Ep. 24 Can You Balance Cloud, AI, and Security in a Hybrid Workplace? With Amir Hameed

00:12 - Introduction and Career Journey

PJ Farmer
Welcome to Cloud Currents, the podcast that navigates the ever-evolving landscape of cloud computing and its impact on the modern business. I'm your host, PJ Farmer, and today we are thrilled to have Amir Hameed, the senior vice president of worldwide solution sales and engineering at RingCentral, joining us. Hi Amir.

Amir Hameed
Hi PJ. How are you doing today?

PJ Farmer
I'm doing great. Doing great. Ready for some cloud currents? So Amir brings over 25 years of experience in the tech industry, having witnessed and contributed to the evolution of telecommunications from traditional systems today's AI enhanced cloud communications. His journey through industry giants like Nortel Networks and Avaya have given him a unique perspective on the challenges and opportunities in our rapidly changing tech landscape. In today's episode, we'll explore the transformative power of cloud communications, dive into the integration of AI and business tools, and discuss how companies are adapting to the post Covid work environment. Amir will also share insights on cloud security, disaster recovery, and his vision for the future of unified communications. Amir, welcome to Cloud Currents.

Amir Hameed
Thank you once again, PJ, it's a pleasure to be here.

PJ Farmer
So, hey, could you just start by walking us through your career journey, starting from your early days at Noratel networks and to your current role at RingCentral?

Amir Hameed
Absolutely. So, I mean, I live in Toronto, Canada, and I went into electrical engineering as my university major. And at the time I was really interested in telecom. So I was very fortunate upon graduation to get my first role at Nortel Networks, which was some time ago. It was actually called Northern Telecom at the time. So I started at the headquarters at Northern Telecom, it morphed into Nortel, and I did various roles there, all related to telecom infrastructure, systems engineering, various roles, project management, marketing. And then I landed on what was really interesting for me, which was kind of like the sales or the presales realm. And I've kind of been there since. From there, I got recruited over to Avaya. And Avaya at the time, you know, was a lucent spin off.

So at and T Lucent, Avaya, and they were just kind of getting a stronghold into Canada. So it was a great opportunity for me to kind of lead. At the time, it was the IP telephony practice, because, again, it was the convergence, right? Because you had the bellheads and the net heads, you know, which way is the technology going to go? Is it going to stay with the phone companies or is it going to go all IP? And so it was very interesting, and we had ATM and other technologies. Ultimately, of course, IP was the winner. And so moving over to Avaya was very interesting, because, know, voice over IP and IP telephony was really taking over. So prior to that, the systems were either analog or digital, and there was a lot of pbxs out there and they worked just great.

But, you know, obviously what's next? And what's next was the value of IP telephony. You know, having centralized servers and then gateways giving you things like disaster recovery planning, you know, business continuity planning, where if one node or one location where to get knocked out, you would still have the ability to have the other locations with a replicated software so that they could still continue to run. And that was very important because whether it was Nortel, Avaya, or at RingCentral, where I am today, not only is it the UCAs, UC as a service voice, but also contact centers, were also doing that. And so as you can imagine, you know, contact centers are very mission critical. So having the ability to failover was a huge advantage that IP telephony provided, and so had a huge run with Avaya Canada.

I moved into some international work, Latin America, you know, lots of international experience down there. And then from there, you know, after that, I moved into the session border controller world. So I was still in telecom, but then I was securing voice over IP conversations.

PJ Farmer
What did you call that again? The session. Say it again.

Amir Hameed
Session border controller.

PJ Farmer
Okay, I am not familiar with that term. So what does that mean?

Amir Hameed
Basically, you know, as the packets move ingress to egress, you'd have a session border controller that would kind of be the gateway into the various entities. So it could be a session border controller would be at the service provider, you know, as we exit the PSTn, come to the service provider. Businesses would have session border controllers as well. So I did that work with Sonus, which later merged with Genband and is now ribbon communications. So, you know, as part of the new cloud deployments, you still have session border controllers as one of the network elements. So I did that for a bit, then I did some consulting with Mitel as well. And then I realized, I said, you know, my whole career has been on telecom, but it's all been prem based, right? And I said, you know, I'm canadian, right?

So we play hockey here, so we like to go to where the puck is going, not where it is now.

