RingCentral, Inc. (RingCentral) provides AI-powered cloud business communications, contact center, video, and hybrid event solutions.
The company has an AI-powered multi-product portfolio, including Unified Communications as a Service (‘UCaaS’), Contact Center as a Service (‘CCaaS’), Video & Events, and RingSense AI solutions. RingCentral’s core tenets include:
Trust: The company provides communications that businesses can trust, with reliability, security, and privacy; Innovation: The compan...
RingCentral, Inc. (RingCentral) provides AI-powered cloud business communications, contact center, video, and hybrid event solutions.
The company has an AI-powered multi-product portfolio, including Unified Communications as a Service (‘UCaaS’), Contact Center as a Service (‘CCaaS’), Video & Events, and RingSense AI solutions. RingCentral’s core tenets include:
Trust: The company provides communications that businesses can trust, with reliability, security, and privacy; Innovation: The company executes through focused and strategic innovation, setting the bar in the industry for many market firsts; Partnerships: The company has a diverse set of strategic partners, global service providers, channel partners, and third-party developers.
RingCentral is designed for intelligent, connected, and effortless business communications, making employee and customer experiences more productive and efficient.
The company’s multi-product portfolio includes:
RingEX: RingEX is the company’s AI-powered Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform, available in various countries and phone number availability in several countries, enabling seamless collaboration across voice, messaging, and video:
Cloud phone system with IVR, advanced call queues, call management, and deep telephony integrations, where the company has historically strived for 99.999% availability.
Business messaging, including enhanced SMS, MMS, and team chat for streamlined communication.
Cloud fax solutions for secure, integrated document receiving and transmission on mobile or desktop.
AI-enhanced video meetings, featuring meeting summaries and smart collaboration tools, with conference room solutions and interoperability, integrating with third-party meetings.
Comprehensive business analytics and cloud migration tools.
APIs and integrations, allowing businesses to customize workflows and connect with existing applications.
RingCentral Contact Center: RingCentral Contact Center is a collaborative contact center solution that delivers AI-powered omni-channel and workforce engagement solutions integrated with RingEX. RingCentral Contact Center brings together the powerful integration of Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS), which leverages technology from NICE Ltd., along with RingEX, enabling easy collaboration while delivering seamless omnichannel experiences across more than 30 digital and voice channels.
RingCX is the company’s native next-generation CCaaS solution, delivering an AI-powered customer engagement solution with deep CRM integrations and a broad ecosystem of integrated partner solutions, including the following capabilities:
Omnichannel support across voice, chat, email, and messaging for a seamless customer experience.
Real-time and historical analytics for supervisors.
Outbound engagement, including predictive dialing, automated campaigns, and proactive customer outreach to drive conversions and engagement.
Bring-Your-Own IVA (Intelligent Virtual Assistant) for custom AI-powered self-service AI agents tailored to business needs.
Deep CRM integrations, including Salesforce, Zendesk, ServiceNow, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics, and others, ensuring customer interactions are context-aware and data-driven.
Seamless integration with RingEX, enabling a fully connected UCaaS and CCaaS powered by the RingCentral global network.
RingCentral Artificial Intelligence Solutions: RingCentral provides multiple AI solutions designed to improve employee productivity, elevate customer experience, and automate routine tasks:
AI Solutions for RingEX.
AI Receptionist is an AI phone agent that uses generative AI to automatically answer customer questions and transfer callers to the right place, much like traditional full-time receptionists do.
AI Assistant automates conversation recaps, captures notes, and summarizes actions, thus freeing employees from taking notes.
RingSense transforms conversations into actionable conversational intelligence, helping teams improve productivity with AI-driven insights, including, among others: automated meeting and call summaries that capture key points and action items; sentiment and trend analysis; performance insights for managers and teams, providing benchmarking, coaching opportunities, and operational movements; and AI-powered sales intelligence, analyzing customer interactions to optimize engagement and improve sales efficiency.
AI Solutions for RingCX.
AI-based Quality Management (QM) powered by RingSense AI for smarter coaching and operational insights.
AI Agent Assist offers real-time suggestions and contextual responses to improve service efficiency. (This product is currently in beta).
AI Supervisor Assist enables real-time monitoring, coaching, and sentiment analysis to enhance team performance. (This product is currently in beta).
RingCentral for Microsoft Teams: RingCentral seamlessly embeds into Microsoft Teams, providing reliable, global enterprise-grade phone, SMS, fax, and customer experience solutions—without requiring a Teams Phone license:
Embedded telephony, fax, and SMS, delivering a fully featured business phone system inside Teams.
RingSense conversation intelligence, providing AI-driven insights.
A personal AI assistant, automating notes, transcriptions, and follow-ups.
AI writer for SMS, automating composing texts.
