RingCentral emerges as leader in UCaaS solutions

There are more unified communications as a service (UCaaS) solutions than ever for enterprise-level organizations, and one of the leaders in the marketplace is RingCentral.

One of the top performers for six years in Gartner’s annual ranking of UCaaS solutions, RingCentral’s move to build on top of its foundation as a voice calling solution has put in competition with other newer names like Zoom in the race to build its customer base following the 2020 shift to remote work.

With large organizations turning to RingCentral as a UCaaS solution alongside other tools like Microsoft Teams, Vyopta customers now have the ability to get data and analytics for premium-level plans. Vyopta recently announced its addition of RingCentral support to give customers a more complete view of their suite of UCaaS solutions

Jaiganesh Lakshmisundaram, senior product manager for Vyopta, said RingCentral’s strong track record in voice calling makes it an attractive option for companies looking to have the best array of UCaaS solutions possible. And as it has added messaging and video capabilities recently its utility has made it less of a niche option.

“Most of our enterprise customers have two or more solutions and you want to utilize the global voice capabilities on RingCentral and the meeting and collaboration capabilities of Microsoft Teams for chat, meeting and messaging,” he said. “With the growing demand for cloud-based communication, enterprises are rapidly moving to cloud-based solutions, and while RingCentral is traditionally more on the voice side of UCaaS they also offer a package solution that includes voice, video, meeting and messaging.”

Vyopta’s coverage of RingCentral includes the ability to monitor and create alerts around calls from specific numbers or regions, with a forthcoming expansion of service that will gather data on call disconnect issues.

Lakshmisundaram said Vyopta partners pushed for coverage of RingCentral because displaying its usage and live call data alongside other UCaaS solutions and collaboration tools creates a strong unified view of how a customer’s entire suite of options are performing. That flexibility becomes even more important as RingCentral pushes to become more of an all-in-one UCaaS provider.

“From what we’ve seen, RingCentral wants to do everything that a Zoom or a Microsoft Team does today, which is to operate as a package UCaaS solution where you offer everything,” he said. “Maybe you start off with offering a chat IM and then you can have video and audio calls internally and externally, then go ahead and set up meetings all in a single tool. If you look at their office package it includes all of that.”

Measuring usage matters for UCaaS solutions

The trend toward organizations employing more than one UCaaS solution comes with the added expense of licenses for those tools. Those costs make it even more important to have good data on how many of those licenses are being used, so companies can make a push to increase usage or cut back on the number of licenses if there are cohorts within the organization that don’t have as much need for a given tool.

Lakshmisundaram said Vyopta’s coverage of RingCentral can help companies pinpoint that information, which is helpful since it is often an add-on tool available along with more established names like Microsoft Teams or GoogleMeet.

“After you’ve onboarded a large number of users in a specific region you can look at if you’re able to generate the desired number of adoptions. If you take a look at active versus inactive users, if you provision RingCentral for everyone in your company and you have 1,000 people… through the analytics you notice that only 500 are using it, and out of the remaining 500 probably 200 are using it once a week and then the remaining 300 have never used it,” he said.

“With that information you can go back to the user base and ask why are you not using this, or are you using a different tool? Those could be users who make no voice calls and you don’t need to pay for licenses to give them access that they aren’t going to use.”

Learn more about Vyopta for RingCentral.

Chad Swiatecki is a business writer and journalist whose work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Billboard, New York Daily News, Austin Business Journal, Austin American-Statesman and many other print and online publications. He lives in Austin, Texas and is a graduate of Michigan State University. Find him online on LinkedIn.