RingCentral has promoted Kira Makagon to President and COO with the remit of driving innovation and growth.

Announced during RingCentral’s latest earnings call for Q4 CY2024, Makagon will step up from Chief Innovation Officer to manage the UCaaS and CCaaS business’s product and technology arms.

Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral’s CEO, commented during the earnings call:

She has been in charge of all products and technology and has been the driving force behind turning RingCentral into an open-air platform and our evolution into a multiproduct company that now includes contact centre and AI(…) Kira’s expertise in driving product vision and innovation, coupled with her deep understanding of customer needs and our company’s culture makes her the ideal leader to help guide RingCentral into our next phase of AI-fueled multiproduct growth.”

Shmunis added that, in her new role, Makagon will oversee the company’s product and technology organisation and will introduce direct and channel sales, customer success, marketing, and business operations organisations.

Meanwhile, Makagon also outlined her own priorities in her new position. “This shapes our strategy and innovation, and here are my key priorities,” Makagon said during the earnings call. “First, build upon our UCaaS leadership, infusing AI across our entire portfolio. Second, expand TAM through our multiproduct portfolio, led by RingCX, our native AI-first CCaaS solutions. Third, drive profitable growth and improve customer engagement across our entire business.”

RingCentral’s Operational Highlights From Its Latest Quarter

Makagon elaborated on the first UCaaS-centric priority and the ambition to imbue AI across the entire portfolio. She emphasised that customers choose the platform for its market-leading cloud business phone system with a robust omnichannel feature set. This culminated in one of RingCentral’s largest wins this quarter via an international public sector customer who purchased over 10,000 seats in RingEX.

Interestingly, Makagon also highlighted that business customers are choosing RingCentral to complement Microsoft Teams messaging and video. Teams customers turning to RingCentral was a trend Makagon underlined repeatedly, citing several $1 million TCV deals, where the platform’s integration with Teams was considered a decisive factor.

In other UC-centric operational highlights, Shmunis stressed the impact of AI’s introduction across most of RingCentral’s ecosystem. The exec highlighted one major new customer, technology services and solutions provider Genpact, as selecting RingCentral’s full, AI-powered comms suite across RingEX and RingCX to power its 125,000 employees in 30+ countries.

BT has chosen RingCX to support its CCaaS offering, aligning it with other Global Service Providers (GSPs), including Colt Technology Services, Vodafone UK, and Vodafone USA, which are already offering RingCentral solutions.

Shmunis also revealed that RingCentral now has 700 customers on RingCX, up from roughly 500 last quarter. RingCentral Events, its virtual hybrid and on-site events platform, now has 700 accounts, up from about 600 in the third quarter of 2024. Shmunis suggested RingCentral is halfway toward reaching its goal of at least $100 million in new product ARR by the end of 2025.

RingCentral’s Latest Financial Health

RingCentral’s Q4 CY2024 results showed solid revenue growth of 7.6 percent year over year, meeting expectations at $614.5 million. Earnings per share (EPS) of $0.98 slightly beat forecasts, signposting solid cost control. The company also improved its profitability, moving from a -7.9 percent operating margin last year to breaking even this quarter. Free cash flow remained strong at 18.2 percent, illustrating healthy cash generation.

However, the outlook for the next quarter is weaker, with revenue guidance of $609.5 million—2.7 percent below analyst expectations. With a market value of $2.86 billion, RingCentral is improving its financial health but faces slowing growth. Broadly, while the company is making progress toward profitability, its slower sales outlook raises questions.

RingCentral Launches AI Receptionist to Transform Business Call Handling

Tied to its latest earnings call, RingCentral announced this week that it has launched RingCentral AI Receptionist (AIR), a new Agentic AI solution that can automatically pick up and address customer voice calls.

Powered by generative AI, RingCentral AIR can handle customer inquiries by providing accurate business-related responses and seamlessly transferring callers to the appropriate destination—mirroring the capabilities of a traditional receptionist.

This launch marks a significant step in integrating agentic AI into the UC space in a practical and impactful way. Unlike contact centre intelligent virtual agents (IVAs), which often require complex and costly deployments, RingCentral AIR is natively embedded into the RingCentral phone system. This built-in approach makes AI-driven call automation easily accessible to businesses of all sizes, particularly those that can most benefit from streamlined customer interactions.



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