Scaling Business Communications with Secure, No Headache Connections

Speaker 1:  With that, I'd like to introduce Mitch Tarica. Mitch is the Senior Vice President of Sales at RingCentral where he is responsible for growth of the enterprise customer base across North America. Prior to that, he spent time at Oracle and also led the WebEx team from being one of their first employees all the way through their IPO. With that, please help me welcome Mitch Tarica. 

Mitch Tarica:  All right. Well, thank you, Ashley. Hello Oktane. How's everybody doing?

Audience:  Great. Good. 

Mitch Tarica:  Very nice. Thank you all for taking the time to come out. This is my third Oktane, so it's pretty impressive to see Oktane grow on the scale, the ecosystem of customers, and really what Oct is doing in the marketplace is nothing short of amazing. It's great to be a partner, a customer, and a vendor of Okta and see really the growth and trajectory of the company. So, it's exciting to be a part of this whole thing. We've got a great agenda for the next 45 minutes or so. I'm going to get up and talk a little bit about this right here on the screen, empowering the modern world of work, and how communications and RingCentral is helping make that happen and really lead that effort out there in the marketplace.

Then we're going to be hearing from a customer, a joint customer, of both RingCentral and Okta. We're going to hear from Imran Kazi, Director of IT for Carvana and really hear how Carvana, which ironically we met at Oktane, is leveraging the power of both RingCentral and Okta mixed together, integrated together and what the scale of those two powerhouses in their respective industries are doing for Carvana. We'll hear from Imran in a little bit. 

First, let's talk a little bit about this modern world of work. Before I talk about the world of work, the world in general has changed. The way we live has truly changed. Show of hands, who in the last 30 days has either watched a movie or a show on Netflix? About 80% of the room. Who in the last year went to a drive-in movie? Nice, nice, there's a few of you. That's fantastic. The way we consume our entertainment has clearly changed. The cloud has changed the way we entertain ourselves, entertain our family. That's powered by the cloud. 

Who in the last week has been inside of an Uber or a Lyft? Pretty much everybody in this room. The way we travel, the way we get around has changed. My mother told me never to talk to strangers, and she also told me never, ever get in a car with strangers. Here I am today picking up my phone calling a stranger, having them bring their car to me, and get in that car with that stranger. I'd say the way we get around has definitely changed. 

Then who has either listened to a song on Pandora, Spotify in the last month as well? Pretty much everybody in the room. I can't ask you if you've been to Tower Records. There's some gray hair on this head. I remember Tower Records. All right, there we go. There's some Tower Record fans. Again, the way we consume our music, the way we buy things with the oncoming of Amazon and how Amazon has changed the way we buy things, the way we live our lives has changed, all powered by the cloud. It has changed the way we live. It has also changed, obviously, the way we work. In our business at RingCentral, the leader in cloud communications, it's changed the way we communicate. 

On your right side, you see this gentleman on a desk phone. That desk phone is pretty much a dying device. Being tethered to your desk phone the way the worker communicates, they have an entire set of different needs. They're a mobile workforce. They're a workforce that needs instant access to their mobile device but then applications or communications applications on their mobile device, on their tablet. The worker wants communications integrated into their applications. They want to be able to make calls out of their apps, out of their Messenger, out of their CRM, out of their service platform. No longer do they want to be tethered to this device. They want to move from over here to right here or on that mobile device. 

Then it's a global workforce. The world is truly flat. How do you take communications, roll it out across a global fleet of users, provision it across a global fleet of users instantly? The way we communicate has changed, and the cloud has powered that change. On the right side of your screen, you'll see an ad that RingCentral took out in the Wall Street Journal earlier this year in February when one of the oldest players, oldest companies in communications, Avaya, filed for Chapter 11. Why did that happen? You've got a company, again, tried and true communications company that was trying to move their business to the cloud, born premise, started as a premise, they are a premise-based company, could not get their business to the cloud fast enough, could not be nimble enough to move their business to the cloud. So, they're going to have to reorganize themselves and figure out how they come out of this. That headline is, "The cloud has won as Avaya filed for Chapter 11."

