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RingCentral announced the acquisition of Glip, a cloud messaging and collaboration company, for an undisclosed sum.
Glip, which was founded in 2012 and is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, offers a messaging platform integrated with task management, calendar, notes, and file sharing, and includes integrations with other platforms, including Box, Dropbox, Evernote, Google, Asana, Jira and others.
“RingCentral is uniquely positioned to take its industry- leading business enterprise communications solution, which includes a phone system, SMS, conferencing, meetings, and fax, and combine it together with Glip to create a powerful team communications, messaging, and messaging and collaboration software solution,” Vlad Shmunis, CEO of RingCentral told eWEEK. “The result, Teams, will offer a best-of-breed, tightly integrated unified communications and collaboration solution.”
As a result of the acquisition, Peter Pezaris, CEO and co-founder of Glip, as well as the entire research and development team, will join RingCentral.
The company will be re-branded as RingCentral Teams in the coming months, and its capabilities will be integrated and available at no additional cost to all RingCentral Office customers.
“Cloud and mobile are helping employees communicate and get work done in real time across any medium, any device, from any location. The concept of an open cloud-based platform is powerful. Enterprises are choosing which apps they want to use for specific things around productivity, file storage, document sharing and CRM,” Shmunis said. “Having integrations with best of breed apps is now possible thanks to the cloud, and this is allowing people to be more productive and efficient in their everyday work.”
RingCentral plans to keep the current standalone application, also renamed Teams, for the Web, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android mobile operating systems, available to its current and future customers.
“Business tools, for all their benefits, have the potential to over-complicate rather than simplify our workload,” Shmunis said. “Throughout the life of a project you might switch between phone, messenger, notes, documents, task lists, and email repeatedly. Each tool might live in its own silo, as its own ecosystem, or loosely connected to other tools. Even within a project, you might see a dozen or more email chains. Following up on a single link or data point could require a desperate search through weeks of email threads.”
He said Ring Central wants to change all of that and make it super simple to communicate and collaborate in a seamless way.
“It should be as easy to plan a team project as it is to send an instant message, to calendar an event, or start a phone call,” Shmunis said. “We know that meaningful and uncomplicated communication is the underlying key to work success, and the integration of these different kinds of tools accessible from a single communications and collaboration hub is where we see things evolving to in the near future.”