As RingCentral COO David Sipes noted during last month’s earnings call, the cloud communications provider continues to work on bulking up its open platform and furthering product development in a few focus areas, including high availability. This week the company provided evidence of each in the form of two pre-
Enterprise Connect product announcements -- one related to APIs and the other to cloud connectivity.
Communications Where You Live
The first new API-related product,
RingCentral Embeddable, reflects the growing trend of integrating communications and collaboration capabilities into business applications and workflows -- a theme we’ll no doubt hear repeatedly next week at Enterprise Connect. With RingCentral Embeddable, enterprise customers will be able to have their developers add voice and SMS messaging into business applications, providing capabilities such as screen pops with inbound calls, click to dial, click to SMS, and access to softphone settings, messages, and call history, RingCentral said.
Because developers will be able to leverage the user experience and quality assurance used in RingCentral apps, they’ll be able to embed the communications functionality “in under 15 minutes,” the company declares on its
product page.
As Kira Makagon, EVP of Innovation at RingCentral, noted in a
prepared statement, the need to toggle from one application to the next is an unnecessary distraction for modern workers. Being able to easily embed communications into business-critical applications will enable companies to make their workforces more productive, she added.
In additional API news, RingCentral has added two new compliance-related APIs to its
API library. With an e-Discovery API, administrators can generate reports on all messages -- including data on SMS, chat, MMS, voicemail, and fax -- tracked by user. Further, using a new message retention API will allow them to extract messages to meet additional compliance and data retention requirements, RingCentral said.
RingCentral Embeddable and the new APIs are available immediately on a global basis.
In addition to these product releases, RingCentral shared that more than 20,000 developers use its open platform and that the platform supports more than 2,000 integrations.
Keeping the Communications Flowing
RingCentral’s second announcement of the week focuses on resiliency -- a must-have for enterprises moving to the cloud for communications, as Robin Gareiss, president of Nemertes Research, noted in a
prepared statement. “As organizations move to cloud communications, it is imperative for them to have uninterrupted access to business-critical communications services,” she said. “Cloud services that maintain voice and emergency calling capabilities during Internet outages have an edge because they address platform availability requirements.”
Enter RingCentral Persist. With this solution, RingCentral Office customers will be able to maintain communications services should Internet access fail at any of their locations. Specifically, RingCentral Persist will enable:
- Emergency calling to and from the local Public Safety Answering Point via the PSTN connection
- Extension-to-extension dialing at the affected site as well as among sites via the PSTN connection
- Outbound calling to external numbers, over the PSTN connection
- Routing of inbound calls to designated users
When RingCentral Persist becomes available next quarter, IT administrators will be able to provision and manage the solution through the RingCentral service portal, the company said.
The company will be showcasing these latest solutions -- RingCentral Embeddable, its new API products, and RingCentral Persist -- in booth 1806 on the Enterprise Connect Expo floor.
If you haven’t registered for Enterprise Connect, it’s not too late to attend – and catch up with RingCentral and hundreds of other exhibitors. And, as a No Jitter reader, you can even still get $200 off your pass by using the code NJPOSTS at checkout.
