RingCentral Launches Global Office

RingCentral, a provider of cloud-based business communication and collaboration tools, today announced Global Office, a unified-communications-as-a-service solution designed to unify enterprises with branches spanning multiple countries and enable international agents to connect with their customers through local support channels.

For RingCentral, the release is a further push to replace legacy private branch exchange (PBX) telephone with flexible and simplified cloud-based solutions. Vlad Shmunis, CEO of RingCentral, noted in a statement that the company's offering has given U.S. companies a cloud-based alternative:

"When we introduced RingCentral Office, we dramatically changed the legacy PBX market with a single cloud solution supporting multiple locations in the U.S. We also delivered simple and disruptive all-inclusive per-user pricing compared to the expensive and complex a la carte pricing model still prevalent among legacy on-premises vendors."

Now, the vendor continues to distribute the model on a global scale.

According to Niel Levonius, RingCentral's director of product marketing, other vendors such as Cisco and Avaya have tried to account for global communications problems by providing international numbers that can be accessed in various countries, but these offerings have not enabled global employees to engage those customers as entities situated in their native regions.

"This is the first time a multinational organization can extend service globally on a single communications platform without going around and replacing on-premises systems at every office around the world, which is a costly and clunky process," Levonius says.

Built on RingCentral's Global Connect Network—a redundant service delivery architecture that promises security, and is designed to adjust as companies operate on an international scale—Global Office aims to foster improved interactions between international customers and service agents by making it easier for them to connect directly with customers.

Global Office's capabilities include local phone numbers; local caller IDs; worldwide extension-to-extension dialing; included minute bundles for international calls; carrier-grade service quality; legally required and available number porting; and legally required emergency services.

"Not only is there a natural preference for localized numbers," Levonius says, "but RingCentral offers an excellent IVR and Auto Attendant solution that allows users to configure their system to ensure proper call handling of customers at a global scale. If a call is coming in from a region that requires a certain language, it's routed to the proper contact to handle that language. From a customer service standpoint, that is a huge asset, as it saves customers time in getting their concerns heard and resolves issues in a timely manner."

And this kind of consolidation is becoming essential to multinational organizations, as they expand their global service teams; increasingly, these companies are eager to replace their legacy on-premises systems with more agile ones, agreed Elka Popova, principal analyst of unified communications and collaboration at Frost & Sullivan, in a statement:

"Distributed enterprises have a tremendous demand for a unified cloud-based communications solution that efficiently connects their global workforce."

One multinational customer, Pyramid Analytics, which has offices in Europe, Israel, and the U.S., has already cut costs and increased efficiency with the solution. According to Herbert Ochtman, executive vice president of business development at Pyramid, phone systems have traditionally been one of the company's top IT expenses. RingCentral's offering has enabled the business intelligence and analytics platform provider "to connect our global workforce in a seamless and cost-effective way," Ochtman said in a statement:

 "It's surprising how easy it is to deploy in other countries and manage from one centralized administrator dashboard."

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