PJ Farmer
Hey, Wayne Gretzky said that. Wayne Gretzky said that. I'm with you.

Amir Hameed
Absolutely, absolutely. My wife's born and raised in Edmonton, city of champions back then. So I said, well, the puck is moving to the cloud and all of my great experience has been with premise based hardware and software. So I said, I need to move into the cloud. And at that time I joined eight by eight, which was a competitor to RingCentral, where I am now. And I did a similar role. I led all of pre sales globally for eight by eight. And so we had, you know, Ucaas offerings and CCaas offerings. I got a lot of experience managing large teams globally, right. Because I'd already done it with Avaya, where I had all of the Americas at one point. All of the pre sales engineers, all of the contact center specialists, video data, there was such a huge bevy offerings.

And then I moved into eight by eight kind of doing the same thing, expanding globally. And cloud was just taking over because all of those older prem systems that I was implicated in were now moving to the cloud. Right? So, and then about five years ago, I got an opportunity to come to RingCentral. And so I've been happily part of the RingCentral organization, again, leading pre sales. So not just the SES, the solutions architects, custom engineering, but also the overlay sales teams. So the technical specialists. So that, in a nutshell, is kind of like where we are today.

07:24 - Engineering Background and Cloud Technologies

PJ Farmer
That's great. And I have to say your background in engineering too. I keep telling my son, he's a freshman in college, I'm like, engineering is where it's at. It's the biggest bang for the Buckley because I also studied electrical engineering before I got my first it role. So good stuff, I love it. So I'm gonna. So I can't help but ask then, how your background in electrical engineering. Did it have any influence in your approach to cloud technologies? Did it, did it factor in? I would love to hear more about that.

Amir Hameed
Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, during my studies at electrical engineering, obviously we're studying wave transmission and communications. Very, very interesting to me. And I studied at the University of Ottawa, which is the Canada's capital, and that's where Nortel had their Bell Northern research. So their Bell Northern research, so we'd get all kinds of projects that were all telecom related. And, you know, it's been some time now that I've been doing this, but we talk about cloud today, you know, software as a service and the ability to, you know, kind of be hands off as a customer and just have the solution work for you. Well, there was something earlier called Centrex, right, Digital Centrix, where you could go to your service provider, you know, at and T, Verizon, Bell Canada, whoever it was, and they would actually give your phone system.

You didn't have to maintain anything, and very cloud like, you would just pay a monthly fee and you would have access to all those features. So, so it's kind of like a reincarnated cloud, but so much stronger and much more powerful today. But just saying that some of these technologies and some of these motions kind of come back and have been with us for some time.

PJ Farmer
I was actually going to ask you about Centrex because I don't know a lot about that. I was hoping you could tell me a little bit more about how that concept of Centrix and how it kind of relates to modern cloud communications. I saw some parallels, though, but I would love to dig into that more.

Amir Hameed
Yeah, absolutely. So today you're a business and you don't want to maintain your equipment. You go to the cloud, you come to RingCentral or another competitor, and it's all taken care of. You focus on your main business. Now, at the time when Sentrex had come out way, way back when people were buying pbxs, right? So you had a PBX and you maintained it, and it was hardware and software, and you maintained it in your data center or otherwise. And then the telecom companies, the service providers, said, hey, what if we hosted it and what if we gave you the phone? So it was the earliest version of cloud, but it had its limitations. It was still very costly. Moves, add and changes had to be initiated and done through your service provider, which made it very costly.

Still, the software was nothing, the most up to date and current. The Centrix would not have the same feature set that the PBX would have. So again, it was kind of the initial foray into it, and it really just provided customers with, you know, the Opex versus capex argument. Like, I want to focus on my business. I don't want to maintain a phone system. So I'm going to let my service provider do it for me. So that was again centric, which now today, when you look at cloud systems, it's no comparison, of course.

PJ Farmer
Sure, sure. This is just really interesting. I have been in IT infrastructure for a very long time, but I've never been in charge of the phone system. A lot of backup, but not the phone system. And I am curious, what are some of the, we're talking about pbxs and have those on Prem. So certainly there's a transition, a migration. You have to get there somehow. So what are some, or were some of the key challenges in transitioning from those on premise PBX systems to cloud based systems?