RingCentral is winning in the cloud. On the left side of your screen, that may look familiar to some of you, many of you. That's communications spaghetti, is what I call that. That's a PBX. That may be in one of your closets or one of your data center. That's a phone switch right there, and that's one of our customers. That's a picture that I frankly took inside of a customer's switch room, and that's what we're replacing. That's truly the transformation of no longer do you need that. Communications has truly moved to the cloud. 

What does that mean, and how are we doing it? One more step, and look at the legacy. What you see here are silos. You see locations, San Francisco, New York, London. In that Avaya world, in that world of premise-based communications, what you needed to do is you needed to stand up a PBX in each location. You needed to put a PBX in San Francisco, one in New York, and one in London. They were not connected to each other, and they left out the dispersed worker, the worker who works from home. They left out the mobile worker. So, this old way was not suited for what I just described, for modern way of communicating. It's just suited. 

How do we do it now? RingCentral, again, the largest player in the space, growing twice as fast as anybody in the space, has taken communications, moved it to the cloud and taken all three of those silos and connected them. A perfect example is actually Okta. Okta has been a RingCentral customer for years. They use us across seven countries. They use us both in the core of PBX, integrated into applications like SalesForce, of course leveraging Okta from a provisioning perspective so they can provision users across the globe. Their mobile force uses us. Their force that works from home uses us. They also use us in the contact center. 

Again, it's globally. So, they can pick up the phone at headquarters in San Francisco, extension-to-extension dial to the UK, to France, all happening in one global platform that's managed in one global environment that's provisioned by Okta, of course, across that global fleet of users.

How is our go-to market? How do we go to market? How do empower that cloud, empower that cloud communications platform? At the foundation, at the bottom is enterprise PBX. It is still the phone system. You are still messing with one of the oldest tried and true ways of communicating back to Mobell. You have to an enterprise class, enterprise grade phone system, which is voice, which is fax, which is messaging, SMS, giving your users a business identity also that they can take wherever they need to take with them. 

Then we put an application on top of that enterprise PBX. So, the application layer is collaboration. The application layer is web and audio conferencing. The application layer also is contact center. We have also the world's leading cloud contact center as RingCentral Contact Center. Then on top of the application layer, we provide a fully open platform. Dozens upon dozens of integrations that are out of the box, integrations into Okta, integrations into SalesForce, integrations into the Google Cloud, ServiceNow, who was just presenting prior, full integrations into ServiceNow. 

Then that open platform is also allowing customers to custom develop the integrations that they want to into their systems. A perfect example of that is Intuit. Intuit has taken our fax API, put it right inside of TurboTax. We sent five million faxes the year before last using the fax API right inside of TurboTax. It's an open platform where you can take pieces of it and put it into your applications. 

The next box there as a differentiator is team collaboration. So, now messaging comes to form. The true power of the messenger, the IMs. RingCentral acquired a company called Glip a year and a half ago. What we've done is we've taken the messenger and we've integrated all of the communications function of that enterprise PBX and put it into the messenger. So, now when you're at your desk and you're messaging, or on your phone and you're messaging, you're able to make your calls out of your messenger, you're able to do tasks inside your messenger, box integration, DropBox integration. You're able to provision your users with Glip through Okta as well. 

So, taking that messaging client and that messaging experience and integrating the true communications platform, and then lastly global. I mentioned Okta is in seven countries. RingCentral offers local numbers in over 100 different countries. Local numbers, all part of one global platform in 100 countries. I mentioned the cloud is winning, and RingCentral is winning in the cloud.

This is Paul Chapman who is the CIO of Box. Box, like Okta, has been a customer for many, many years. Really, Box came to us with a whole lot of spaghetti. It wasn't just the enterprise PBX. Using different meeting applications, GoToMeeting, WebEx, Interall, using Slack, using many different applications, trying to put it all into one platform. Paul Chapman and CIO.com said he saved about $800,000 a year by taking all of that and putting it onto one platform with RingCentral. 

