Wouldn’t it be great if businesses could take full advantage of communications in the cloud and transform their business applications to better connect with customers?
At RingCentral, our vision is to provide best-in-class cloud communication solutions that serve today’s modern enterprise, including distributed and mobile workforces. This vision extends beyond connecting people and the devices they use. It also means connecting the applications and tools organizations rely on to run their businesses and serve their customers.
Today I’m excited to announce the new RingCentral Connect™ Platform. We’re working with developers, partners and customers to do what no one else has been able to do previously — create an open, self-service platform that allows businesses to seamlessly integrate business communications logic into key enterprise applications. This new offering combines an unprecedented level of customization with powerful communications capabilities. At the same time, the open architecture makes it fast and easy for developers to add significant value to their own business applications or product offerings.
A number of companies provide transport as a platform. That is, they provide APIs to add basic voice and text capabilities to custom applications. RingCentral goes far beyond this. We’ve now opened APIs to expose our entire industry-leading cloud-based business communications system as an open platform. With RingCentral Connect developers can now access the power of multi-modal, real-time communications and messaging, supported by our extensive business logic and customer data management and reporting. This enables applications to not only send and receive calls and texts, but deeply embed communication functionality into the business workflow of the application.
Our platform model is akin to Salesforce.com, which has APIs that are used by their customers and partners who want to get the most out of the Salesforce experience by integrating directly with their platform. The same is true for RingCentral Connect. It’s a way for customers to easily access the wealth of data (e.g., call logs, business rules, messages, presence, etc.) that is already managed by RingCentral, thus enabling much richer and more innovative workflows for their businesses.
There’s no doubt that many business tools have migrated to SaaS models in the cloud, and over the past decade these cloud applications have transformed the way we work. Business communication is still about connecting people, but with many tools now in the cloud, communication is also being organized around business application systems, including CRM (customer relationship management), HDS (help desk systems), and ERM (enterprise resource managements) to name a few.
RingCentral is closing these gaps, and breaking down the silos that isolate communications from business system applications and workflows. This is a significant step forward because businesses want to better connect with customers – and communications is at the heart of every customer interaction. Having communications well integrated into the tools and applications businesses rely on every day is critical to eliminating inefficiencies and gaps that block customer success.
Starting today, the RingCentral Connect Platform for Developers is officially open in beta. A couple of new integrations are underway, including Zoho, which developed a powerful integration that allows 13 million customers of their CRM to leverage RingCentral capabilities without ever leaving the Zoho app. In addition, Intuit integrated RingCentral into one of their products to enhance their customer experience.
These examples along with some of the integrations RingCentral has previously rolled out for Google, ZenDesk, Box, and Salesforce give you a sense of the possibilities. And the possibilities are endless.
As businesses rapidly adopt cloud communications and move away from inflexible, closed on-premise PBX systems, the future of business communications becomes truly realized. What does this future look like? Communications solutions get integrated with business applications to improve workflow and enhance employee productivity and improve customer satisfaction.
With our open platform and your business ideas, the future of the seamlessly connected business becomes real. We look forward to seeing what you come up with using the RingCentral Connect Platform. The future is here and now, and we look forward to building it together with you. Sign up today at developer.ringcentral.com.
Originally published Feb 25, 2015, updated Sep 17, 2021
