Recently, RingCentral discussed the next chapter in business communications and collaboration through its acquisition of Glip. For those of you not familiar with Glip, it’s a team messaging and collaboration software-as-a-service for business that works across desktops and mobile devices.
Bringing workforces closer together and making it easy to communicate has always been the core of RingCentral’s mission. We want to give our customers the best possible business communications experience, regardless of their location or device. And we also want to support the multiple ways people want to communicate and get their work done.
It’s too often the case that collaboration is hindered by long threaded emails, fragmented conversations, different locations for documents, and different applications where messages are sent to one another. Communications and collaboration has become too siloed between lots of different workflows and applications, and the result is major slippage in productivity and work efficiency.
It should be easy to quickly flip from team chats to a real-time phone call, conference call, or video chat. With our acquisition and integration of Glip into RingCentral, our vision is to lead the future of what two industry analysts, Zeus Kerravala and Dave Michels, are calling WCC (Workstream Collaboration and Communications). This means transforming the way people work in distributed and agile teams, without the frustration and fragmentation that has hindered us through the old ways of working.
We are really impressed with the Glip product. They’ve created a world class business messaging solution and mastered the complex art of tightly integrating collaboration and productivity features including: team calendars, file sharing, shared notes, image annotations and task management. The product also has some powerful integrations with other cloud services like Zendesk and Google Drive. Imagine as a support agent using Zendesk if you could instantly share your work with other people in your organization without making them login to Zendesk! Best of all, all of this information can be easily searched and located in the Glip interface.
The power behind Glip’s application and the notion of WCC is amazing. Think about it. Glip ate their own dogfood to make Glip as amazing as it is today in less than two years which may have taken other companies using email more than double the time! Their work itself demonstrates the power of how the right tools can help a team be fast moving, agile, and more collaborative.
We’re just at the beginning here of a major shift between bridging the traditional way of working and the next generation of work in the cloud. Stay tuned for more updates on the new RingCentral Teams later this year!
Originally published Jul 01, 2015, updated Jul 19, 2021
