RingCentral at a ConnectCentral 2017 conference today expanded its campaign to begin a central communications and collaboration hub in the cloud by adding integrations with Slack, Google Gmail and Amazon Alexa in addition to adding support for chatbots enabled by artificial intelligence technologies provided by Salesforce, Kore.ai and Gong.io within the core RingCentral Office service.
In addition, RingCentral unfurled a quality of service (QoS) analytics application that can be employed to discover issues involving jitter, latency or packet loss.
Jose Pastor, vice president of product management for RingCentral, says as a rule RingCentral has no issues integrating with other services even when there is an overlap in functionality.
“We made the platform easy to customize,” says Pastor. “Customers should be able to bring new technologies if they need it.”
Pastor says at this juncture, it’s clear that customers are voting with their feet to embrace unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS). The issue that many of them run into with rival platforms is that they are not as easy to use as RingCentral. Rather than being developed by a telecommunications carrier, Pastor says RingCentral is driven by software engineers that are especially focused on the end-user experience.
It remains to be seen how so-called over-the-top providers of communications and collaboration services will be able to outmaneuver carriers and providers of network hardware looking to extend their reach into communication services. But with millions of users already signed up to use the RingCentral UCaaS, Pastor says the company likes its odds now more than ever.
