Earlier this month, RingCentral held its annual Analyst Summit in the beautiful resort of Corde Valle outside of San Jose, California. Even with the wonderful landscapes to distract, the real show was in the sessions led by the RingCentral executives, who shared with a group of 30 analysts their current strategy for the RingCentral portfolio of communication and collaboration products.
Following an opening welcome from Kira Makagon, Chief Innovation Officer, who discussed the company’s evolution over the past 25 years and its current strategic focus on expanding its product portfolio beyond its cloud PBX roots, the event highlighted RingCentral’s commitment to innovation and growth in the unified communications market.
One theme that really caught my attention was how RingCentral, already with a healthy annual recurring revenue stream (ARR) of $2.33 billion, driven by its core offerings of messaging, video, and phone, plans to generate an additional $100 million ARR from its newest products by the end of 2025. These products include RingCX, RingSense, and RingCentral Events.
Below is my take on these new product offerings and other innovations presented during this event.
RingCX
RingCentral announced the general availability of RingCX on November 14, 2023. RingCX is an AI-first contact center solution available in the US, Canada, UK, France, and Germany. It is designed to democratize contact center solutions, offering an AI-enhanced platform that caters to a broad range of businesses. Unlike RingCentral’s current contact center solution, which is offered in conjunction with NICE (CXone) and targeted toward enterprises, RingCX was initially aimed at smaller organizations. Although, with over 1000 features available at launch, it has gained traction across various market segments, reflecting its adaptability and market appeal.
One feature I like is the workforce engagement management (WEM) add-on. The WEM add-on offers automated quality management, conversation analytics, and insights into customer intent, sentiment, and agent performance.
Both contact center offerings capitalize on the trend of customers purchasing UCaaS and CCaaS together. RingCentral Contact Center integrates NICE’s CXone cloud contact center with its own cloud Message Video Phone (MVP) platform, providing companies with a single “vendor” for customer communications and engagement solutions. RingCentral CX also takes advantage of the UC/CC crossover, but the secret sauce of RingCentral CX and its MVP platform is in the way it plans to cross-leverage AI technologies seamlessly across both UC and CC workloads. Some workflows were shared with attendees under NDA, but take my word that the team at RingCentral has identified exciting new use cases for AI, data, and analysis that span all of its portfolios. The last but significant differentiator of RingCX is its price. With a single license model of $65 per agent per month, RingCX is competitively priced below many other offerings in the market.
With its price point and comprehensive features, RingCX is positioned as a valuable option for businesses seeking efficient contact center solutions. The platform’s success and rapid adoption underscore its alignment with market needs and RingCentral’s strategic focus on expanding its customer base.
Looking ahead, RingCentral plans to enhance RingCX with more features, including Microsoft Teams Contact Center Certification. This reflects the company’s commitment to continuous improvement and addressing evolving market demands, ensuring RingCX remains a relevant and compelling offering.
RingSense AI and Strategy
RingCentral’s AI strategy emphasizes enhancing customer experiences and operational efficiencies across its product suite. The company aims to integrate AI in targeted, meaningful ways, focusing on specific use cases to deliver tangible benefits. All of this is under the umbrella branding of RingSense and will be offered up as productized offerings for specific workloads or vertical use cases. Although this left the analyst audience with several questions about pricing and future monetization, Ram Rajagopalan, VP of Product Management, walked the audience through the current offering in the market, RingSense for Sales, as an example of a for-fee offering of RingCentral’s AI capabilities.
In his presentation, Rajagopalan underscored the pervasive role of AI in RingCentral’s offerings, highlighting its importance in the company’s innovation strategy. The adoption of various large language models (LLMs) demonstrates RingCentral’s flexible, customer-centric approach to AI, catering to diverse needs.
Combining this information with Chief Product Officer Srini Raghavan’s earlier presentation on RingCentral’s AI product vision, the key takeaway was that the team has identified several opportunities to leverage AI across UC and CC use cases that are currently in development or beta testing, and they are actively working out pricing models that are fair and validated for their customers and use cases.