Amir Hameed
Yeah, great question. So in the beginning, and now cloud is at least seven, eight, nine years old. So it's not new anymore. You're well beyond the early adopter phase. In fact, today we, as of during COVID time, you could say we absolutely ship more cloud lines than any base premise line. But some of the challenges are more on the customer front and some of it has to do with comfortability, right? They're used to their system, they know how it works. And then you come in and you say, hey, I'm going to give you equal, not equal, better, more secure capabilities, more feature functionality, more robust telephony, as well as contact center offer it as a service. It can be daunting, right? Says, well, wait a second, how is that going to happen? Like how is that going to work?

So that's why in pre sales, what we do is, you know, we go into the customer, we talk to them, we understand what they're doing today, we try and listen about some of the challenges with their existing platform. Because you got to remember, when you're in the prem world, you're truly limited by the system version control, the updates of that piece of hardware, right? The software that's running on that hardware. And if you have multiple locations, you may not have the same platform on every location. You know, coming back to the Nortel or even Avaya worlds, you may have, you know, the latest and greatest at your headquarters, but you may have a key system or a smaller system that is not as feature rich in many of your remote locations.

But what cloud did is it democratized that, because whether I'm working in a satellite office or at headquarters, for example, if I'm in sales, I need the latest and greatest mobility tools, right? I need access to everything on my device. And I wouldn't necessarily have that in the old world because again, I would be limited to the hardware that was there. So now enter the cloud. And it's incredible because everybody gets access to the latest feature functionality. There's only one release and we do those upgrades. So for example, I could be dealing with a Fortune 1000 financial services company or a retailer or otherwise, whenever any feature is developed, it's available across the board. So what we're saying is even a small business would have access to the same robust feature functionality and advanced features that, you know, a Fortune 100 would.

So this is kind of the, the benefits of the cloud. And it's really incumbent upon the vendor to talk with the customer, understand where they are, and again, you know, we do trials, we do proof of concepts, because we want to show them that, hey, you're taking this. This change, and it can be viewed as a risk. But wait a second. You know, as much as my 20 year old Nortel or Avaya PBX or Cisco is old, it still gives me dial tone. It's still working. Right? So I think it's just kind of overcoming that and truly showing the value. Like, we try to drive business outcomes. Right. We see your communications platform as a strategic benefit to you. Like, you get to keep. It's a war for talent sometimes, right? You want to get the best and brightest coming out of school.

Well, they're used to having. Having so much capability just on their phone in terms of how they communicate and collaborate. So if you're going to give them, and they're going to say, hey, I'm going to join your company, and I'm going to have this 20 year old PBX, I mean, I can't even, you know, I can't even get my work calls on my. On my mobile device. It's very different. Right. So.

15:25 - Impact of COVID-19 on Cloud Communication Adoption

PJ Farmer
Sure, sure. Well, you brought up Covid, too, and I know for our company, we saw a huge increase of people moving everything to the cloud, desktops, everything, as remote work became a necessity. And I think you said you've been there for five years, so you were at RingCentral during COVID Right. So can you tell me about how that pandemic accelerated the adoption of cloud communication tools?

Amir Hameed
The truth is, we were already growing at a very healthy clip. But what had happened is, you know, if you've got an IT shop, and then you've got various projects that are prioritized and, you know, digital transformation or moving your tools to the cloud were absolutely in the top five. They always were. But with COVID you know, the ability to do remote work, not just for your employees, your contact centers, the lifeblood of your organization, that became number one.

So it was incredible what we were able to do in terms of accelerating the move to the cloud to the benefit of customers, because they realized that, wait a second, we can't get into our office, whether it's our employees, whether it's our contact center agents, but we can quickly equip them with the tools that they need so they can work from home or wherever they may be sheltering, for that matter. But business kept on going. So that was huge. Huge from a business continuity perspective.

PJ Farmer
Yeah, absolutely. What a crazy, what a crazy time. So now it's post Covid. Right, if you like that term. And, you know, what challenges are businesses facing now in managing multiple communication platforms? Because, man, I feel like, you know, five years ago I was using Webex and hadn't even heard of Microsoft Teams. And, you know, now we've got that. We've got phones and the other phone. And so what are some of, like, business challenges that you run into? Because just on a personal level, there's a lot.

