Keeping in touch: how a new partnership will ready businesses for a digital future

Vinod Kumar explains how our work with RingCentral will help businesses communicate and collaborate

Reflecting on the past year, it’s clear that our reliance on communications technology has never been more important. In April for example, we saw network traffic ramp up as people and businesses moved online to stay connected during lockdowns, with six months of forecasted demand hitting in four weeks.

Organisations are more comfortable now with remote working than ever before, driven in large part by digital tools that make it easy. We’re now used to mixing various communications channels, from instant messaging and email to voice and video calling. We blur them together to suit our collaboration needs.

This dramatic acceleration of a longstanding trend in the digitalisation of work is likely to lead to permanent changes for many organisations. Gartner research, for example, has found that 82% of company leaders plan to allow some level of remote working as people return to the workplace.

Seamless collaboration

Readying businesses for a future powered by remote working and seamless collaboration is vital. That’s why we have entered into a new strategic partnership with RingCentral, a leader in cloud based communications and collaboration services.

Our vision is for a simple, intuitive digital platform that allows businesses to pick and choose the services that work for them. For example, they could start with voice calls, add team messaging, and then upgrade further to online meetings with video and screen sharing.

This creates options for businesses. They will be able choose an evolutionary approach that brings in one or two tools, or they could opt for revolution by switching on all channels at once, backed up by a cloud based system that allows for updates to roll out fast.

Moreover, using open APIs, we will be able to work with customers to fuse together communications apps with other software applications that support business processes – such as CRM systems. 

Whichever approach businesses choose, the end result is a system that will power new ways of working.

From SME to multinational

Best of all we want this to work for all organisations. We have heard from customers of varying sizes over the past few months, and have learned how they have turned to communications tech to keep doing business.

Our larger customers need to connect thousands of employees together across countries, and to be able to integrate these new tools with existing solutions.

From listening to the thousands of SMEs that have worked with us through our V-Hubs in local markets, we know that remote working is one of their top challenges. Good collaboration and communication is a core part of making remote working effective.

This new platform will give all companies the tools they need work together well now, and to power them into a digital future.

Read more about our new partnership here.