RingCentral Analyst Summit 2024

Expansion of its multi-product, single platform, AI-enhanced strategy could be crucial for RingCentral, but presents a new set of challenges.

RingCentral’s Analyst Summit, a hybrid event, was held in California with elucidation of its wider market strategy, following its latest financial updates. It’s nearly 25 years to the day that RingCentral was formulated, making the Silicon Valley giant considerably older than you might think.

Vlad Shmunis – Founder, Chairman, and CEO – of RingCentral was on stage during an executive panel to outline the company’s leading position within global communications markets:

“We (RingCentral) were the original cloud PBX provider – and we are still the fastest growing of the public (listed) UCaaS players.”

The majority of RingCentral’s ARR still comes from PBX-related solutions within its portfolio, but new product lines – across contact centre (CC), events, and sales enablement – represent an increasing proportion of this. There was general acknowledgment during the event of the balance required between building on its core areas of strength, cloud-based PBX capability, and investing in new areas to develop its revenue streams in the future.

Some of these areas are potentially transformative and worth examining in more detail from both a customer and partner perspective.

Addressing an underserved market with RingCX

At Cavell, we have been talking about a potentially underserved proportion of the market for several years. Contact centre solutions for decades were the preserve of larger enterprises who could afford the substantial CAPEX required to install, manage, and maintain them. The cloud-era promised to democratize this access but contact centre adoption trends still skew toward larger businesses who could afford the now substantial OPEX required.

The informal contact centre market is substantial. The number of organizations with users who aren’t leveraging formal contact centre systems or CCaaS solutions but are responsible for customer communications is vast. Even in the formal contact centre, the opportunity in smaller business segments is sizeable. Cavell’s own research shows that the proportion of the contact centre agent market that will be deployed, in organisations with less than 50 users, will increase significantly over the next 5 years.

RingCentral announced the general availability of RingCX in November 2023. The solution aims to offer an easily deployable, AI-enhanced contact centre solution designed to meet the mass market requirement for a customer interaction handling solution. RingCentral revealed that the platform has already received significant traction with customers, with thousands of users already deployed, including some recognizable logos.

Vice President of Product Management, Ashish Seth, admitted that at inception RingCX was targeted at midmarket to smaller organisations, who typically might have slightly more simplistic contact centre requirements. Since becoming generally available though, the solution has appealed to a wide range of businesses of all sizes, with some deployment in enterprises with more than a thousand users. It turns out that RingCX was more of a use case play, rather than a segment-specific offering.

The wide-ranging appeal is understandable. At $65 per user per month (PUPM), the solution is disruptively priced. Cavell’s own enterprise research of contact centre buyers found that the mean price paid for a formal contact centre solution in the US was nearly double the RingCX ticket price.

The solution also packs a considerable punch for the price with unlimited domestic inbound and outbound minutes, support for more than 20 communication channels, ACD, IVR, and skills-based routing included as standard, as well as a host of other features.

RingCentral openly admitted that for the most complex contact centre deployments, they will still need to utilise their partnership with NICE. But for more simplistic requirements, RingCX will hit the mark. Its development will continue a rapid trajectory, with a lot more news to be announced at this year’s Enterprise Connect. One example of a future goal is Microsoft Teams Contact Centre Certification. An integration is coming later this year for RingCX, but Microsoft certification is key. Cavell research found that this was a red line for many organisations already using Teams with an integrated contact centre solution. A not insignificant proportion of the available market will be potentially out of reach until that is achieved. With the new solution still addressing a significant proportion of the contact centre market, RingCentral joins a host of other providers…

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