Amir Hameed
There's a lot of apps. There's a lot. And a lot of it sounds the same as well. And so just as with COVID you know, you had to make the CIO a superhero because they quickly turned it around and said, hey, don't worry, even if the lights are not on in the office, the lights are on. From a business perspective, people can continue to collaborate. But what had happened is the CIO's that I spoke with, they're like, hey, this is great. We've got this. But now we have so many licenses. We've got something for video, something for chat, something for phone, something for contact center.

And so what you saw post Covid is this environment, wherever the CIO who could do no wrong when they managed to keep things running are now being viewed as, hey, wait a second, how much is this costing us? Right? And you had so much proliferation of licenses. So then they started coming back and saying, well, let's condense the licenses down. And so again, we work with customers because at RingCentral we're able to offer message, video, phone, contact center all on a device, which is great. You mentioned Microsoft Teams, huge adoption globally. I don't think anyone thought Microsoft Teams would have been as successful as it was. And where we're seeing teams is as great as teams is the one thing they do have outages, right? And so they've got regular outages.

So at RingCentral and the industry as a whole has all realized that, you know, teams is there. You know, if you're a large company, you've got e three licensing already paid for. You're going to have teams, right? Smaller businesses, maybe not so much. So we've come up with offerings like an embedded dialer or direct routing. And what that does is it truly gives you business continuity for your team's investment. So that way when you're going out to the PSTN or you're calling a customer or a supplier anywhere in the world, you can have your team's interface, but you can have RingCentral. As an example. We provide five nines reliability running in parallel so that's been a growing business for us because absolutely, as you say, teams has truly taken off.

But one thing it's extremely difficult to do is to guarantee uptime in a multi-tenant global cloud platform. So that's an area of opportunity for us.

PJ Farmer
It sounds great. And I just want to talk about COVID some more. I know we should be done. We shouldn't even be bringing it up, but it has been very different. And I've noticed even in my own company, I come in three days a week. I used to come in five, but now Mondays and Fridays are often spent working from home, and I go back and forth with these things. Some of the folks with our company did not sign up for three days a week. Right. They live half hour, 40 minutes away. They're not going to do that. And I'm so curious what other companies are doing and how RingCentral factors into that hybrid work environment, because I feel like it's just so different between the businesses. And I'd love to know what you're seeing, maybe what you're seeing by segment, too.

Like different segments. You focus on things like that. I would just love to know and how you help.
Amir Hameed
That's a great point. So, as you mentioned during COVID everybody's working from home, right? Everybody's working from home because you have no choice. Now we're getting out of COVID and you're talking about hybrid work, right? And some companies came in really harsh and said, thou hast to come into the office. And I was like, whoa, that's not going to work. The flip side to that is there's a lot of real estate out there, right? And so you want to encourage collaboration, and then you had people who are like, okay, so you're telling me to come into the office here. I'm here, but there's no one around. I'm going back on a video call. So what is, what good is it for me to be in the office if nobody's here? So that is, that is definitely a challenge.

So what we've found is, you know, two to three days a week, we do like to encourage those folks that are near an office to come into an office. And what we do is that's when we do our team meetings, our collaborations. Right. So you're coming in for a purpose. You know, we, you know, whether it's in our Silicon Valley headquarters or Denver or Charlotte or anywhere, London, Australia, it doesn't matter. Whichever office you're coming into, people tend to come in the same day. So you can have that because there is something to be said for face to face meetings. Some things. There is a huge benefit when you collaborate face to face. That said, hybrid work is here to stay. Right?

So we've been working on tools to effectively enable hybrid work, and that's a little bit different because, you know, when everyone's in the room, okay, everybody's in the room, great. But what happens when two people are not in the room and the conversation gets monopolized by those who are in the room? So we're focused down on tools to enhance that experience, to kind of democratize it. Again, using that word, right, to say, hey, even if I'm not there, for whatever reasons, I'm still effectively collaborating across the board, and I've got a seat at the virtual table, even if I'm not physically there. But absolutely, we believe that hybrid work is there. It's here to stay. Right. Because it just doesn't make sense to come into the office every day if not everybody is there.

That being said, there are certain teams that are going to be more effective when they collaborate head to head. You've got a whiteboard, you're all in there. You can crunch so much out.

