RingCentral is among the world’s largest cloud-based communication and collaboration solutions providers, with over 4,000 employees and total equity of USD 10 billion. The company has been around for 30 years but has only recently witnessed meteoric growth. It received its first round of venture investments in 2006, and over the next half-decade, RingCentral added the likes of Cisco, Sequoia Capital, and Silicon Valley Bank to its investor list.
Today, RingCentral is a publicly-traded entity and is recognised as a leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for UCaaS 2019, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Microsoft, Cisco, and 8×8.
While RingCentral is better known for its enterprise offering called Office, it also has a robust developer platform. RingCentral Developers packages all the APIs powering its vast suite of products and makes it available to business software developers at a competitive monthly pricing. And this goes beyond your typical communication APIs – there’s also widgets, bots, and support from RingCentral’s very own developer community. Today, we are reviewing the features and capabilities of RingCentral Developers in greater detail.
Inside the RingCentral Developers Platform
In many ways, RingCentral’s API library (which makes the lion’s share of the Developer Platform) operates as an independent entity from its other enterprise solutions. It has won several awards as a distinct offering, including Best in Communication APIs by API World, for two years now. Let’s take a closer look at its bevy of features:
- RingCentral APIs:
- Voice – This lets you add voice and calling capabilities to any application, along with web RTC support. Standard telephonic functionalities such as voicemail, caller ID, call recording, answering rules, and voicemail is all bundled within this API library. In other words, your users can perform any phone-related task from your web and mobile applications, built using RingCentral
- SMS – Just like telephony, RingCentral offers a number of SMS and MMS APIs, with support for automated notifications, delivery & read status, multi-lingual support, and a lot more
- Team messaging – RingCentral’s glip APIs are focused on instant messaging between team members. There are private and shared conversations, message histories, guest/member invitations, and the ability to build a customised chatbot using glip
- Meetings – The meeting APIs work in conjunction with voice, letting users create on-demand meetings, share real-time updates, end or delete meetings, and manage access across participants
- Fax – Document sharing is made extremely easy with RingCentral Fax API for business. You can share an impressive range of 29 different file formats with compatibility for two-way fax and multiple files concatenation. This review only covers the tip of the iceberg – RingCentral’s collaboration APIs meet virtually office requirements you could think of
- RingCentral Embeddable – If you’re looking to bake RingCentral’s interface onto an existing application, the company’s nifty widget offers an answer. You can quickly embed voice and text into a web application and customise it according to your requirements. You can even personalise the UX and give it a branded look-and-feel using CSS elements
- RingCentral Bots – Chatbots are fast becoming an enterprise staple with use cases across the contact center, self-service modules, training tools, etc. RingCentral powers chatbots for two conversational interfaces: instant messaging and SMS
Why the RingCentral Developers Platform Makes a Difference
RingCentral has consistently been a developer favorite, and with good reason! Beyond the features listed in this review, it has a well-established GitHub presence with regular additions and innovations from the company’s thriving developer community.
RingCentral ensures a superior developer experience by boosting usability and cutting down onboarding timelines. There is a sandbox environment where you can test your applications, and a navigable API reference to make the development that much simpler. The company also boasts a well-designed documentation portal, with SDKs in seven different languages. In fact, RingCentral has a designated support service provider to look after the developer experience!
It is “the only API able to provide voice, SMS, team messaging, meetings, fax, real-time data, and on the fly system configuration for a full communication suite – in other words, a unified platform that marries CPaaS and UCaaS in a unique combination.”, said Mike Stowe, Sr. Manager of Developer Product Marketing at RingCentral.
What We Think
If you’re an active member of the GitHub community, you’ve probably already heard of RingCentral. Developers can take its impressive API suite for a spin, with a free trial – and monthly subscriptions start as low as USD 20. This is clearly a win-win scenario: for businesses who need customised yet powerful communication tools, RingCentral is a standout solution. RingCentral Developers brings the same degree of capability with an additional helping of flexibility to software design.