This came out of Forbes and, "The cloud is winning, and RingCentral is winning in the cloud." There's quote if you can't see it in the bottom left, it said, "Three things that come to mind when I think of RingCentral, partner, value and innovation." We also have four integrations with Box. So, Box on Box, Paul wanted to be able to use their applications across their fleet of users leveraging that integration, and then, of course, all of the provisioning done with the Okta and RingCentral integration as well. It's a great story. 

Don't take my word for it. Let's listen to this analysts. The analysts, what are they saying about communications? This is a report that came out earlier this summer from Synergy Research. What Synergy Research said ... They looked at the total industry and the amount of movement from premise to cloud, and the adoption that we're seeing from premise-based communication to cloud-based communication. If you see here, RingCentral is by far the number one worldwide cloud communications provider. We are larger than our competitors, but most importantly as I said a little bit earlier, we are investing ... about 18% of our revenue goes back into the product. RingCentral is a 500 million, 475 million dollar company. 18%, a little north of 50 million, goes back into the product every year. We're also investing twice as much as our next competitor on this list. 

Also, the analysts laud us and give us some kudos as we sit in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for the second year in a row as the leader in UNCAAS, unified communications as a service. We are the leader in the quadrant, the Magic Quadrant. That new report comes out next week, so you can stay tuned. The new MQ comes out next week in this space as well, and we'll see what Gartner says about where some of these dots have moved and shifted and where that all sits. Frost and Sullivan Company of the Year in 2016, Aragon Research in 2017, and IHS in 2017 as well. 

Again, we're winning in the cloud but then being recognized for the success and our customer's success. Speaking about our customers, all different sizes, from small to medium business all the way up to super large enterprise. You see Okta here. You see Box here. I spoke to that. We know all sorts of different industries. Last week I was in Denver, Colorado speaking at an event with the CIO of Tuff Shed. 78 locations, took them live in 45 days across 78 locations both in the contact center and the PBX. 

You see companies like Hyatt Hotels. Hyatt Hotels earlier this year moved their entire headquarters in Chicago, 2,500 users, of off Avaya, onto RingCentral. Brinker International is about 5,000 users. Every Chili's across North America. When you order your baby back ribs, they're answering it on a RingCentral phone.I mentioned this earlier. We're about 475 million on a 31% growth rate, so growing faster than anybody else. 

We're here at Oktane, so let's talk a little bit about the Okta integration. It's all about how quickly and how smoothly you can provision your users. How can you, again, when you have a global footprint, get people up, operational, and using the tools that you all want to put into your application stack and infrastructure? Our customers that are using Okta are able to two-way sync, using single sign on, use the universal directory, and really shrink the time it takes to manage and roll out the RingCentral application in their fleet, secure single sign on, tracking and reporting, life cycle management. It's all about when you get a new hire, how quickly can you get that new hire using the suite of applications that you want to roll out?

A few joint customers, Carvana is right there in the middle. We're going to hear from Imran in about two minutes. You can see mutual customers across all verticals, Del Monte in the consumer goods and manufacturing space, Palo Alto Networks. Palo Alto Networks is live across 1,600 users globally of RingCentral, and they took that live in about 45 days. They credit the Okta integration as a big reason they were able to move so quickly and so swiftly. They had an initiative to get off of premise, onto cloud, and they needed to do it quickly and provision quickly. They used the Okta/RingCentral integration to make that so. 

Another great one that's not on here is World Vision. World Vision is the largest nonprofit organization in the world, 40,000 employees. They've got a couple thousand of them on RingCentral. One of the key reasons they selected RingCentral was because of the Okta integration and how quickly they could provision. Randy Boyd and his team needed to get that up and operationally very quickly. Their charter is to feed the world, not just give them food but teach them how to get themselves food. It's a great story.