PJ Farmer
Mm. Totally agree. And, you know, I've had those same thoughts myself. I'm like, why am I here? There's no one here. And then folks started coming in more, and in the last month, I've been able to walk down the hall and solve problems in five minutes. That would have required me to create a calendar, invite, and have a video meet, you know, things like that. So there's some benefit. But I also, I like having both. I like having options.

Amir Hameed
People like having options. And again, if you plan ahead of, and you've got the tools that allow you to be effective, like I said, I'm a road warrior. I'm traveling 60, 70% of the time. So unless I'm visiting an office, I'm not likely in the office. But again, even if I'm at an airport or anywhere I am, I'm still plugged in and able to effectively collaborate.

PJ Farmer
Well, no conversation in 2024 would be complete without bringing up AIh.

Amir Hameed
Yes.

24:14 - AI Integration in RingCentral Products

PJ Farmer
So, you know, I've seen a lot of benefits from AI in telecommunications. Tell me, though, how RingCentral is incorporating AI into its product offerings and maybe some of the practical applications that you really excited about.

Amir Hameed
Yeah, absolutely. So just as we had these huge paradigm shifts, call them. Right, you had IP telephony. When I first moved to Avaya from Nortel, it was a big shift because we were moving away from digital telephones to IP based telephony. And then, of course, you had the huge shift to the cloud. What I'm finding now with AI is just accelerating that value to move to the cloud, right? And there's so many examples of AI. I think any vendor in the industry, everybody's talking about AI, right? Everybody's talking about it. It's everywhere. It has to be everywhere, because the ability to leapfrog and innovate at the, it's a torrid pace of innovation. So for us, you know, luckily, we had acquired an AI company five, six, seven years back at DeepAffects, and that kind of gave us access to our own language models.

So we're able to offer things like transcriptions and meeting summaries a lot earlier than even Teams, as an example. And now we're taking it to the next level, where, for example, if I'm in a conversation with somebody, not only can I obviously transcribe and get all the meeting summaries, but it has the intelligence using AI to categorize that conversation. So let's say, PJ, you and I were talking, you know, any milestone, what were the actions? What were the outcomes? What were the open items? What were the follow ups? So not only have I had this conversation, but all of the follow ups are there, and that's been a huge benefit. We also do that for sales teams, right? You're talking with customers. We'll integrate right back into the CRM. You know, salespeople are great at some things, but they can be lazy. Right?

And, you know, you want to do forecast accuracy. Well, imagine a scenario where, you know, you've already forecasted that this deal is going to close this quarter. It's subject to a board meeting. Now, we have something called RingCents for Sales, where you're having the conversation with the customer. It's all AI driven, you know, keeping track of how much you talked, how much you listened to, you know, how empathetic were you? Sentiment analysis, all of the AI goodies, all built in there. But imagine, PJ tells me in the middle of that conversation, Amir, you're not going to believe this. You know, I know it's September 2024, but our CFO got COVID. He got COVID today. Our board meeting isn't going to happen till next quarter. Right? Imagine the system has the intelligence to realize that, and it's like, oh, wait a second.

Amir had forecasted that this deal was going to close pending this board meeting, but we just heard or the AI picked up that board meeting is not happening, it would automatically update into Salesforce or whichever CRM that you have, all of the notes, all of the critical updates, saving me time as a salesperson and then allowing the sales leadership to say, oh, okay, now we have a clear picture. So there's so many examples of where AI is truly making a difference across the board.

PJ Farmer
That's really incredible. That is really helpful. Very incredible. You know, but then you have concerns about privacy and security, right, in these language models, where they're being stored and what's going on. So how do you balance those benefits and concerns with the features and the functions that you get out of it?

Amir Hameed
Absolutely. It's got to be ethical. AI at RingCentral, we've never shared customer information with the Internet or with social media as an example. It's got to be fit for purpose. So you want to leverage AI, but it's not when this. It's funny because a year ago, OpenAI and ChatGPT just took off and you could see businesses getting in trouble, like big businesses getting in trouble because they were taking sensitive customer information or confidential information and running it through ChatGPT, which is open. So that's something that we absolutely do not do. You know, customer safety, security, privacy is absolutely paramount. So, whereas we offer AI solutions, we don't, you know, when we sell it to our customers, they have it protected in their walled garden and they can leverage it as they need to.

