“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” – William Pollard
Conversations have shifted. And with them our mindsets. Thankfully, we are progressing toward a post-pandemic world. As we do so, businesses, companies, and enterprises – small and large – are evaluating what has worked and what hasn’t. Discussions put on hold or allowed to take a backseat during the past 18 months, are now back on the table.
Remote? Hybrid? In-person? Discussions about workplace settings are now top of mind. Fortunately, our recent, collective experience has pushed us to learn. The hard-won lesson? Human connection is essential to every single thing we do. The more inspired, motivated, and connected we are, the more productive and innovative we become. As businesses, we can no longer ignore the power of engagement and camaraderie amongst colleagues.
RingCentral exists to power human connections. And in doing so, we allow businesses to thrive. This unwavering mission of ours started decades ago but is more relevant and important today than ever before. This is why we offer solutions that empower employees to connect, communicate, and collaborate seamlessly – no matter which workplace direction your company chooses to go.
What do our customers share as the reason for their commitment to RingCentral? Here’s a tip, it’s all about Trust, Innovation, and Partnerships.
- Building trust with enterprises requires consistently delivering reliability, security, and data privacy over multiple years. RingCentral has a track record of 99.999% uptime over the last 12 consecutive quarters. In other words, just five minutes of downtime a year including maintenance. This is simply unmatched in the industry.
- Innovation has been at the core of RingCentral from the beginning. The company has always made outsized investments in research and development to create and redefine a modern, scalable cloud-based architecture. That’s how we deliver a leading enterprise communications platform to customers incorporating messaging, video meetings, and a cloud phone system. It’s why we’re leading the way in delivering innovative cloud-based contact center solutions.
- Great partnerships and a partner-first mindset is critical. In Q2 there was incredible progress with Avaya, Atos, Alcatel Lucent Enterprise, AT&T, British Telecom, and Telus. We announced new strategic partnerships with Verizon Business and Deutsche Telekom. All our partnerships begin with trust and innovation. You can discover more about our partnerships below.
That has been the consistent recipe for our success. Now, let me share some detail about the trends we are seeing and addressing in the market.
Trends in business communications
Moving communications to the cloud. Despite a shift seen prior to the pandemic, many businesses scrambled to migrate employees to being remote once crisis hit. As a result, the trend has accelerated. Moving communications to the cloud ensures you have the tools to activate your workforce from anywhere. It enables you to compete, grow, and thrive in today’s altered world.
The new age of voice. Video took center stage in keeping people connected and engaged during the pandemic. However, voice will be the primary mode of communication in the new ‘new normal.’ Voice is the backbone of video. Meetings and conversations simply cannot happen without audio. We’re seeing a resurgence in focus on voice as the core ‘must-have’ for organizations going forward.
Convergence of business communications and contact center solutions. Our customers understand the benefits of having the entire business and contact center communications suite united under one vendor. They demand it. It’s seamless. Impactful. Experience-driven. This is the fastest-growing area of our business. And it will shape our solutions for the future.
Innovation + Speed
Last quarter, we moved at tremendous speed to deliver updates and capabilities to RingCentral Video. We now offer over 100 new features to help people communicate and work from anywhere.
We reimagined Meeting Rooms in anticipation of the hybrid work experience. We added new features specific to RingCentral Video such as voice-activated control and mobile-phone controller. Other features foster spontaneity, such as Team Huddle. Team members can jump from asynchronous messaging to a real-time video connection. And, back again, as they see fit. Easily and in the moment.
At RingCentral, we aim to deliver best-in-class experience across all modes – Message, Video, and Phone. Video has been and will continue to be essential in the way you collaborate with colleagues, customers, and partners. That’s why we are so proud to have won the 2021 RemoteTech Breakthrough Award for Overall Video Conferencing Solution.
Customers are our driving force
There is nothing more motivating than feedback from our customers. We were recognized – with the highest rating – as a Customers’ Choice in the April 2021 Gartner Peer Insights ‘Voice of the Customer’: Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS), Worldwide report for both the large and mid-size enterprises. All the more special as it is based on real feedback and ratings from customers like you. Customers who use our products day in and day out.
