At
Enterprise Connect this week, the future of work has been a popular topic of conversation, as you’d expect. While talk about the future of work has permeated sidebar discussions, breakout sessions, and virtual mainstage panels and keynotes, we’ve heard lots of advice but perhaps no real consensus on the specifics for success.
Anand Eswaran, president and COO of RingCentral, brought up the topic during the company’s first-ever EC keynote presentation. During his presentation, he highlighted five defining factors RingCentral identifies as being crucial in the future.
- Participant equity — First and foremost, employees need to have equal access to digital technologies, regardless of where and how they work, Eswaran said. Communication and collaboration tools not only need to provide an experience fit for specific users, but also “level the playing field for remote, in-office, and remote employees,” he added.
- Systems of experience — By blending capabilities like UC and contact centers, enterprises can create synergies that boost productivity and improve employee and customer experiences, Eswaran said.
- The composable enterprise — “It is the era of the open, composable enterprise — no code, low code, and programmable communications APIs can no longer be ignored,” Eswaran said. Cutting-edge enterprises will create customer communication and collaboration tools that fit their unique needs, all through the power of a unified communications platform as a service, he said.
- AI remains crucial — Enterprises will continue to leverage AI to streamline operations and foster deeper human connections, Eswaran said. Just as AI has reduced the complexity of answering customer queries in the contact center, it will continue to drive changes, not only in the contact center but the larger enterprise, he added.
- Work how and where you want — In the future of work, employees will want to work in the way they want and where they want, and at the pace that they set, Eswaran said. The job of RingCentral and the like is to enable this flexibility for enterprises, he added.
These factors, Eswaran said, “are essential to achieving … balance in this new world of hybrid work.”
RingCentral Shares Update to MVP, Rooms Apps
During the keynote, RingCentral added to its own hybrid work story,
sharing updates for its RingCentral MVP, its UCaaS platform for messaging, video, and phone, and RingCentral Rooms, a video meeting control app.
For
RingCentral MVP, RingCentral announced four features expected to be GA in the first quarter of 2022. They are:
- Live transcription — Providing automatic transcription for video meetings
- Meeting summaries — Meeting participants will be able to receive a recap of the meeting, a video highlight reel, and keywords.
- Digital whiteboard — MVP users will be able to use an infinite digital whiteboard to create virtual sticky notes, upload images, and annotate content. The whiteboard will come with a built-in mini-map, which will track where a user is currently on the whiteboard, RingCentral said.
- Content sharing via phone — Meeting participants will be able to use their phone’s rear camera and the RingCentral app to share content directly to a meeting, RingCentral said.
For Rooms, RingCentral announced:
- Mobile-to-room meeting switch — Users can switch an ongoing meeting to their mobile device directly from RingCentral Rooms.
- Rooms as softphone — RingCentral Rooms devices can soon be used as a phone through the RingCentral Rooms app.
- Rooms proximity sharing — With a Bluetooth connection and device, meeting participants will be able to share content to a nearby RingCentral Room, without having to join the meeting.
- Room Connector — With an add-on license, enterprises can use existing SIP-enabled meeting hardware to join RingCentral Video meetings.
Additionally, RingCentral is set to expand its partner ecosystem with several new Rooms appliances, including the Logitech Rally Plus room system, the Poly Studio X70 video bar, and the Yealink A20 and A30 video bars, RingCentral said. These Rooms features and partner devices will be GA by end of the year.