We don't have access to it and we absolutely don't share it outside. But I think, you know, ethical use of AI is becoming more and more of a concern. And you're starting to see some regulation and other things, because when you come to healthcare or other areas, it becomes a real concern, like who's behind that AI. And you want to make sure it's not used for any nefarious reasons either, outside of just privacy, right?

29:37 - Future of Unified Communications

PJ Farmer
Yeah, absolutely. Well, so what are some other emerging technologies, maybe not other, just in general, what do you think will have the biggest impact on unified communications in the next five years in terms of technologies and emerging technologies?

Amir Hameed
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. You know, it's, five years is like a crystal ball. I mean, I have been in this for a while and I've been amazed and humbled at the pace of innovation. But the reality is anybody today to make a prediction for five years out, it would be foolish because just the pace of innovation. But one thing I will say is, you know, just as voice and data converge for IP telephony, people started moving to the cloud. We are seeing, you know, the convergence of UCAs and CCAAs. So, like, you know, call it the, the employee experience and the customer experience. So that's truly coming together, like in a single pane of glass. So I think we're seeing now, you know, historically, you know, being in this business, oh, here's an opportunity that a customer has.

They want to replace their voice system. Maybe they want to move to the cloud. Okay, great. Then another group of people will say, oh, but our contact center, you know, that's going to be another group of people. There'll be another decision, another timeline. More and more, we're seeing that come together, and more, we're seeing AI come into the mix as well. So things like workforce engagement, quality management, there were vendors and tools historically that did that really well. But, I mean, AI is capable of going through billions and billions of data, conversations, and otherwise, and then giving you actionable insights.

So that I think with AI, it's just turbocharging, this move to a single pane of glass for all of your communication needs, whether it's with a customer, with a partner, amongst yourselves, and then also giving you, and we have this today, the ability to know exactly, you know, who. I won't even say called, because it's a digital world now, right? So when you're dealing with your, with your supplier, your vendor, your service provider, you might call, you might text, you might web chat, you might reach them through social media, and then through AI, giving the ability to know every single interaction, who interacted. How long was the interaction? Was it effective? What results did it yield? It's just a torrid pace.

But I think looking back and looking forward, I believe the future is bright from a consumer perspective, because as companies and vendors bring this technology forward, it's truly to drive customer delight. Because at the end of the day, people have choices, right? Like, I mean, I know four or five years ago when I was chatting, I would know I'm talking to a chatbot, and it would be really annoying because the responses come back, I'm not talking to a person. This is silly. Today I'm happy to talk to a chatbot, give me the information that I need, you know, give it to me in a timely fashion, and. But at the same time, give me the ability to escalate to a human if I need to. And that's all about delighting customers, which I believe will be the next phase of this whole convergence of communications, the industry that I'm in.

PJ Farmer
You know, you were talking about some things there that couldn't, I couldn't help but think about how, you know, we often say, you know, if you are not measuring something, you can't manage it, right? And then that goes back to oftentimes getting data about how something's going and something you said there about the interactions, who's speaking, empathetic, sympathetic, like all these different things. Have we ever, have you ever thought about how this might have an impact on even like education? Because I was thinking as you were talking, like, we might be able to get a lot of data this way in order to influence communication majors and how kids are taught in school and things along that line, even just from those interactions.

Amir Hameed
Yeah, yeah. I think there is a bit of a concern, right? Because, you know, just as technology giveth, you know, technology taketh away, right? And you've got a scenario where you see some of the younger folks now, they'll be at dinner. I see this, I go out with my wife, family, and you see other tables and everybody's like, haha. And they're not even talking to each other, like, what's going on? So some basic communication skills can be suffering as a result of the technology that's available now. With chit chapt, they can easily do nonverbal communications because chat GPT will tell them exactly what they want to say and they can revise it and send out written. But what if you're in an interview situation? You're actually talking to someone.

They want to see some personality, they want to get to know you, and you're losing the social skills. So I do see that as definitely a bit of concern. But again, that's why, you know, as part of our solutions, we look at sentiment analysis because it's so important. We want the ability to inspect what we expect. So if you're going to be delighting customers, we need the tools so that we know how you're interfacing with them. You know, if a customer is extremely irate about something that went wrong, it's technology, things happen, something's gone wrong and you're like, oh, how would you like to buy this? Or how would you like to upgrade that? It's like, wait a second, listen to the customer empathize. That is not the right time to talk about another service or a product.

