How coronavirus is changing work and tech

Ring Central CEO Vlad Shmunis joins Yahoo Finance’s Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous and Brian Sozzi to discuss how people’s working habits are changing as they work from home.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: I want to welcome now to the show Vlad Shmunis. He is CEO of RingCentral, and we know millions of Americans are now working from home, Vlad, and I understand RingCentral is taking on Zoom with a new product. Tell us about it.

VLAD SHMUNIS: Yes, thank you for having me. Look, RingCentral is not taking on Zoom. RingCentral is a leader in unified communications as a service. We're a billion dollar revenue company. We're profitable. We're growing rapidly in the mid 30s, and we have had, for a while, a differentiated product that integrates messaging, video, and phone functionality through the cloud. We call it, MVP, message via your phone.

Now, the video component in our service has been powered by Zoom for a number of years. We've learned quite a bit from that relationship and that technology as part of our solution. And now today, we introduced our own homegrown product called, RingCentral Video, which again, will be available as part of our RingCentral office solution. So our customers will continue to be able to use Zoom, if they'd like. It's a good product, but we think we have a number of advantages to offer with our RingCentral video technology.

BRIAN SOZZI: Vlad, Brian Sozzi here. You know, 45% of your annual recurring revenue is tied to small and medium sized businesses. Can you just give us a snapshot into your business? What are you seeing right now giving a lot of businesses are closed because of the coronavirus?

VLAD SHMUNIS: Yes. No, of course. Look, obviously, a terrible situation. Now, we are-- we're not a nice to have for a business. We're a must have. We're lifeblood.

So we are probably the last service to be turned off, and I have to say, look, we have over 2 million customers. We have over 400,000 business entities on the platform. So obvious, many of them are smaller. Mostly because of some very large accounts, you know, 45,000, 50,000 people, but-- or users, but better small business.

Look, we have not seen a wave of Exodus, yet anyway. People are hanging on, and you know, we're hopeful. We're actually seeing quite a bit of acceleration in use of our service, in app downloads. We just compared-- interestingly enough, we just ran a comparison same week, months over months.

So what we saw was increase in app downloads over 300%. We see increase in meetings over 100%. We see increasing messaging over 70%. So unprecedented growth, and again, we're just one of those work from home solutions that are really picking up steam now.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Vlad Shmunis, CEO of RingCentral. Best of luck to you and with the new product. Thanks for being with us.

VLAD SHMUNIS: Thank you for having me.