Spotlight on Enterprise Communications | TelecomDrive.com
With a huge number of multinational organizations establishing offices and technology hubs in India, more and more enterprise entities are looking forward to resilient communication solutions that are tailor made to their needs and ensure business continuity in a seamless manner – this is where RingCentral is reinventing communications for enterprise today.
Sathesh Murthy, Managing Director and Engineering Head, RingCentral India speaks with Zia Askari from TelecomDrive.com about the company’s strategy for India and its future plans.
How does RingCentral look at the Indian market today? What are your key priorities here?
The phenomenal development of India’s telecom industry in the last three decades, largely driven by big capital, is possibly the greatest triumph amongst all other rising businesses and industries in India. IBEF reports India’s IT and business services market is projected to reach US$ 19.93 billion by 2025 – there is a huge market opportunity. As more multinational organizations establish satellite offices and technology hubs in India, they require fully compliant, enterprise-grade solutions to ensure business continuity and seamless communications. That is what we provide at RingCentral.
Undoubtedly, AI is on our minds. Together with our leading message, video, and phone platform, as well as our contact center solution, we are focused on empowering businesses around the world with AI-powered conversation intelligence, which unlocks insights from interaction data to accelerate business outcomes. We are focused on how we can improve our platform to accommodate how people will operate in the future, promoting AI-enabled communications, ISV connections, frictionless experiences, and more.
How do you look at the opportunities in the Indian market for cloud communications service providers? How can RingCentral help CSPs realize the opportunities?
India is experiencing rapid growth in internet penetration and smartphone adoption, making it one of the largest and fastest-growing markets for digital services. Thus, we at RingCentral perceive significant opportunities for cloud communication service providers to offer solutions to a large user base India. India has a mobile-first population, with a significant number of users accessing the internet primarily through smartphones. This allows us to leverage this trend by offering mobile-friendly solutions that cater to the unique needs and preferences of mobile users. Mobile apps, SMS-based communication, and voice services optimized for mobile devices can be key differentiators in the Indian market. To aid the growing need, the Indian government’s Digital India initiative and the push for digital transformation across sectors are driving the demand for cloud-based communication services. This opens windows to CSPs to modernize their communication infrastructure, migrate to the cloud, and leverage advanced communication technologies to enhance productivity, customer engagement, and operational efficiency.
Please share details on your go to market strategy for India?
Hybrid work is not going anywhere, and businesses worldwide will continue to embrace mobility to enable work in any mode, on any device, from anywhere. With these new working dynamics, we will continue to see the adoption of cloud-based communications platforms. We intend to endeavor towards excellence in research and development, driving innovation in the sector at large. Moreover, India has a great talent pool, and we are building our engineering organization as we scale for growth—transforming our innovation centers in India into centers of excellence as a major R&D hub.
Currently, there are more than 100 employees at RingCentral’s office in India and we look forward to increasing the taskforce significantly in the upcoming months.
What kind of innovations are being driven by RingCentral in the sector today?
With more than 500 APIs, over 8500 custom apps, and more than 80,000 developers, RingCentral offers a linked experience across modalities on a single global open platform. Along with data-driven coaching, decision-making, and process optimization, we also provide AI-powered capabilities, like Live Transcriptions and automatic Meeting Summaries, in our video meetings solution. Earlier this year, we announced RingSense, a cutting-edge AI platform that brings the power of conversation intelligence to business communications and collaboration.
Our first application of RingSense is for Sales teams whereby it gives every salesperson and every sales manager superpowers with AI capabilities that enhance human limitations and automates things like summaries, actions items and coaching to help them close more deals, faster. Ultimately, RingSense eliminates the more mundane tasks, allowing employees to concentrate on more strategic or creative tasks.
Cybersecurity is a critical peg for the cloud communications platform. What is your strategy to drive security for your customers?
We have recently obtained key regulatory approvals from the Department of Telecommunications (DoT) and the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) to offer compliant enterprise-grade cloud telephony in India. Security is a foundational principle of how we extend trust to our customers, and is a shared priority from our CEO, our CISO organization, and all employees. It’s reflected in our:
- Information security protection practices
This gives customers peace of mind that RingCentral is keeping their data safe and protects their communication data – from incidents like data breaches, vishing and smishing – to the world’s highest security standards.
- Our adherence to global privacy laws
This gives customers peace of mind that RingCentral is keeping them free of regulatory concerns and stays in compliance with laws such as GDPR.
- And front-end security controls for admins and in the app itself
This gives customers the ability to secure everyday communications, whether it’s through administrative controls to authenticate access, blocking spam, etc.
Please share RingCentral’s growth plans in India and your product offering?
We are always looking to identify new partners to collaborate with that will enhance our offerings for our customers. RingCentral also has a broad partner ecosystem, including some of the largest phone carriers in the world like AT&T, Vodafone, BT, and Deutsche Telekom, among others.
RingCentral’s Global MVP provides a single phone system for companies that have offices around the world. This phone system is cloud-based and can be used on desk phones, desktop apps, and mobile apps, streamlining the phone system management across your international branch offices. RingCentral Global MVP licenses come with 1,000 outbound minutes per user and these minutes are pooled across the account and can be used for calls placed in the same regional zone as the Global MVP country.
What more can we expect from RingCentral in the coming months?
Cloud communications and collaboration solutions are imperative to business today. RingCentral delivers the most advanced, industry-recognized cloud PBX, and we also have the most complete and tightly integrated Unified Communications as a Service and Contact Center as a Service solution. We’re continuing to focus on simplifying business communications for customers around the world by providing intelligent, connected experiences. What that means is we are injecting AI into every part of communication; we’re breaking down silos of communication across modes, devices, and integrated tools, and we’re making experiences adaptive, dynamic, and personalized to the way people want to work.
