible than ones focused on IoT technology. Our approach is about de-risking IoT for the channel. As confidence grows, partners can invest in a simpler, more sustainable way.
Q: At what point does the management layer — provisioning, diagnostics, billing, control — become the real product rather than the connectivity itself?
In many ways it already has. It’s only a lack of familiarity with the market that makes the connectivity components feel like the main event.
Look across any of the other products the channel takes to market — UCaaS, fixed connectivity, voice, traditional mobile. The differentiation is predominantly around the service that surrounds them. As products reach maturity, that naturally happens, and IoT is heading the same way. How a product is experienced is what matters.
That’s why, as a wholesale-only business, Pangea has to provide the foundations from which the channel delivers outstanding service. The portal, the automation, the self-service capability — those aren’t ancillary. They’re increasingly what partners are choosing when they choose a supplier.
Q: Which technology developments do you think will most influence how partners deliver cellular over the next few years?
My first trip to Mobile World Congress was a good reminder of how wide the gap still is between technological possibility and delivered reality. But two areas are closing that gap in ways that will directly affect partners.
eSIM is the obvious one. It offers the potential to move away from SIM cards locked to a single mobile network toward more agnostic solutions that can be reconfigured over the air. It won’t arrive as a technical utopia overnight — commercial structures and interoperability still govern how it’s deployed — but the direction of travel is clear. For partners, it means more flexibility in how estates are designed and managed, and over time, less dependency on any single network decision made at the point of deployment.
AI and network automation are the other area. There’s still a gap between what AI can do in terms of driving operational efficiency and how much control mobile networks are willing to delegate. But as that boundary shifts, it directly improves the service experience partners can deliver. And the channel has always been strongest when the service experience is where the value sits.
Q: What are you focusing on building at Pangea to make cellular easier for partners to adopt and scale?
It’s a combination. On the technology side, we’re investing in the capabilities that will matter most over the next five years — eSIM, automation, and portal and API development that gives partners more control and self-service capability.
On the product side, it’s about continuing to turn our technical breadth into defined, repeatable propositions. Demystifying the products, delivering simple consumable solutions, and giving partners the confidence to grow in the market without needing to become IoT specialists themselves.
Q: If the strategy’s working, what should partners notice six or twelve months from now?
IoT should feel less like a specialist category and more like a natural extension of what they already sell. Partners should be building sustainable IoT pipelines and seeing real value contribution in their businesses.
The conversations should feel more straightforward. The commercial models should be clearer. Partners shouldn’t need to become IoT experts to start selling it profitably. If we’ve done our job properly, the complexity stays with us and the clarity reaches the channel.
For more information, visit pangea-group.net
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