Here's a good little segway, actually. We're going to have the CIO of World Vision at our user conference in October. Will Randolph is going to come talk about how taking one of the older institutions in World Vision and how we leveraged technology in general, but how we leveraged communications and RingCentral to be able to power his stack. October 23 to the 25, I hope everybody comes. We'll be in San Francisco. We have Salman Amin Khan from the Khan Institute talking about learning, and how the mind learns, and how communication impacts the way we all learn. 

Peter Guber. I'm from LA, so I'm a Laker fan. I'm not a Warriors fan. He is the Co-Owner of the Golden State Warriors, the world champion. I know. Golden State Warriors. Also, a titan in the business world talking about the power of communication in general and in business, bringing different groups of people together. It's a great opportunity. This is our second annual. Okta, I think you guys are on number five. This is our second annual. We look forward to seeing you all there. 

That's it for me. What I'd love to now do is bring up Imran and have Imran come share his experience rolling RingCentral out across 35 locations and how he was able to do so by leveraging the power of Okta and RingCentral together, and some of the lift he saw in empowering his communications stack as well. Imran, come take it away, please. Thank you. 

Imran Kazi:  Thank you, man. 

Mitch Tarica:  [inaudible 00:18:45]

Imran Kazi:  That's my Warriors, but it's all good. 

Mitch Tarica:  I know. Sorry about that. 

Imran Kazi:  Thank you for inviting me to represent Carvana and let me share out story, how both RingCentral and Okta has helped our rapid growth at Carvana. A little bit about Carvana. Back in 2013, when the founders started Carvana, the number one goal, the number one thing that they wanted to address with Carvana was to change the way people buy a car. They wanted to address the actual customer experience of how car buying used to be during the times of the dealerships. 

Of course, dealerships haven't gone away. They're still here, but we all are used to going to the dealerships, that painful experience, the talking to the sales guy, going through the contract, having them charge these documentation fees, all these different painful stuff back and forth with the dealership. What we wanted to do was eliminate all of that and really change the buying experience. That is our mission is to change the way people buy cars. 

In order to do that, in order to give the superior customer experience to the buyers that want to go and buy the car that they want, we wanted to make sure that they have the best experience. There was a report that came out in 2014 by Capgemini that showed that 97% of the car buyers, they do their research online before they go buy a car. For us, it was simple. The customers were already there at the comfort of their home, the comfort of using their browser. We just wanted to make sure that we implement a solution that gives them the best experience, that's easy to use, is quick. We've had customers that have bought a car in less than ten minutes. 

The second thing we wanted to make sure, that the selection is great. We wanted to provide them the best selection so they can go through our inventory. We have, right now, more than 7,300 cars in our inventory, and it's rapidly growing. The other one was the best value because of the fact that we don't have these brick-and-mortar car dealerships, we don't have sales guys, we don't charge those bogus fees that the dealership charges. All that savings, all that value, we push it out to the consumer. On average our consumer, our customers, they save about $1,500 on average on a car compared to Kelley Blue Book. 

A simple and seamless car buying experience, it's indeed that. You go on there completely device agnostic, OS agnostic. You can use your mobile device. You can use your Mac, PC, whatever. Find the car you want. Trade in the car. Sell your car online. You don't have to go through a tremendous amount of stuff. You can just put your VIN number, detail of the car. We give you a fair price from Kelley Blue Book. You can go through real-time personalized financing. Majority of our customers, they do financing through us, through Carvana, but you don't have to. You can do your own financing. You can pay in cash. Lastly, through that seamless experience, you can sign and decide if you want to pick up the car from one of our vending machines or have it delivered. 

We realized that car buying could be a little apprehensive doing it online. You're buying, let's say, a $15,000 or $20,000 car online. So, we understand the users are going to be a little nervous doing that purchase. That's why we make sure Carvana stands behind every car we sell. That's why we have our own reconditioning and inspection centers. We have a very rigorous criteria of what cars we sell. Typically, they're less than five years old, slightly used, low mileage. 