So again, these are obvious examples, but it gets really detailed where very discreetly, you know, and then imagine reams and reams of conversations where before people would have to listen to the recordings. Now, with a few keystrokes, you can go straight in or proactively have you bring you to that part of the conversation where you can analyze how good was it, and then when you know what good is, you can share that best practice across the board. So there's all, I mean, these tools are amazing how powerful they can be to help, to your point, educate and to educate and train.

PJ Farmer
Yeah.

Amir Hameed
Also important.

PJ Farmer
Yeah. I could easily see these things, if they're not already there, turning into a coach saying, hey, you just got done with that call. Would you like to know how you could have done better?

Amir Hameed
I mean, exactly. We are doing that. We're doing that today.

36:30 - Ensuring Security and Availability

PJ Farmer
That's so cool. That's so cool. Well, you said something earlier, I don't want to run out of time before I ask about it. And it was about, you know, we were talking about how important availability is. You know, we come to rely on these applications, but, you know, things sometimes have availability challenges. And so I was hoping maybe you could talk to me about how RingCentral handles, you know, ensuring that you have security and you've got availability of RingCentral available to your client.

Amir Hameed
Yeah, that's been one of our biggest strengths. And again, when you look in the industry, a lot of people will talk about four nines or a five nines service level agreement. In our case, it's actually built into the engineering, and that's one of the key differentiators at RingCentral. It took us a long time to get there, but now we're proud to say for the last five years, we've offered greater than five nines availability, which is less than six minutes of downtime in a year. Just to put it into perspective, Teams will go down a lot. We've talked about AI. Everybody has great copilot and all that, but when your platform is down, all of the goodies go out the window. So that's truly been our differentiator is the ability to offer that you can go on down detector.

There are third parties that validate that you can see who is up. And again, it's a matter of building that multi tech infrastructure built with privacy in mind, seven layers of security and resilient across the board that RingCentral provides. And like I said, we provide it for a Teams customer as well.

38:16 - Transitioning to Cloud Communications

PJ Farmer
Excellent. Well, let's get, let's start looking ahead again. And we talked about interesting emerging technologies, but, you know, I don't even know, do these people exist? Are there people out there that are still hesitant in moving their communications to the cloud? Are they still there? And if so, what advice would you give them?

Amir Hameed
Yeah, and look, the reality is it's not if, but when you're going to move to the cloud. So you're absolutely moving to the cloud. But in fairness, there are some organizations that have very strict guidelines, whether it be from a compliance client's perspective or as I did in my previous lives, you may have some proprietary systems of record where you've invested a ton in professional services to make that legacy PBX work with your legacy proprietary platform. So those customers often will take a little bit longer. But again, I've got a custom engineering team, I've got API ses that will go talk to the customers, show the openness of our platform. So another thing with RingCentral, our platform is very open, so we've got well over 5600 integrations out of the box.

We've got about 80,000 developers that can build on our platform so that they can expose it and you can literally click to communicate from whichever tool that you're in, right. So some of those customers where they've invested a lot, clearly they want to sweat their asset, right? They've made the investment. And again, it's a matter of understanding how strategic to your business is the communications, right. Because, you know, the CFO in today's macro environment will say, hey, if it's not broke, why fix it? What are you talking about? It's working. I can pick up the phone and it works. Leave it. But you can't do this, you can't do that. And so that's where, again, that's where the value selling comes into play, the ROI, right.

Kind of talking about, well, if you made this investment, here's where we can get you, and then we can also do what we call a self funded roadmap in some cases to say, hey, here's where you are today, here's the end state. But we'll tell you what, we'll do it in phases. You can shift this to the cloud based on that. You're going to get this much savings. Based on those savings, once we prove them out in six months, eight months, reinvest and then go to the next level and then kind of keep going that way. So again, people are moving to the cloud. There's no doubt. I mean, all of the legacy vendors, right, Avaya and others are actually partnering with us. Right. We have Avaya cloud office, we've got other partnerships.

