RingCentral: Disruptor Defends Turf through Innovation and Global Expansion

If you doubt cloud is an increasing threat to on-premise phone systems, consider RingCentral has exceeded 300,000 businesses meaning cloud has become highly disruptive to traditional PBX vendors. Smart disruptors know that once they become incumbents, they too become targets of disruption.

I often advise communications service providers the move to software solutions like NFV is critical because they need to be able to compete with OTT providers such as Facebook and WhatsApp who have a large audience of users who will use voice and video once available on their platforms. Likewise, cloud-UC players need to worry about text-based enterprise companies like Slack becoming major players in UC and collaboration.

This is why RingCentral purchased Glip, the team messaging and Niel Levonius.jpgcollaboration solution. I spoke with Niel Levonius (pictured) Director of Product Marketing of the company who told me Glip usage has tripled since the acquisition and they plan to keep it as a freemium model.

In other news, the company’s Connect Platform has exceeded one million API calls per day. In addition, their WebRTC solution which is in Beta lets users experience real-time communications directly from their browser. In addition, their WebRTC API is now available to developers. Niel explained this initiative is part of the company’s move to lightweight apps which allow them to increase the velocity of their innovation.

Niel also explained the company wants to be the first truly global network service provider and will be in over 35 countries by the end of the year. In addition, they have phone numbers available in 79 countries at the moment.

As RingCentral moves upmarket and targets companies which have more than one-thousand users, there will be increasing importance on having voice quality which scales globally. Their move into the text messaging/group collaboration space coupled with their desire to dominate global telephony should be nice differentiators in the market. There is no such thing as being disruption-proof but at least it seems they have figured out a way to become highly disruption-resistant.

To learn more about APIs and ecosystems – be sure to visit All About The API. To Keep up with the latest on WebRTC and Real-Time Web solutions check out Real-Time Web Solutions.

 

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