We know that used cars are not perfect. Our approach is, we want to be completely transparent to our customers, so any little scratch, any little ding a car, a used car has, we have this patented spinner photography photo studio that takes the picture off a car, inside and out, giving the customer, the consumer every little detail about a scratch, a ding that a car has. So, when they order the car, when they get it delivered, they know exactly what they ordered. After, they have seven days. They order the car, they get the car, seven days to drive the car. If they don't like it, they return it no questions asked. 

The two ways we deliver the car is either we, in any market that we're in a 100 mile radius, we do free delivery. The other fun way is you can come to one of our vending machines and pick up the car. A lot of our customers bring their family, their kids, because it's a unique experience. They come and we give them a big coin that they go in, they put it in the machine. We take their video, the car comes out. By the time they go home, we have a small clip of their video picking up the car. Currently we have five of these vending machines. We're building more and more, because we think that this is the new way of buying a car. Everybody is doing it online. All you have to do is have a fun experience and go pick it up. 

This rapid growth since 2013, we have gone through this growth. We started in the very first market was Atlanta in 2013. Then in 2014, we went to Nashville and Charlotte. Nashville was the very first vending machine we started. Even to 2015, we went into six more markets. We were in nine markets. Last year, we were in 21 markets. Then we went IPO April of this year. Now August of this year, we're in 35 markets. So, we have gone from three to 35 markets. Our revenue from last year has been over 880%, 365 million just because of this extreme fast growth. We continue to enter new markets and completely revolutionizing the used car sales. People are loving it, and we're having fun building these vending machines and selling these cars.

Now as we had this simple and seamless way of selling our cars online, we wanted to make sure ... When I joined Carvana, I realized that Carvana is actually a technology company. We are focused in changing the car buying experience for our consumers. We are focused on our product, how we sell it, how we make it easy for them. My team wanted to make sure we implemented these solutions and tools to our dev team, to our engineering team, to our advocates team, finance team that is seamless so they can do their job and focus on our product to give customers the best buying experience. 

So, we implemented Okta. We've grown in the last 15 months. We have grown from 350 employees to 1,400 employees. We have 102 published apps. We're in 40 different locations. By implementing Okta, we've made sure that as our rapid growth, as our rapid hiring was going through, the very first day as we hired an employee not only that person has full access to the applications but that person was productive day one. 

Then we had to make sure that our communication platform was the key, basically. We needed to make sure that our customers go through the process of going to the right person as we enter new and new markets, and we wanted to make sure that the platform that we implement ... RingCentral platform was the one that we decided to go with, because my team is the one that has to deal with the spaghetti communications that Mitch showed. We are in 35 markets, we started with three markets, we don't want to deal with different switches, and hard phones, and PBXs in every location.

It's easy to have a unified communications solution that's on the cloud. It takes a day for us to start a market. We get our phones drop shipped to each location that's starting. We make sure that our serial numbers of the phones that are being dropped is on our portal and numbers are set up before even we do a grand opening of our market. We've seen with RingCentral, the deployment has been so quick that ... We saw the bottom line investment help us get more customers in. 

At the end with Okta and RingCentral, we have internal advocates that help our customers buy the car. Then we have the external advocates that help them deliver the cars. Immediately we saw increased productivity. Immediately we saw improved communication. Obviously, it was a better experience for our customers. When they call in, they didn't have to go through different IVRs and different people, wrong team to answer the callers. They knew each market had its own number. Then you have each advocate that they can get ahold of. It was seamless and easy. They were able to have a better experience when buying the car.

Having Okta and RingCentral being our most important solutions to help us grow, we've had a 4.8 star rating. 95% of our customers recommended to their friends. We've grown tremendously in the last year, 180% year over year growth, 356 million. It's due to the solutions that we decided to go with that are similar to our culture, and approach, and trying to resolve the problem that we're trying to resolve, better customer experience. That's it. 

Mitch Tarica:  All right. Thank you.

Imran Kazi:  Thanks, Mitch. 

Mitch Tarica:  Do Q&A? All right, I think we're going to wrap it up. Thank you everybody. Enjoy the rest of Oktane. Have a great evening tonight and a good rest of the show. Thank you.