A lot of the service providers at AT&T has office at hand. I'm in Canada. Telus has business connect, Vodafone, British Telecom. So they're all realizing that their customers want to move to the cloud. And we're pretty humbled to have the greatest variety of partnerships where they did their own individual due diligence for security, for privacy, for availability, and said RingCentral would be the right platform for us to put our name on it. Right.

PJ Farmer
So the other thing I want to ask you about, and something that I've noticed and, well, we won't talk about how long I've been doing this, but is the role that, the changing and evolving role, I feel like sales has and solutions engineering has when it comes to cloud technologies. And just to put on out there, my husband's in sales. He's been in sales for almost 20 years now. I have never been in sales. You can only have one salesperson in our family, I think. But I'm just curious, how has that changed for you? You've done it a couple places. How as things move to the cloud, like, how does that role change? How does it look?

Amir Hameed
Yeah, I mean, so things change. Well, the technology changes and evolves, but the way I run my team and my practices, you know, authenticity above everything, integrity above everything. Right. We're here to be trusted advisors. So we're part of the sales team. But I can proudly say that the CIOs that I speak to, they say, hey, you know, the salespeople are there and they're fine, but I want to hear from the solutions engineer or the solutions architect, the pre sales, because I know they're very technical and they're going to tell me, you know, what can be done and what can't. And what we say is, look, if there's something we can't do, that's absolutely fine, right? But we don't say we can't do it. We say, hey, give me. And this is how we do the discovery.

So give me, you know, mister customer, tell me the use case. I understand. Oh, that's great. And then we take it back. And then once we understand it, another fun part of my job is to be the voice of the customer. So I amplify it back into the product and engineering team because, you know, we've got a roadmap. So they'll have a six to 12 month roadmap. But what I love at RingCentral is they're always asking me, hey, you've got the global team, you've got people talking to customers. Partners every single day. Does this align with where the puck is going? Right. And so we absolutely have the ability, the empowerment to adjust the roadmap based on customer feedback. And so when there is that customer asking for something that we don't have, we let them know, hey, we can't do this today.

Let me get a better understanding of how you would use that feature functionality. Let me amplify your voice back to our product teams and most times we'll come back with, hey, you know what, we can get that for you next quarter. Based on how the sales cycle is going. How does that timing align for you? So again, I think the pre sales, the se function is very important. Important because, you know, we do the true discovery and in many cases we help guide the customer into some of the problems they may not even know that they have.

PJ Farmer
Very good, very good. So yeah, that trusted advisor role, I think is huge with cloud. And, you know, in all the different buying models now you've got perpetual licenses, but then you got monthly just consumption or usage based licenses. It definitely changes how sales interacts with the clients, right?

Amir Hameed
It does, because it's no longer a one time sale. Right. In my past, hey, I want to sell you this PBX. It's going to be a big deal. I've sold it and I'm done. Right, because it's done. Because that thing's in there for 15, 20 years, it's still there now. It's not like that because customers can terminate at any time. There's so much competition. So we have to be true trusted advisors and strategic partners for our customers because that way, if we're still in touch with them, hey, they've deployed. How's the implementation going? How is that working for you? Continuing to get feedback from them and then recommending, you know, it's also usability. Right. How are they using the platform, making sure that they're maximizing the usage to their benefit.

So I think now, in today's world of cloud and software, as a service, you have to have that trusted relationship well beyond the sales point because there will be opportunities for upsell cross sell or you're going to be booted out of there.

45:54 - Vision for RingCentral's Future

PJ Farmer
Right. Totally agree. Well, so let me, let's end on this one. What's your vision for the future of RingCentral and its impact on global business communications?

Amir Hameed
Yeah, look, we have over 400,000 customers today around the world, all shapes and sizes, from small business all the way up to the Fortune 100s. We want to continue to be there as the strategic trusted AI communication. So it's where we, you've got AI, but it's trusted AI for communication. So I think that's the, we want to continue to be there for you. We're going to innovate like none other. But you can trust us because the AI that we're proliferating across the board has been vetted and will absolutely be there for your benefit without any of the concerns from privacy or security or customer sensitive data being shared.

PJ Farmer
Well, Amir, I really appreciate you joining me today for this little art discussion. I learned a lot that I did not already know, and it was really nice to meet you. So thank you.

Amir Hameed
Pleasure. Likewise, PJ. Thank you for the opportunity. Pleasure.

PJ Farmer
Take care.