The cloud communications and collaboration industry has been going through a dramatic shift over the past year. One thing is clear: The cloud is winning. And RingCentral is winning in the cloud by helping businesses leverage cloud solutions in new and innovative ways. Our mission is simple: We empower employees in organizations of all sizes to be more productive and ultimately more responsive to their customers.
We’re delivering on this mission through industry-leading innovation and by continually developing our platform to deliver more value to businesses like yours. Some of our key areas of focus include:
- Executing on our Collaborative Communications vision: going beyond older unified communications concepts by bringing together all modes of conversation for the workforce to communicate and collaborate.
- Delivering an open platform so that software partners and customers can easily integrate other applications with RingCentral solutions creating custom workflows tailored to suit their needs.
- Extending our global reach and improving the level of service we deliver to businesses enabling them to operate efficiently on a global basis.
We’ve made a lot of progress over the past year in each of these areas along with other key milestones. Let’s run through:
Introduced Collaborative Communications
Technology continues to empower people to work the way they want—anytime, anywhere, and from any device. Historical divisions between communications and collaboration technologies no longer make sense; instead we’re seeing our customers around the world asking for a unified experience.
Early in 2017, we announced that the RingCentral Glip team messaging and collaboration solution would become an integral part of the next-generation RingCentral Office, our flagship business communications cloud solution. We’re well on our way toward creating the industry’s leading Collaborative Communications experience.
Increased the reach of our open platform
Unified experiences with a collaboration-first approach is at the core. Next, seamless experiences across your business workflows is increasingly becoming a key requirement for enterprises. With more than 10,000 developers and over a 1,000 partner and customer integrations, RingCentral has made application integrations easier and more seamless. In 2017 there were new and enhanced integrations with popular partners like Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce. And most recently, we announced the integration of RingCentral with Amazon’s new Alexa for Business, which enables users to leverage voice commands to start meetings, check voicemails, send texts, manage calls, and more.
Broadened our global footprint
We closed out 2017 with RingCentral Global Office available in 37 countries, most recently adding Latin America support in Brazil, Peru, and Argentina. Hundreds of enterprises today use RingCentral Global Office to support their mobile and distributed workforce worldwide. We also expanded multi-language support of our product and customer service last year.
Scaled enterprise communications
The top story of 2017 was that more and more large enterprises trust the backbone of their communications and collaboration solution needs to RingCentral. Our mid-market and enterprise segments grew to a $178 million annualized, representing 76% year-over-year growth and contributed over 55% to our new Office business in Q4 2017.
Key to this rapid uptake among larger enterprises was our expanding ecosystem of channel partners, which includes several diamond-level Avaya channel partners. Channel partners have significantly expanded our reach among the mid-market and enterprise and contributed 35% to our overall bookings in Q4 2017.
Expanded Services & Support
Over the past year, RingCentral has scaled its services and support team globally, and added new leadership to the organization. We’ve expanded our value-add strategic services such as enterprise support, network assessments, managed services, RingCentral University, and more. And we continue to expand support in multiple languages, which includes English, Spanish, German, and French. Our dedication to services and support hasn’t gone unnoticed. The Technology Services Industry Association (TSIA), an industry association which measures performance among SaaS and Communications providers, scored us 9.4 out of 10 in services and support in 2017, compared to the SaaS industry average score of 8.5.
Recognized for industry leadership
RingCentral is a worldwide leader for global cloud communications and collaboration, and we’re honored that many leading technology analysts recognized our accomplishments in 2017.
- RingCentral was named a Leader for the third consecutive year in the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide.[1]
- Frost & Sullivan named RingCentral Company of the Year in its report on Hosted IP Telephony and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), North America.
- IHS Markit honored RingCentral as a UCaaS market scorecard leader.
- We won an Innovation Award from Aragon Research as a leader in UCaaS.
- Synergy Research Group recognized RingCentral and positioned us as overall #1 global revenue market share leader with 25.5% of the global UCaaS market.
2018 and beyond: The future is Collaborative Communications
The cloud is proving its superiority and companies are increasingly confident transitioning their communications solutions away from on-premises legacy systems. On-premises communications systems are obsolete, and now we are seeing a drastic industry shift to cloud. Gartner’s recent UC forecast explains,[2] “Evolving market dynamics will change the end-user spend mix throughout the forecast period. By 2021, 53% of UC spend will be generated from cloud UC, 28% will be generated from product support services, and only 19% will be generated from premises-based UC solution spend.”
The way we work has changed dramatically over the last decade, and will continue to evolve with new business requirements and user expectations. Employees are now more mobile, more distributed, and certainly living in a more digital world than ever before. And our goal is to support the way people want to communicate and collaborate through the modalities of their choice.
The first chapter of the RingCentral story was about proving the advantage of the cloud over hardware-based legacy on-premises communications systems. With cloud winning, the next chapter of our journey will focus on Collaborative Communications: a broader vision of using communications technologies to enable people to work the way they want, with collaboration at the center, and an open platform approach that supports intelligent business workflows.
To make this vision whole, it is supported by a global service delivery infrastructure, together with industry-leading customer service and support. When you are ready to open that new office in Singapore or Rio, or when you are looking for ways to help your people work together more effectively, we’ll be there with you all the way in 2018 and beyond.
[1] Source: Gartner, Inc., Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide, Daniel O’Connell, Bern Elliot, Rafael A Benitez, September 6, 2017.
[2] Source: Forecast Analysis: Unified Communications, Worldwide, 2Q17 Update, Megan Marek Fernandez | Daniel O’Connell | Scott Morrison | Tom Eagle, 13 July 2017
Originally published Feb 16, 2018, updated Apr 18, 2021
