Dennis Publishing, IT Pro’s parent company, has picked RingCentral to help it transform its business communications strategy to focus on mobility and open platform integration. In preparation for a major shift in its business towards a more dynamic working environment, which included office relocation, Dennis began examining a number of alternatives to its inflexible legacy on-premise PBX system.

“With space being at a premium in London, and flexibility being a valued benefit for employees, we adopted ‘agile working’ in our new building,” said Paul Lomax, CTO at Dennis.

“People still work in zones with their teams, but they need to be able to work in different spaces within the building depending on their needs, often with other members of staff. This meant we needed more than just deskphones, to free people from their desks, and give them the flexibility they need to work.”

Already using Google G Suite across the organisation, Lomax and his team considered a number of options examining feature sets and ability to integrate with Dennis’s other collaborative applications. “We wanted to avoid our staff becoming too deskbound, as any solution needed to work on more than just Windows and Macs as a third of our estate is not on these two platforms,” he said.

Dennis picked RingCentral due to its close integration with Google, and successfully transitioned its 400 staff on the RingCentral platform. The transformation has allowed staff at Dennis – of whom up to 40% can be out of the office at any time – to become more agile.

The flexibility extended to locations around the new building, with staff able to use devices anywhere across eight floors, with just under half of calls being made using the RingCentral unified client on smartphones, and another 20% of calls being made using the Windows or Mac application on a laptop.

Lomax praised the breadth of features RingCentral offers, saying: “Being able to quickly and easily record calls has been particularly useful for our editorial teams, but the best thing about RingCentral is the ability for staff to use the device that best suits, and that is most appropriate to the job that they are doing there and then.”

Just one month after full deployment, Dennis is already averaging around 5,000 calls a week with the beta Quality of Service report showing 96% of calls rated as good.