Ever striving to move upmarket, cloud communications pure-play RingCentral continues to build out its enterprise support organization as well as its global infrastructure, and -- as indicative in some recent wins -- the efforts appear to be paying off.
This week RingCentral announced that it has brought industry veteran Derrell James, most recently with Avaya, on board as SVP of professional services. James, who had been responsible for Avaya's $2 billion global strategic services business, joins RingCentral at a time of increasing requests for professional services engagements from larger companies looking to realize "the promise of the cloud," as COO David Sipes shared during a recent conversation with No Jitter.
In addition to adding expertise to the professional services team, RingCentral said it is expanding support for global customers. The professional services organization now serves deployments in France, Germany, the U.K., and other countries supported by its in-country cloud calling service, RingCentral Global Office, the company said. Building on the base RingCentral Office cloud phone system, RingCentral Global Office not only allows multinational enterprises to connect far-flung employees to each other in integrated fashion, but also provides local phone numbers and caller IDs so those enterprises can appear local to their customers in any region.
In a separate announcement, RingCentral last week reported that more than 700 multinational enterprises have adopted RingCentral Global Office since it became available in early 2016. The figure represents a 75% increase in the number of companies using the cloud communications service over the last two quarters, RingCentral said. On average, these multinationals have more than 100 employees using the service in 30 countries, Ritu Mukherjee, associate vice president of RingCentral Global Office, shared in an email interview. She was not, however, able to share corresponding call volume or other metrics.
In RingCentral's April Q1 2017 earnings call, COO Sipes spoke to the channel's growing importance in winning enterprise business for both RingCentral Office and RingCentral Global Office. An uptick in channel acceptance is "enabling us to reach more enterprise customers, faster, and with higher win rates," he said. In fact, channel partner involvement led to five of the six seven-figure deals the company closed in the first quarter, he added.
Hyatt, which is replacing an on-premises Avaya system, is among those $1 million or higher deals, noted RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis during the earnings call. Hyatt is starting the move to RingCentral Office at its headquarters, but ultimately intends to do so across its workforce, Sipes elaborated later in the call. He attributed the win to the seamless integration of voice, video, messaging, and team collaboration.
As further evidence of RingCentral's upmarket success, the midmarket and enterprise segments now account for more than $115 million in business, Mitesh Dhruv, SVP of finance and strategy, said during the earnings call. That represents an 86% growth overall, as well as around 45% of new RingCentral Office sales, he added.
To keep building on the multinational momentum it has with RingCentral Global Office, RingCentral also last week announced an expansion of its global footprint in Asia Pacific and Latin America, to include new data centers in Japan and Brazil. As elsewhere in the RingCentral network ecosystem, these data centers feature direct peering connections with unnamed Tier 1 international carriers and Internet service providers, Mukherjee said. With the Japan and Brazil data centers open, RingCentral now operates 17 data centers in four regions.
Additionally, RingCentral Global Office is now available across 32 countries in the North American, European, and APAC regions. Its reach will extend to Latin America in the third quarter when RingCentral brings on support for Brazil, Argentina, and Peru, and deeper into APAC when Japan comes on board in the fourth quarter, Mukherjee said.
Rapidly growing itself, Medallia, a customer experience SaaS provider, is one company that apparently appreciates RingCentral's continued expansion. The company has grown its presence in Palo Alto, New York, Buenos Aires, London, and Paris, and with RingCentral Global Office it can "ensure our employees are always connected and able to communicate and collaborate on any device, from anywhere," said Jonathan Hansen, principal enterprise architect at Medallia, in a prepared statement.
"This is critical to our business," he added, "so we can stay connected to our customers globally and continue to deliver on our mission to create a world where companies are loved by customers and employees alike."
Over time, RingCentral also will offer in-country versions of RingCentral Office for the APAC and Latin American markets, just as it has done in Europe, Mukherjee said (see related No Jitter post, "RingCentral Simplifies Collaborative Communications"). With local RingCentral Office versions, the company provides in-country purchasing and billing in local currencies -- and further establishes itself as a global player with local presence.
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