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RingCentral Simplifies Collaborative Communications

Today RingCentral made several announcements toward advancing its vision of collaborative communications -- a solution stack that can provide a global, unified solution that facilitates collaboration for organizations of all sizes. The announcements fall into three categories: an update to RingCentral Office, European expansion, and improved analytics.

Office

RingCentral Office is the company's cloud PBX offer for businesses, available since 2009. Over the years it has received numerous updates, including conferencing and workstream messaging additions. RingCentral was among the first of the UC companies to embrace workstream messaging/team chat with its 2015 acquisition of Glip. Though, initially Glip was simply bundled in Office as a separate application.

RingCentral's next generation of Office has a reimagined user experience built on the Glip user interface. The result is a single application that supports messaging, voice, video, tasks, file sharing, fax, and SMS. This could be described as unified communications, but it's rare in the UC/UCaaS industry to find so many modalities unified in a single UC or UCaaS service.

Also included in the new Office are team messaging APIs and more than 40 new supported integrations to prevalent cloud services, including popular chatbot frameworks such as Hubot and Botkit. These new APIs and SDKs are intended to enable developers to embed messaging, collaboration, and task automation into business workflows.

RingCentral's motivation behind this new release is to simplify communications overload. According to a recent RingCentral U.S. study, knowledge workers commonly rely on five or more communications tools to communicate at work.

The new RingCentral Office will be made available in limited release next month.

Global Expansion

The company also announced that RingCentral Office is expanding into 13 European countries. Previously, RingCentral Office was available only in the U.S., Canada, and U.K., but supported remote workers with virtual numbers across 30 countries. With today's announcements, localized versions are available for purchase across 13 European countries plus the U.K., and services can now be paid for in Euros.

The 13 new countries are Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Portugal, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland.

Within these new markets RingCentral has regulatory compliance, emergency calling services, and direct peering with land and wireless carriers. RingCentral Office is available through channel partners, and the company is opening new direct sales offices in Paris, Amsterdam, and Dublin.

Analytics

Lastly, RingCentral announced improved analytics for both IT administrators and contact centers. RingCentral Quality of Service Analytics provides instant visual performance information across all of its codecs and endpoints. It measures jitter, latency, and packet loss, and can pinpoint network and provider issues.

RingCentral Live Reports provides a contact center-like, real-time dashboard view into call volume, employee availability, hold times, and more. Plus, the solution is mobile-ready.

RingCentral reported a compound annual growth rate of 33% during 2013-2016, and its 2016 annual recurring revenue at $378 million. Its mid-market and enterprise segment, representing accounts with more than 50 seats, grew 93% year-over-year, and now represents $100 million in annual revenue.

Dave Michels is a Contributing Editor and Analyst at TalkingPointz

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