Day one at ConnectCentral, RingCentral’s annual customer customer in San Francisco began today. With over 3,000 registrants in attendance, it’s been hard to spot a non-RingCentral guest staying at the Westin hotel this week.
Vlad Shmunis
The event kicked off with Jim Lundy, CEO and Lead Analyst at Aragon Research hosting a fireside chat with Vlad Shmunis, Founder, Chairman and CEO of RingCentral. Reflecting on RingCentral’s rapid growth since inception, Vlad commented on how the company has changed from a small team – where he knew everyone by name – to the giant it is today.
“Smaller teams made it easier to collaborate but harder to make decisions. ‘Oh, we’ve got to make payroll this month’ helped drive us to be a pretty lean company”.
Following Vlad’s appearance on Mad Money, Jim asked about the experience. Vlad coyly mentioned that as Jim Cramer, Mad Money host, pushed him for how RingCentral can help score Tampa Bay Buccaneers (RingCentral client and Jim’s favourite NFL team) score more points, the real answer is actually yes. “RingCentral is about making real teams more productive, even on the football field”.
RingCentral vs The Big Guns
Recognising RingCentral serve 3 of the top NFL teams, Jim Lundy probed as to why vendors like AT&T weren’t dominating the American collaboration market. Vlad said that AT&T were a natural partner of theirs.
“AT&T have come back to RingCentral. Their BroadSoft platform was pretty flat before the Cisco acquisition.
Folks like Cisco and Avaya are in secular decline. Cisco technology is still on the 1980s mentality of going into the office everyday. Current reality is that organisations are distributed, multiple locations, mobile and international. Legacy systems were not designed with that in mind. Platforms need to be multi-tenanted and global. You need to reimagine how businesses communicate”.
Interestingly, BroadSoft host their first annual conference since the Cisco acquisition, Connections, this week too.
RingCentral Engage
Further to the news that RingCentral had acquired Dimelo, today’s conference confirmed the formal launch of RingCentral Engage. The Dimelo product slots perfectly into the RingCentral product suite with its digital customer experience capabilities. Former Dimelo Managing Director, Stephane Lee, provided an exclusive demo of the newly branded platform.
For more on how Dimelo, now RingCentral Engage, tomorrow we have a feature article, including exclusive insight from VP and Managing Director of RingCentral EMEA, Sahil Rekhi.
Employee Engagement Meets Customer Engagement
On the subject of acquisition, previous RingCentral acquisition, Glip, got a key mention. Recognising that Glip came before platforms like Microsoft Teams, Vlad Shmunis revealed that Glip was almost named RingCentral Teams. Vlad also said that:
“Understanding early on that enterprise grade team messaging, collaboration, contact centre, voice and video were crucial to making RingCentral so hard to compete against”.
David Sipes, COO at RingCentral, went on to say that employee engagement and customer engagement are siblings. He referenced the Richard Branson quote,
“If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients”
as relevant to what Glip is and has been doing for RingCentral clients. As business, and the Unified Comms market now understands that both employee engagement and customer engagement is crucial for customer satisfaction and business growth, RingCentral is firmly making the right noises to back up its product portfolio.
