The News: Today, RingCentral announced the addition of Push-to-Talk capabilities to the RingCentral platform to provide frontline workers with a tailored communications experience that includes video, voice communications (1:1 or channels), team messaging, and file sharing. Read the full press release here.
RingCentral Adds Push-To-Talk Capabilities to Meet the Needs of Frontline Workers
Analyst Take: Communications platform vendors have been fighting it out over the same 715M global knowledge workers for the last 25 years. Under the older monolithic architectures, software experiences had to appeal to a massive audience to make them worth building. There are enough commonalities in people working in front of a computer at a desk that the model worked. But it left about 2.1 billion global frontline workers underserved by the communications technology industry.
The frontline worker category is a hugely diverse group of job roles ranging from forestry and fishery workers to retail clerks, tradespeople, and workers on the factory floor. The old software development model made it impractical to create solutions for this group as their needs vary so much. But with advances in mobility, cloud architectures, and composable platforms, the needs of the frontline worker have recently become addressable, and the market is starting to respond.
RingCentral’s Push-To-Talk (PTT) feature allows frontline workers to instantly communicate via channels or in 1 to 1 conversation. While looking up a contact or dialing a number annoys knowledge workers, it poses a much different problem for an electrical lineman or a machine service technician with their hands full. In many cases, that barrier prevents the free flow of information to or from the field, leaving both organizations and workers guessing the next best action. PTT makes communications easier for the frontline workers and helps ensure open lines of communication throughout the organization, so everyone is operating with the best information available.
While PTT is valuable as a standalone capability, RingCentral’s offer goes a step further by adding messaging, file sharing, and the ability to share the mobile device’s camera to the package. These services further clarify communications between the frontline and central office.
From an admin perspective, PTT gets added as an additional button in the same RingCentral app for enabled users. This means there’s still only one app to manage. Admins can also add/remove users and create/manage channels on a single device or across all devices in the Admin portal and handle lost or compromised devices in the field via Microsoft inTune.
Disclosure: Wainhouse Research, part of The Futurum Group family of companies, 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 Wainhouse Research as a whole.
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Image Credit: RingCentral
Author Information
Sean is a Senior Analyst strategically focused on cloud-based collaboration and its impact on worker productivity and human connection. Sean provides research on market sizing and forecasts, product and service evaluations, and end user/buyer insight.
Sean is a trusted advisor to and assists industry vendors and enterprises with workplace communications and collaboration strategies, market entry and product assessment, product portfolio analysis, and sales enablement services.
Prior to Wainhouse, now a part of The Futurum Group, Sean was the Chief Product Officer at PGI, owning the product strategy and roadmap for a full suite of B2B and B2B2C SaaS communications products including an enterprise grade phone system, audio meetings, video meetings, messaging, video webinars, high touch attended audio conferences and massively scaled video webcasts.
Sean holds a Bachelor of Science in International Business from University of Colorado, Boulder.