We welcome the many great organizations who joined us in the last quarter. Here are just a few:
Through BT we won The Ardonagh Group, the UK’s largest independent insurance distribution platform, where we will together, provide integrated UCaaS and CCaaS for over 3,500 users and 800 contact center agents.
We also had a great contact center-driven win with AmeriSave, a leading mortgage lender. AmeriSave selected RingCentral to provide a more scalable, integrated UCaaS and CCaaS platform across nearly 4,000 users, including 2,000 contact center agents.
Finally, Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral had another strong quarter of solid growth in new seats, new accounts, and transaction volume. ACO is seeing solid traction with businesses of all sizes and from both new and existing customers, including a notable win for over 12,000 seats with a Fortune 500 freight transportation company, who moved from an Avaya on-premise solution to Avaya Cloud Office.
Partnership + Collaboration = Joint Success
RingCentral believes in partnership. Always has. Always will. We’ve built a broad ecosystem. Why? Because together we are stronger. We value all our partners – from the channel, to our developer community, from our vendor partners to our global strategic partners. By working together, we are collectively and proudly enabling organizations worldwide to both grow and run their businesses.
In Q2, we strengthened that ecosystem through new global strategic partnerships:
With Verizon Business, we’re bringing cloud communications to enterprises, helping set the foundation for a new workplace experience by giving employees the ability to work and collaborate from anywhere.
With Deutsche Telekom, we’re transforming business communications for organizations of all sizes in Germany. As a first step, the partnership offers Deutsche Telekom’s customers a co-branded version of RingCentral Video as a lead stand-alone video solution to ensure people can work productively and efficiently from anywhere.
With Eclipse Technology Solutions, we’re bringing cloud communications to Canadian enterprise customers. This will enable customers to accelerate their digital transformation from their legacy on-premise systems to cloud-based technology.
We also announced several extended partnerships – a testament to how much our joint customers value our offerings.
In partnership with Atos, we announced Unify Video by RingCentral in Europe: a standalone video with team messaging product designed to enhance online meetings and enable people to work smarter and communicate and collaborate from anywhere.
Together with Avaya, we announced a global expansion for Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral, making it available to 13 countries. Later in the quarter, we also announced a wide range of new capabilities for Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral, including many Avaya device-specific enhancements providing easy migration, additional video and global expansion features extending the ability for customers to connect across any device and work environment.
Our partner, AT&T Business, announced the availability of AT&T Office@Hand Wireless, which empowers users to maintain a high-performing voice presence across devices – mobile, desk phones, tablets and personal computers – all from a single phone number.
And finally, we announced an expansion and extension of our partnership with NICE to continue offering RingCentral Contact Center™ worldwide. We see an increasing desire from customers for an integrated, best-in-class, unified business communications + contact center solution from a single provider, making this an important strategic decision for the company.
Raising the bar for security and trust
We worked alongside the industry and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to help eliminate up to 4.9 billion unwanted robocalls and spam calls to help protect our customers. When left unchecked, spam calls can be very damaging to businesses. They not only increase the liability of getting scammed, but also take valuable time away from real callers and disrupt the flow of work for employees. By leveraging our AI- trained data, we’re able to identify and root out unwanted calls, contributing to the STIR/SHAKEN call authentication framework.
Trust and reliability is rooted in providing secure service. This is just another measure we’ve taken to keep the communications experience secure. And seamless. So all our customers have to worry about is getting work done.
Keep learning to keep innovating
As Pollard says, “learning and innovation go hand in hand.” As we move forward beyond the pandemic, what have we learned? To be ready. Ready for the unexpected. Ready to accept that a familiar response or solution may no longer apply nor suffice. Readiness is the opportunity worth grasping. Because innovation is born of disruption. And with that next wave of innovation, can come a better world. One of humility. One of hope. One of humanity. One of connection. Human connection.
Originally published Aug 11, 2021, updated Jan 30, 2023