RingCentral Connect 2021 is a wrap! A huge thank you to all of our speakers, panelists, and viewers for making this possible. We couldn’t be happier with the incredible turnout for our biggest virtual event ever.
There’s a lot to unfold. We announced the launch of our newest solution, RingCentral Rise, along with major investments in new sectors of cloud communications. We also took the time to celebrate our most successful growth since the company was founded.
But most importantly, we brought together the best leaders in the industry to discuss the future of communications.
Let’s look at the top moments from RingCentral Connect 2021:
1. Anand Eswaran and Nat Natarajan highlight our roadmap for the future
2021 was a huge year for us. We surpassed our $1 billion milestone, announced an exclusive partnership with Mitel, and won Gartner’s highest Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service award for the seventh year in a row.
And we have so much more on our roadmap. Anand Eswaran, our President and Chief Operating Officer, and Nat Natarajan, Executive Vice President of Product and Engineering, highlighted the key trends that will drive RingCentral in 2022.
Participant equity
If the last two years have taught us anything, it’s that remote work was a huge success. In fact, companies of all sizes are adopting permanent hybrid and remote work models in their return-to-work strategies.
Participant equity means that no matter where your people and teams work from—in-office or remote—they should have the same communications experience everywhere.
Systems of experience
CIOs have two priorities: help employees work more productively and improve the customer experience.
Systems of experience means creating an entire communications system around delivering positive experiences. We provide both unified communications (UC) and contact center (CC) services to improve the efficiency of agents and increase customer satisfaction.
Composable enterprise
Composable enterprise means offering interchangeable parts so users and businesses can create custom solutions that meet their needs.
At RingCentral, we’re continuing to focus on providing low-code, no-code, and pro-code APIs that help you simplify your workflows and work smarter.
IA and AI
Intelligence augmentation (IA) is the idea that our solutions can supplement people in their everyday work. For example, IA can qualify leads over a chatbot and connect them to the right subject matter experts for their needs.
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the idea that many solutions can be fully automated. For example, in video meetings, RingCentral can automatically transcribe audio into text in real time.
Your work, your way, your pace
Every business is different—and we understand that companies grow and scale at different paces. We’re here to support you—whenever you’re ready.
2. Analysts prediction: The rise of conversational intelligence
We invited several cloud communications analysts to hear their thoughts on the future of the industry.
- Blair Pleasant – President & Principal Analyst, COMMfusion
- Zeus Kerravala – Founder, ZK Research
- Jim Lundy – Founder, Aragon Research
Their prediction: conversational intelligence (or conversational AI) is the next frontier for contact centers.
Conversational intelligence software uses AI to listen to every nuance of human speech and classify it into actionable data.
Think about how we listen and analyze the tones and expressions of people we talk to in person every day. When you chat with your friends, family, or colleagues, you don’t just hear words—you hear emotions.
What does this mean for businesses? For sales teams, this means having AI that can recommend the best content to target a buyer. For support teams, this means resolving customer issues much faster.
3. A bank that works from home
James Posnett, Account Director of Enterprise Financial Services at RingCentral, had a chance to speak to a customer that transformed their entire work model.
Erick Owens, EVP CIO/CTO of TexasBank, shared that his company needed a new way to continue serving customers during COVID-19—one that didn’t involve in-person interactions. The challenge was finding a way to replicate face-to-face interactions that are crucial to building relationships with customers.
With RingCentral, TexasBank employees could work from home, on their own schedules, and serve customers at any time of the day. And while video meetings can’t replace face-to-face meetings, it’s a service his bank will continue offering.
4. RingCentral Ventures: Our new strategic investment arm
RingCentral is as successful as we are today thanks to investors like Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. Now it’s our turn to support up-and-coming innovators in the communications world.
Kira Makagon, our Chief Innovation Officer, unveiled our new strategic investment arm: RingCentral Ventures. We partner with entrepreneurs and early-stage startups in several key ways:
- Funding: Money to kickstart ideas and hit the ground running.
- Advice: Technical and business expertise in cloud communications and collaboration.
- Mentorship: Hands-on guidance from our seasoned leadership team.
- Validation: The backing of a well-recognized industry leader and innovator.
- Exposure: Learn from RingCentral’s global customer base and go-to-market approach.
We also highlighted our first RingCentral Ventures partners: Balto, TaskHuman, and Enable.
5. Introducing RingCentral Add-ins
Jeff Rogers, Senior Manager of Platform Marketing, and Byrne Reese, Group Product Manager, introduced the latest addition to our open platform: RingCentral Add-ins.
RingCentral Add-ins makes embedding integrations into RingCentral MVP much more intuitive. Like your extensions on Chrome, Add-ins let you interact with your favorite business apps straight from your conversations.
For example, the DocuSign add-in allows people in a conversation to sign a document directly from RingCentral. No need to open a link to another page.
Similarly, Jira users can update their tasks and due dates from within a RingCentral chat or group.
6. Vlad Shmunis talks about where RingCentral is headed
RingCentral’s own Founder and CEO, Vlad Shmunis, sat down with Zeus Kerravala in the RingCentral headquarters to talk about what the future of RingCentral looks like.
Vlad highlighted some of our biggest achievements of this year, including 12 quarters of 99.999% reliability, end-to-end encryption in video meetings, and new GSP partners: Vodafone, Deutsche Telekom, Verizon, Telos, and more.
He also discussed that RingCentral is headed in several directions:
Composability: Making RingCentral a hotbed for developers to create their custom APIs, while giving employees a much more integrated experience with their apps. For example, signing DocuSign documents in RingCentral MVP.
Contact center: With Engage Digital, our contact center solution is uniquely positioned to provide a much better customer experience compared to other solutions—which still focus primarily on voice services.
5G: RingCentral realizes that 5G will revolutionize technology like never before. We plan to invest in creating new communications features that use 5G, such as virtual reality, artificial intelligence, and more.
A huge thank you
RingCentral Connect 2021 was our largest virtual event ever with so many exciting things to come. And we couldn’t have done it without you. Thank you to everyone who attended, and keep an eye out for our 2022 events.
Missed the live event? You can watch all of the videos on demand at ev.ringcentral.com/Connect.
Originally published Nov 17, 2021, updated Nov 03, 2023