RingCentral Events: RingCentral Events, built on the Hopin Events and Session acquisition, enables businesses to host virtual, hybrid, and in-person events with AI-powered engagement tools:
Multi-session event hosting, from small gatherings to large-scale conferences.
AI-driven attendee engagement, including automated networking and personalized recommendations to foster community.
Deep integrations with CRM and marketing automation.
The company’s flagship cloud-based offerings, RingEX and RingCX, are subscription-based and made available at different rates, varying by the specific functionalities, services, and number of users. The company primarily generates revenues from the sale of subscriptions to its offerings. The company’s subscription plans have monthly, annual, or multi-year contractual terms. The remainder of the company’s revenues primarily consists of product revenues from the sale of pre-configured phones and professional services.
The company uses its direct inside sales force and indirect sales channels to market its products and subscription offerings. The company’s indirect sales channels, which sell its solutions, consist of a regional and global network of resellers and distributors; global service providers and strategic partners who market and sell the company’s RingEX, RingCX, or other solutions, including co-branded solutions.
Customers
The company has a diverse and growing customer base across a wide range of industries, including financial services, education, healthcare, legal services, real estate, retail, technology, insurance, construction, hospitality, and state and local government, among others. The company seeks to establish and maintain long-term relationships with its customers.
RingCentral powers customer engagement and intelligent communication across industries:
Retail and e-commerce businesses use AI-assisted agents to reduce wait times, automate order inquiries, and personalize customer interactions.
Financial services firms ensure compliance while enhancing client engagement with voice and digital experiences, personalized coaching, and intelligent risk and compliance monitoring.
Healthcare providers streamline patient communication and care coordination with scheduling, automated documentation, and HIPAA-compliant messaging.
Customer service teams improve response times with real-time agent assistance, self-service tools, and personalized coaching.
Sales and marketing teams accelerate deals with conversation insights, automated follow-ups, and smarter customer engagement strategies.
The company sells its solutions to enterprise customers, as well as small and medium-sized businesses. The company defines a ‘customer’ as a party that purchases or subscribes to its products and services directly or through its indirect sales channel, which includes resellers and distributors, strategic partners, and global service providers.
Marketing, Sales, and Support
The company uses a variety of marketing, sales, and support activities to generate and cultivate ongoing customer demand for its subscriptions, acquire new customers, and engage with its existing customers. The company sells globally through both direct and indirect channels, which include resellers and distributors, strategic partners, and global service providers. The company provides onboarding implementation services to help its customers set up and configure their newly purchased communications system, as well as ongoing self-service, phone support, online chat support, and training. The company also closely tracks and monitors customer acquisition costs to assess how it is deploying its marketing, sales, and customer support spending.
Marketing: The company’s marketing efforts include search engine marketing, search engine optimization, affiliates, list buys, shared leads, content leads, appointment setting, radio advertising, online display advertising, sports sponsorships, billboard advertising, tradeshows and events, and other forms of demand generation.
Direct Sales: The company primarily sells its solutions and subscriptions through direct inbound and outbound sales efforts. The company has direct sales representatives located in the U.S. and internationally.
Indirect Sales: The company’s indirect sales channel consists of global and regional networks of resellers and distributors, strategic partners, and global and regional service providers. The company’s indirect sales channels help broaden the adoption of its solutions and enable the company to leverage the channel to sell its services as well as access their customer bases.
Customer Support and Services: While the company’s intuitive and easy-to-use user interface serves to reduce its customers’ need for support and services, the company provides online chat and phone customer support, as well as post-sale implementation support, as an option to help customers configure and use its solution.
Strategy
The company’s strategy to expand its technological capabilities involves engaging in strategic transactions from time to time. Such strategic acquisitions enable the company to complement its technology and skill sets and expand its solution reach.
Technology and Operations
The company’s platforms are hosted both in private and public clouds. The company’s private clouds are built on a highly scalable and flexible infrastructure consisting of commercially available hardware and software components. The company’s public clouds are built on a scalable platform that allows it to leverage shared components and services, enabling rapid development of new features and functionalities on its existing platform without re-architecting the infrastructure to achieve geographical redundancy and high availability. The system is designed to be redundant. The company also utilizes Amazon’s and Google's public cloud services.
The company’s private cloud is served from multiple data centers and third-party co-location facilities located in several cities in the United States and throughout the world. The company’s data centers are designed to host mission-critical computer and communications systems with redundant, fault-tolerant subsystems, and compartmentalized security zones. The company maintains a security program designed to ensure the security and integrity of customer data, protect against security threats or data breaches, and prevent unauthorized access to its customers’ data. The company limits access to on-demand servers and networks at its production and remote backup facilities.
