RingCentral is a leading global provider of cloud communications, collaboration, and contact center solutions for businesses. It’s no surprise that a tech company that was born in the cloud has a firm dedication to cloudifying their own business. We recently sat down with Ashu Varshney, Vice President of Global Operations at RingCentral. Ashu shared with us how VMware solutions have helped them in their cloud journey, and how VMware vRealize Automation is an important part of their expansion into the enterprise space.
While RingCentral started in an era when there was some resistance in moving to the cloud, enterprise businesses who were traditionally not fast to adapt are now more eager to evolve. RingCentral serves hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide, and its enterprise segment is growing at 88% YoY, according to the company’s recent Q2 2019 earnings report. Enterprises are increasingly moving away from voice-only legacy communications systems (traditional PBX) and adopting cloud PBX solutions for their multimodal communications needs. With that, how does RingCentral continue to deliver on their top priority of enterprise-grade availability and quality of service?
The answer is DevOps. RingCentral requires very agile operations. They are head and shoulders above companies of similar size when it comes to their investment in R&D. Considering the high volume and speed of product development and release cycles, RingCentral needs automation with the ability to scale at a low cost. Especially with a large customer base, it can be challenging to keep customers online and connected while fine tuning performance of products. Regular product updates are critical to customer success and security.
To support this, RingCentral is using VMware. With a self-service model of infrastructure supporting 800+ R&D developers, VMware vRealize Automation is a key part of a very complex framework. vRealize Automation helps boost R&D agility, allowing RingCentral to set a strong go-to-market cadence of developer release cycles every six weeks.
Ashu weighs in on this:
With the six-week release cycle from our R&D and developer pipeline, it translates to us making production changes every night. We make changes to our infrastructure and to our applications, and then roll out these features in new product releases. You can’t make updates to your entire customer base in the same day, so you roll out these updates in sections to customers. By the time you are done rolling out to all customer sections, it’s time to start all over again with new features. To do all this manually and at a rapid pace, with that high volume, you will not be successful. We need a very solid framework to be able to keep up with the fast pace of innovation.
vRealize Automation helped us develop a self-service model for our developers. This model goes beyond delivering infrastructure. It delivers an entire microservice where the developer can start coding right away.
RingCentral likes making people’s lives easier. As Ashu points out, service time and release process are stumbling blocks that should not get in the way of real work, which is the company’s “customer first” methodology and quality development.
But why VMware? When you are the industry leader in cloud communications the way RingCentral is, you pretty much get your pick of cloud solutions, right? Well, it all comes down to numbers that ultimately represent quantifiable ways to save time, money, and promote successful overall growth.
So, what do those growth numbers look like for RingCentral?
Ashu did the math and concluded that RingCentral received a big boost from vRealize Automation. “On this journey, we’ve seen 600% growth in our infrastructure,” said Ashu. “As a result of greater efficiencies, we’re able to support twice as many engineers and developers without adding to our system administration and infrastructure management headcount. vRealize Automation has helped us automate release cycles and provide the self-service environment that has been the key to achieving these numbers.”
Now that they have the results they needed to boost their business, RingCentral is continuing their journey to serve customers with IT solutions from VMware that get results.
