Patrick was joined by special guest Daniel Yin who is Director of Product Management at RingCentral.
Firstly Patrick asks Daniel what RingCentral are working on in terms of innovating their UCaaS platform. Daniel explains that he can only reveal so much of their plans as many of the features and functions that they are developing aim to give them an advantage over their competitors. He does explain that there are many new features that they will be bringing to market over the next few years.
“This is very much part of our commitment to investing the most and coming up with the best innovations in the UCaaS product space.”
Daniel explains that some of the innovation they will be investing in is in conjunction with some of the industry’s leading firms like Google and Microsoft. Creating new links and innovations for RingCentral platforms with the likes of the Microsoft Team’s platform is also going to be a key focus. One key area of development is the imminent release of the fully unified RingCentral desktop client which should be available during 2019.
“The idea there is that we want to bring all of the commonly used technologies and tools, so be that video meetings, telephony, collaboration, all to a single platform.”
Daniel explains that dialogue with their customers is a vital tool directing RingCentral’s innovation and development path. Coupled with their huge investment on research and development it enables RingCentral to be first to market with a variety of new features and functions. Patrick then asks Daniel about the impact that emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning will have on the development of innovation with UCaaS platforms. Daniel tells Patrick that the consumer world has a big effect on how business want to use technology. The rise in popularity of voice assistant technology, in the form of Amazon Alexa or Google Home devices, will have ramifications in the professional spheres. RingCentral have developed integrations with these products so that their customers can utilise their innovations within UCaaS platforms.
The communication industry has lots of opportunity to utilise emerging technologies like AI due to the nature and use of language within the platforms. Daniel details various examples of where tools can be used to deliver huge efficiency benefits to customers in areas like natural language processing. The combination of innovations such as this alongside voice assistant technology opens up a raft of potential developments with possibilities such as transcription, analysis and fully digital assistants being used in areas like contact centres. Many of the developments, like sentiment analysis used in the contact centre could well make their way in to UCaaS platforms as long as they are relevant and have the background data required.
Finally Patrick asks Daniel what a UCaaS platform might like in five years as opposed to now. Daniel explains that many of the themes he has mentioned in terms of more interoperability and more adoption of current consumer tools will be widespread. Daniel also recognises a general convergence of technology across the industry and in the future providers will be providing more and more of the technology stack integrating platforms like UCaaS and CCaaS to offer customers the best possible holistic service.
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Presenter Patrick Watson and special guest Daniel Yin from RingCentral.