Intellectual Property
The company’s worldwide intellectual property portfolio includes 478 issued patents, which expire between 2025 and 2042, and 99 patent applications pending examination in the U.S. and in foreign jurisdictions, all of which are related to the U.S. applications. The ‘RingCentral’ trademark is its property.
Competition
The company faces competition from a broad range of providers of business communications and collaboration solutions. Some of these competitors include:
Traditional on-premise, hardware business communications providers, such as Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Avaya LLC, Cisco Systems, Inc., Mitel Networks Corporation, NEC Corporation, and Siemens Enterprise Networks, LLC, any of which may now or in the future also host their solutions through the cloud;
Software providers, such as Microsoft Corporation, Zoom Communications, Inc., and Cisco Systems, Inc., that generally license and/or host their software solutions, and their resellers, including major global service providers and cable companies;
Established business communications providers that resell on-premise hardware, software, and hosted solutions, such as Comcast, TMU, Orange, and others, all of whom currently have significantly greater resources than the company and now or in the future may also develop and/or host their own or other solutions through the cloud;
Other cloud companies, such as 8x8, Inc., Amazon.com, Inc., DialPad, Inc., GoTo, Microsoft Corporation, Nextiva, Inc., Twilio Inc., Vonage Holdings Corp. (acquired by Ericsson), Alianza, Inc., and Zoom Communications, Inc.;
Video meeting and collaboration service providers, such as Amazon.com, Inc., Apple Inc., Alphabet Inc. (Google G-Suite and Meet), Meta Platforms, Inc., Microsoft Teams, Slack Technologies, Inc. (acquired by Salesforce.com, Inc.), and Zoom Communications, Inc.;
Other technology companies, such as Alphabet Inc. (Google Voice), Meta Platforms, Inc., Oracle Corporation, and Salesforce.com, Inc., any of which might launch its own cloud-based business communication services or acquire other cloud-based business communications companies in the future;
Providers of communications platform as a service solutions and messaging software platforms with APIs, such as Twilio Inc., Vonage Holdings Corp. (acquired by Ericsson), and Slack Technologies, Inc. (acquired by Salesforce.com, Inc.), on which customers can build diverse solutions by integrating cloud communications into business applications;
Contact center and customer relationship management providers, such as Amazon.com, Inc., Alvaria, Inc., Avaya LLC, Five9, Inc., NICE Ltd. (including LiveVox Holdings, Inc.), Genesys Telecommunications Laboratories, Inc., Serenova, LLC (acquired by Enghouse Systems Ltd.), Talkdesk, Inc., Vonage Holdings Corp. (acquired by Ericsson), Salesforce.com, Inc., Twilio Inc., and Zoom Communications, Inc.; and
Digital engagement vendors, such as eGain Corporation, LivePerson, Inc., among others named above that may offer similar features.
Regulatory
As a provider of communication services over the Internet, the company is subject to regulation in the U.S. by the FCC. Some of these regulatory obligations include contributing to the Federal Universal Service Fund, Telecommunications Relay Service Fund, and federal programs related to phone number administration; providing access to E-911 services; protecting customer information; complying with caller ID authentication and anti-robocall measures; and porting phone numbers upon a valid customer request. The company is also required to pay state and local 911 fees and contribute to state universal service funds in those states that assess interconnected Voice over Internet Protocol (‘VoIP’) services. In addition, the company has certified a wholly-owned subsidiary as a competitive local exchange carrier in thirty states and the District of Columbia and registered as an IP-enabled Service Provider in an additional eleven states. This subsidiary, RCLEC, is subject to the same FCC regulations applicable to telecommunications companies, as well as regulation by the public utility commissions in states where the subsidiary provides services.
In the United Kingdom, for example, the company’s subscriptions are regulated by Ofcom, which, among other things, requires electronic communications services providers, such as the company, to provide all users access to both 112 (EU-mandated) and 999 (U.K.-mandated) emergency service numbers at no charge. Similarly, in Canada, the company’s subscriptions are regulated by the CRTC, which, among other things, imposes requirements like those in the U.S. related to the provision of E-911 services in all areas of Canada where the wireline incumbent carrier offers such 911 services. Countries across Europe have now implemented the EU Electronic Communications Code, clarifying and updating obligations on PSTN-connected voice service providers, as well as imposing new requirements on number-independent services, such as videoconferencing and team messaging. Additionally, the French regulatory agency, ARCEP, has made major changes to its telephone numbering plan that went into effect in January 2023, allowing for greater nomadic use of services like those of the company and prohibiting the sub-assignment of phone numbers to resellers, requiring each provider to obtain numbers directly from ARCEP. The company’s regulatory obligations in foreign jurisdictions could have a material adverse effect on the use of its subscriptions in international locations.
History
RingCentral, Inc. was founded in 1999. The company was incorporated in California in 1999 and was reincorporated in Delaware in 2013.
