With RingCentral being one of the hottest brands in the world of UC, we thought it would be a good idea to have a sit down with the EMEA Managing Director, Sahil Rekhi, and find out what it was that brought him to the company, what he has achieved there so far and what are his goals for the future. Prior to joining RingCentral, Sahil told us that he spent six years at Vodafone working in various different roles revolving around product development and product management, all of which gave him the necessary skills and experience to secure the role of Product Manager at RingCentral EMEA in 2013. As the second person to join the company, Sahil has been there since the very start and, shortly after joining the company, played a key role in helping the brand secure a prestigious strategic partnership deal with BT which really helped put RingCentral on the map in the UK market.
“Unlike any of the other products BT sells, we typically don’t white label our product and instead deliver a “co-branded” offering that allows all customers to know that the service is coming from RingCentral.”
Once the BT deal had gone though, Sahil then began expanding his remit into the fields of product marketing, product development and pre-sales activities before eventually picking up on all of the brand’s operational activities where he was responsible for overseeing customer care operations and professional service deployments to local markets.
Having gained valuable experience in the wider business of RingCentral over the 18 months that followed, Sahil was eventually given the opportunity to lead the company forward and manage all of RingCentral’s business in the European markets. Since becoming the EMEA leader, Sahil informed us that the company has seen an average growth rate of 120-150% in the 18 months that followed and, after having just launched servers in 13 European countries in March this year, is fast on track to becoming a true global player in the UCaaS market.
“International expansion is crucially important to us and this rapid growth will play a key role in helping us reach our target of $1billion by 2020”
As a company with a current revenue of around $500 million, that leaves only 3 more years for RingCentral to essentially double its value. Though this may seem a tad on the ambitious side, when you consider the speed at which the market is growing and the success RingCentral has already achieved in such a short space of time, Sahil remains confident that those goals will be reached.
“The UC market is growing enormously and people have now become very comfortable with the concept of telecommunications moving to the cloud…and it’s being aided by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Amazon who are all jumping in these areas but also leading the charge with the multi-cloud strategies that they are driving for enterprise customers.”
With this rapid increase in the number of businesses looking to begin their digital transformation (DX) so they can remain competitive in a world that is becoming increasingly dominated by the cloud, the UC market has become a breeding ground of opportunity and RingCentral has been seizing every one that comes their way.
