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RingCentral launches comms cloud to kill of legacy business phone systems

The bigger purpose behind RingCentral's new cloud platform is another stab at killing off legacy business phone systems.
Written by Rachel King, Contributor

RingCentral, a Bay Area-based provider of cloud-based corporate phone systems, is launching a new open platform with two purposes in mind.

The RingCentral Connect Platform consists of a developer portal, a sandbox environment, APIs, SDKs and tutorials for managing custom apps from the sandbox to production.

The first objective is to offer an opportunity to business customers for integrating their business apps with RingCentral's communications systems.

RingCentral touts existing support for apps from the likes of Salesforce.com, Google Apps, Box, Dropbox and Zendesk, among others.

Aimed especially at independent software vendors, this line of service will be facilitated by RingCentral's APIs for building, deploying and managing these custom integrations.

But the second, and longer-term, purpose behind the new cloud platform is another stab at killing off legacy business phone systems.

RingCentral founder and CEO Vlad Shmunis argued in Wedneday's announcement that historically, "communication applications have mostly lived in isolation from other enterprise applications and processes."

But RingCentral is positioning itself as a modern-day alternative with an out-of-the-box approach based in the cloud for companies with their own custom apps ready to plug into enterprise-grade phone systems.

The RingCentral Connect Platform is live in beta mode now.

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