RingCentral will begin offering a cloud telephony service in India.
RingCentral says the move makes it the country’s first global cloud provider to offer compliant enterprise-grade cloud telephony.
The vendor establishing a cloud phone service in India enables multinational organisations with a basis in India to access cloud phone capabilities, empowering smoother communication with customers, partners, leaders and workers.
Mo Katibeh, President and COO of RingCentral, commented:
India is a key strategic market for us, and adding this country as our 46th country for global availability of RingCentral MVP is an important milestone. RingCentral is the first cloud UC vendor to have the license and authorization from the Department of Telecommunications India to operate in India. We’re grateful to the DOT and to the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India for their support of this launch.”
RingCentral passed critical regulatory verifications by the Department of Telecommunications (DOT) India and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to offer fully compliant cloud phone services.
RingCentral was initially granted a Unified Licence for providing a UCaaS service by the Indian government 18 months ago. Since then, the vendor has developed its infrastructure in India and passed government security inspections to achieve its regulatory verification.
“As a pioneer in delivering enterprise-grade cloud communications solutions for over two decades, RingCentral can drive modern cloud communications for businesses of all sizes across every industry and employee type for India,” added Rajeev Singh Rathore, Vice President, Cloud Operations at RingCentral India.
RingCentral’s 2023 so Far
It’s been a “solid start to the year” financially for RingCentral, according to CEO Vlad Shmunis, after the company’s Q1 2023 earnings call in May.
Total revenue grew 14 percent year-over-year to $534 million, exceeding expectations.
“We had a good first quarter, as we exceeded the high end of guidance across key metrics,” Shmunis said. “Our open platform, deep integrations to top third-party applications, 99.999% reliability, global reach, and integrated UCaaS and CCaaS platform continue to resonate with customers and distinguish RingCentral from competitors.”
As well as surpassing total revenue estimations, the company was also ahead on subscription revenues, with a revenue increase of 16 percent year-over-year to $508 million. Annualised Monthly Recurring Subscriptions (ARR) were up, as was the Mid-market and Enterprise ARR.
It’s also been a positive 2023 for RingCentral in its partnerships and product announcements.
RingCentral launched RingSense, a generative AI solution it says will let businesses turn conversation data into meaningful insights. The first offering in the RingSense portfolio is RingSense for Sales, which assesses interactions between salespeople and potential customers to create insights and performance metrics.
Another high-profile announcement was RingCentral for Teams 2.0. Described in RingCentral’s briefing as a “next-gen” UC app for calling, faxing and SMS, the solution integrated RingCentral’s cloud PBX capabilities into Teams via a fully native experience without requiring another app.
Among the new features to enhance productivity were voicemail transcription, call recording, bi-directional presence sync, and unified contact search. The offering could also be coupled with RingCentral’s CCaaS solution, RingCentral Contact Centre.
In April, RingCentral and Vodafone upgraded their shared collaboration and calling platform to enhance the experience of mobile users.
The two vendors introduced updates to their Vodafone Business Unified Communications (VBUC) platform, powered by Vodafone’s mobile network and RingCentral’s mobile applications, to provide users with a unified experience for making calls, sending messages, and launching HD-quality video meetings. The ambition was to transform a user’s iOS or Android device into an extension of their office.
Vodafone Portugal and RingCentral also announced a Vodafone One Net TeamCollaboration with RingCentral UCaaS solution to empower flexible working for Portugal-based workers. The collaboration entailed RingCentral’s messaging and video collaboration capabilities being combined with Vodafone’s fixed and mobile voice communications functionality into one platform.
India’s IT and Communications Boom Continues Apace
As Katibeh outlined, RingCentral’s interest in participating in the significant growth of India’s IT and communications market is clear. Gartner estimates IT communications services spending in India to reach $24.7B in 2023.
With the number of multinational businesses opening up satellite offices and technology hubs in India swelling in tandem with this IT and comms boom, their demands for elite enterprise-grade and fully compliant cloud communications solutions grow in harmony too.
As well as RingCentral, Nureva entered the Indian market in 2021, appointing Nvincy Solutions as a distributor. Nvincy had already started to bring Nureva technology, like the HDL200 system, into the Indian market, where there was a demand for solutions to support the new age of hybrid work.
Earlier this year, Zoom received a Pan-telecom license from the Indian government to offer Zoom Phone to India-based businesses.
Zoom received a Unified License with Access – All/PAN India, NLD National Long Distance, and ILD – International Long Distance from India’s Department of Telecommunications. This meant Zoom Phone’s cloud PBX application service could be offered to India-based multinational corporations (MNCs) and businesses, allowing them to have a UC platform to serve their global workforces.
