Verkada
This Creator of Intelligent Security Cameras Finds Peace of Mind with New Digital Communications
RingCentral is freeing us from all of the delays and setbacks and frustrations of our old phone system. And it’s unlocking business opportunities for us.
Bjorn Pave
Senior Director of IT, Verkada
Video security has always been an extremely complex and time-consuming undertaking for businesses. Verkada is quickly changing that
When Verkada unveiled its hybrid cloud security-camera platform in late 2017, the company immediately began disrupting the $18B video security industry. The organization has since won numerous innovation awards. Forbes ranked Verkada #4 among “America’s Best Startup Employers.” And the company skyrocketed to a $1.6B valuation in less than 3 years.
Verkada traces its success to strong product-market fit and go-to-market strategy. While most traditional systems are built on the promise of hardware innovation, Verkada’s plug-and-play security platform makes using, managing, scaling and securing video security easier than ever for businesses and organizations of all types—from major banks to manufacturing facilities.
With a software-led approach, Verkada harnesses the benefits of the cloud and machine learning to continue to evolve its products through new feature updates and proactive security patches made available to all its customers retroactively. The company’s products have indeed proven to be game-changing: The editors at The Software Report call Verkada’s platform “the Tesla of building security.”
For the second part of its go-to-market strategy, Verkada needed a campaign to get the word out about its hybrid cloud security platform. And to succeed at that effort, the company needed to equip its fast-growing sales team with a highly reliable and flexible phone solution that would arm management with the proper analytics.
An ambitious sales plan demanded a better phone system
The on-prem phone solution Verkada first used when the company launched was no longer up to the task of scaling for the global expansion Verkada is now focusing on. The system didn’t deliver call analytics the company needed to gauge the performance of its reps. Because the system was difficult to manage, making even minor changes required help from IT. But the major challenge—the one that posed a real threat to Verkada’s sales efforts—was when calls started dropping.
Bjorn Pave, Verkada’s Senior Director of IT, recalls when the problem became priority-one issue: “Our PRI circuit started going down. The provider told us, ‘We need to flip the circuit daily, while we wait for a replacement part. It’s just a quick blip, then you’re back online.’ What they weren’t getting was that each time it happened, every single one of our calls dropped.”
We have a phone solution that lives up to our company’s standards for providing outstanding customer service.
Bjorn Pave
Senior Director of IT, Verkada
INDUSTRY
Construction
HQ
San Mateo, CA
YEAR FOUNDED
2016
EMPLOYEES
350+
The communications platform that led to peace of mind
When Verkada rolled out RingCentral’s cloud communications solution, the company was able to solve all of these phone challenges. And the new work-from-anywhere platform, which lets employees make and take business calls using an app, created new opportunities to improve operations and increase productivity.
“We have over 100 salespeople in the field,” Bjorn explains. “Channel sales teams, direct reps, and sales engineers out there supporting their efforts. Now, we can immediately provision someone with a number and app. None of these people are forced to use their own mobile number—they can connect from anywhere on any device they choose.”
Verkada now has the detailed call data and analytical capabilities to give the organization visibility into how its teams are performing. “We’re able to watch the amount of calls, the percentage of calls converting, and even use leaderboards to monitor it all and keep our teams motivated.”
Tapping into a broader technology ecosystem
Because RingCentral integrates with many other productivity and business intelligence platforms, Verkada is also finding additional ways to leverage its new communications platform to boost efficiencies.
“The integration between RingCentral and our Salesforce environment is giving us all sorts of valuable new analytical information. We’ve also integrated RingCentral with other apps to gain more insights.”
Continuing its mission: to make people and property safer
With more than 3,000 organizations already using its intelligent video security platform—including many of the top Fortune 500 and leading cybersecurity companies—Verkada has proven it has built a solution capable of carrying out its mission of becoming every building’s security OS and making people and spaces safer.
And now that it has found and deployed the right cloud communications solution, Verkada has the infrastructure capable of supporting that bold mission.