Video Transcription

Chris Frey:

The next one, the PBX used to have all kinds of things connected to it. We had all these switches, granted it's an IP phone system, but we still had things like analog phones, fax machines, overhead paging. What should customers consider when moving to a cloud solution regarding those types of devices?

Garry Simpson:

This again, I think back to your point of change, really comes in very important, which is those things have to be evaluated early on. We can in the cloud handle analog phones, fax machines, paging systems. Those are things that we can do, but it's important to make sure that the SE staff, the sales engineering staff, your sales people from the cloud, in this case RingCentral, really know what you're looking to do.

Because there are occasions where we do have to put hardware in to terminate analog lines or to connect to a fax machine or to set up paging. As long as we know about those things early, we can definitely accomplish them, but it is, to your point of change, something that you should consider well early to make sure that whatever changes that might occur because we do it in a slightly different way are comfortable to you and that it's going to work out the way you want.

I've been on a lot of installs where we can do high-density faxing for analog lines... I'm sorry, high-density analog for analog lines, for faxing we can put in systems to allow current fax machines to work, or for paging, we put in a SIP paging adapter to continue overhead paging. It all can be done, but it's important that it's done and discussed early.

Chris Frey:

With all this change, we have change to end user behavior, we have change in administrative behavior, there's potential change... And we're not talking big change. We're talking relatively minor changes. How do you feel that customers fair with all this change once they've made the move to a UCaaS environment with Ring? They look back at it say, "That wasn't that bad." Right?

Garry Simpson:

Yeah. There is change. The change is going to be difficult. All change is, doesn't matter what kind of change it is. I used to work for a guy who I love dearly and he used to always say, "If you don't like change, you're going to hate extinction." That is the truth of the matter, is that these things do change. It doesn't even matter if you go from one onsite phone system to another onsite phone system, change occurs.

What we found is that customers do find those change points, but generally in most cases what they're doing is they're finding out that the new world gives them new avenues, new opportunities, and they generally don't look back. Once they've moved into cloud and they're comfortable there, they generally don't go back to an on-prem system because they've gone through those changes, they've succumbed over any of those obstacles that were in their way, and it allows them to get into that new world and really do what they want to do.

It is there, but like I say, most customers once they get through it, they don't look back.

Chris Frey:

I think I can speak for all of us here that all the customers that we have moved into softphone only, the numbers that have come back and said, "I change my mind. I want a phone." I don't know how many of those there are, but it's got to be very, very few. Would you agree with that statement?

Garry Simpson:

I would agree with that, yeah. Again, going back to what I said earlier, it's because it's not just a phone anymore. The software gives you all these different avenues of communication. I think that's one of the reasons people like it, is once you've landed there, all of a sudden all these new avenues are open to you.

Chris Frey:

The last piece I want to talk about is going to be new features. I'm hoping that you have the opportunity maybe to demo a couple things for us. The things I'd like to talk about or expand on a little bit are the areas that were missing in the past. That was really a good mobile experience. Most of us remember ShoreTel Mobility and it worked. I was a user, I was adopter, but it had its limitations and it never really quite caught on.

Can you show us a little bit about what the mobile experience is like within the RingCentral environment?

Garry Simpson:

Sure. If you don't mind, I will... This is like working without a net. I'm going to try to share my screen just so I can show you a couple things. Obviously this is not going to be a full-fledged demo, but to give you a taste of a little bit of the way this works and what you can expect. Let me show you. This is the desktop client right next to the mobile app. Like you said, in the old world, some of these things didn't work as well as we had hoped. In the new world, especially with RingCentral, these are rock-solid devices.

I can make and take phone calls on my computer and/or on my mobile phone. They have the same feature set, so I can do messaging, video, phone, text, fax. I can do the same thing here. They are in concert. The nice thing about the cloud ecosystem is that everything works together, especially if you're using all the different pieces from the cloud vendor, as I was mentioning with all the things that you see here. When I go in to make a phone call to a user, you'll notice over here that the mobile phone does know that that has occurred.

I can switch from my desktop software to my mobile software just by clicking this little green bar here. It's aware of that state change. The other thing is, again, talking about this interconnectedness of the ecosystem that is cloud is you can see here, I can go from a phone call into a video meeting.

Instead of switching gears and sending out an invite and having a lot of people join into that meeting and then now we're back talking again, I can, in real time, go from a chat into a phone call. Go take that phone call, move it to my mobile phone, take the mobile phone, move mobile phone, move it back to my desk, switch to a video meeting. All of that is a lot more fluid.

I like to say it allows you to move in two different directions, horizontally across the different devices, so I'm not tethered to one location, and also vertically across the different modes of communication. I start out with a chat, but that might get too slow. I'd love to talk to you on the phone, I push a button, now we're talking, and then if I want to go into a video call, I push another button and now I'm showing.

I've got this ability to change and move and work where I need to work and work in the way that I want to work. I think that's one of the biggest benefits is that now with cloud, we are getting that where all of this does work together and the ecosystem is aware of all the piece parts. This is not obviously meant to be a full demo. We don't necessarily have time for that today.

But it is something that if you can get a demo with a sales engineer, I think we can show you how all these pieces work together really well and give you those avenues I talked about before, is I don't just have to do a phone call. Maybe I want to text someone or maybe I want to send a fax. All those things coming from one interface and being able to just get to them quickly and easily allow users to communicate and really worry about not how they're communicating but what they're communicating.

If it's a single-button press and I'm into a meeting, then I don't have to worry about, how do I get into that meeting? All I worry about is I'm in the meeting, now what do I want to show you? What do I want to talk to you about? Like I said, this is not a full demo, but just a little taste of what some of those options are. I think you already can see that these things really work together very well.

Chris Frey:

In ShoreTel/Mitel, man, I could talk and say that same thing all the time. ShoreTel/Mitel, ShoreTel/Mitel. One of the great features about that heritage solution was the idea of work groups, right? Kind of like call center light, ACD light, server-based function allowed for call queuing, some reporting, some more advanced logic, a step-up from ring groups. That was something that always set apart the ShoreTel solution from many other on-premise products at the time.

Moving to the cloud in the past, that type of functionality has been difficult. Most customers were urged to go to a full contact center deployment instead of being able to stay within their UCaaS environment. Does the work group functionality of ShoreTel/Mitel, translate into RingCentral today?

Garry Simpson:

It does and at a very nice level where you have those degrees of complexity. Some customers, a work group, a call queue is more than adequate. They don't need to go to a full call center or contact center. In RingCentral, I'll just show you this, there is the ability to jump in and accept queue calls. This is not contact center, this is call queuing where a call comes in and I might want to have three or four or five or 10 or 15 people answer the call.

I'd like to be able to have my team accept those queue calls and be able to jump in and jump out of the queues like they could've with work groups. I can even get to the level where you could jump into specific work groups or in this case call queues. Same thing. I can have a user who's got this one tool and they're able to fax and text like we were talking about it earlier, but also answer queue calls.

I can do that either on the desktop software or if I go up here to the corner, you can see I can do that on the mobile phone as well. That really allows people to work from anywhere because they don't have to be at a desk phone. They can use their laptop, crack it open anywhere. They can work from their mobile device, an iPad, an iPhone, Android. That work group component is absolutely there.

I do agree with you. I think that was one of the great things of ShoreTel, is that you could have that intermediary stage. It didn't have to be zero or 60. You could run 45 miles an hour if you wanted to, somewhere there in the middle.