In short, the future of this AI capability/offering is promising, but it is not currently public how this will contribute to the larger ARR goal of $100 million for the new products. I did get a sense that RingCentral’s AI enhancements are designed to evolve with market trends and customer feedback, indicating a long-term commitment to leveraging AI for continuous product improvement. In my opinion, this strategy aligns with broader industry trends, positioning RingCentral as a forward-thinking player in the communications sector.
RingCentral Events
One of the more “fun” solutions we experienced was RingCentral’s expansion into virtual and hybrid events. In fact, the entire analyst event was hosted on RingCentral Events, the product rebirth of Ring’s recent acquisition of Hopin Event in 2023.
RingCentral Events is a platform for planning, producing, and attending virtual, hybrid, and onsite events. It offers a variety of features, including AI-powered features such as AI Writer, Q&A management, and auto-generated social media content; integrated registration, analytics, and session tools; and personalization features such as customizable content, navigation, and interactive tools.
Through RingCentral events, we experienced the Analyst Summit as a hybrid event with colleagues joining through a web interface and in-room participants using the solution for registration, content viewing, and post-event follow-up items such as recorded session distribution.
In my view, RingCentral Events showcases the company’s responsiveness to market trends and customer needs. The platform leverages AI to enhance user experiences, reflecting RingCentral’s broader strategy of integrating innovative technologies across its portfolio.
As the demand for flexible event solutions grows, RingCentral Events is positioned to meet this need, offering a range of features that support diverse event types and sizes. Kristen Koenig, RVP of RingCentral Events, shared glimpses into the platform’s development roadmap, including further AI integration, an ever-expanding ecosystem of apps in its marketplace, and an agency partnership model to expand reach. Much like the pricing strategy for RingCX, Ring is taking a solid position with RingCentral Events offering tiered pricing starting at $750 per license per year. This tier allows events for up to 100 attendees.
What I like about RingCentral Events is that the strategic focus aligns with RingCentral’s broader market strategy, emphasizing product diversification and enhancement. As the platform evolves, it is expected to play a significant role in RingCentral’s growth and market positioning.
Future Outlook
Expect RingCentral to unveil many innovations and product packaging discussed at the 2024 Analyst Summit at Enterprise Connect in Orlando, Florida, where executives will participate in one of the event’s keynote sessions. The company’s plan to announce more developments hints at a strategy geared toward holistic growth, emphasizing not just technological innovation but also market expansion and customer engagement.
In my opinion, RingCentral’s strategy appears to center on two core ideas. First, it plans to deepen its AI integration across its product portfolio, addressing specific customer needs and refining its market offerings. Second, RingCentral is demonstrating momentum in broadening its product capabilities, particularly in contact center solutions and virtual events. It suggests a commitment to diversifying its services and tapping into new market segments.
The strategy is sound, and the company’s execution to date seems consistent. I fully expect this approach to solidify RingCentral’s position in the market, helping it stay competitive and responsive to businesses’ evolving needs.
Disclosure: The Futurum Group is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of The Futurum Group as a whole.
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Author Information
As Practice Lead - Workplace Collaboration, Craig focuses on developing research, publications and insights that clarify how the workforce, the workplace, and the workflows enable group collaboration and communication. He provides research and analysis related to market sizing and forecasts, product and service evaluations, market trends, and end-user and buyer expectations. In addition to following the technology, Craig also studies the human elements of work - organizing his findings into the workforce, the workplace, and the workflows – and charting how these variables influence technologies and business strategies.
Prior to joining Wainhouse, now a part of The Futurum Group, Craig brings twenty years of experience in leadership roles related to P&L management, product development, strategic planning, and business development of security, SaaS, and unified communication offerings. Craig's experience includes positions at Poly, Dell, Microsoft, and IBM.
Craig holds a Master of Business Administration from the Texas McCombs School of Business as well as a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration from Tulane University.
