INTERVIEW
UCaaS - A Cloud First Option
By any measurement 2018 was an very successful year for RingCentral, the US based UCaaS supplier. Sales were
up 33% year on year to $726m and signifi cantly. within that, there have been shifts to mid-market and enterprise
as well as from direct to channel sales as Robinder Koura, their Head of Channel EMEA, explains
Robinder Koura joined
RingCentral two years ago
with a brief to ‘re-boot’
their EMEA channel sales
and today, in the UK and France,
their two major EMEA markets,
channel sales represents the major
income stream.
Koura says that as well as
our shifts to indirect channels
and the mid-market and
enterprise, he has noticed that
customers too are changing their
perception of UC models.
“Today UCaaS is becoming
a cloud rst option for any
organisation. Organisations have
already shifted many of their
business process applications to
the cloud so when it comes to
uni ed communications that too
has to t in with that model.”
So why has RingCentral
chalked up such impressive
year on year growth fi gures?
“ ere are two main reasons.
Firstly we are driven by
innovation; we only do
UCaaS and we plan to stay an
innovation leader. Secondly, our
shift to a channel model has
seen us accelerate sales. We have
tapped in to channel networks
that in Europe are the trusted
advisors to users with a great
reputation with their customers.
e nature of our channel
program, which we call
‘Channel Harmony’ means
that we are able to work with
Robinder Kour a, Head of Channel EMEA, RingCentral
any partner with some form of
customer base and get them in
to a revenue generating position
incredibly fast.
One of the ways in which we
do this is by placing a subject
matter specialist with the partner
on each of their deals. ere are
no penalties for this so with our
product experts working alongside
the resellers we can get them up to
speed in a month! is is a perfect
method for say IT and CRM
resellers who have never sold
UCaaS before to increase their
customer wallet share.
e UC market is moving
on. It used to be the case that
UC was a PBX with a few
collaboration features bolted
on but today UCaaS needs to
have integrated ‘teams’ style
messaging products included
and integrated. RingCentral
purchased Glip and its team
messaging, collaboration and
le sharing application in 2015
which is now included and
integrated without our UCaaS
o ering.
Our advantage is that we
are a born in the cloud vendor
and the likes of Cisco, Avaya
and Mitel are having to play
catch-up.”
Are the conversations you are
having with users changing as
well?
“ ey are. We can start o
a customer conversation
today by asking clients what
applications they are currently
using. Because RingCentral has
an open platform and API we
had tremendous success with
developers have hundreds of
integrations completed. ese
include Microsoft 365, Skype
for Business and Dynamics,
Salesforce and Google GSuite
where we are one of just two
organisations to have product
integration.
Outside of these ecosystems
there are many users with their
own customer software which
they want integrated with our
platform.”
Expect a quote from the
reseller (CTS) involved.
What can we look forward to
from RingCentral this year?
At a recent customer engagement
panel the drivers for the choice
of RingCentral as a their UCaaS
supplier were considered as being
consistent reliable voice quality,
analytics, integrations and future
proo ng so we will be doubling
down to ensure we continue to
deliver these for our users.
Our focus will be on
leadership in voice video and
messaging, contact centres where
we grew our agent base by 88%
last year, continued drive of our
open platform ecosystem and the
expansion of our channel and
verticals.
8 | IP Telephony 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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