Wheelings & Dealings: RingCentral Acquires Team Messaging and Collaboration Company Glip

By Peter Bernstein
Senior Editor

It should come as no surprise to those watching the cloud communications market in general that various solutions providers are looking to beef up their offerings. The reason is that for go-to-market competitive reasons, having a full suite of not just communications capabilities but also covering all of the bases when it comes to unified communications (UC) and collaboration tools have become essential.  An example of this need to have a complete CaaS and collaboration portfolio is the announcement that Belmont, California-based cloud communications solution provider RingCentral (News - Alert) has acquired Glip, Inc., a cloud messaging and collaboration company.  

Glip is an interesting startup with  capabilities that fill nicely RingCentral’s desire to expand its functionality. Founded in 2012 and headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida, customers for the Glip applications include IBM (News - Alert), CBS Interactive, The Economist, Harvard University, and many others.

The Glip application is designed to help diverse teams be more productive by providing easy-to-use team messaging that is integrated with task management, group calendars, notes, annotations, and file sharing. In fact, a major attraction here is that it includes integrations with such business solutions as Asana, Box, Dropbox, Evernote, JIRA, GitHub, Google (News - Alert), Zendesk, and many others.  

Glip’s capabilities will be integrated and made available to all RingCentral Office customers. RingCentral also plans to keep the current stand-alone Glip application, renamed as RingCentral Teams, available for Web, Windows, Mac, iOS and Android (News - Alert) for all current and future customers.

“Today’s mobile and distributed workforce requires a new generation of enterprise communication solutions,” said Vlad Shmunis, founder and CEO of RingCentral. “We’re excited to welcome the Glip team to RingCentral. Glip extends our platform by adding powerful team messaging and collaboration services. Together we’ll deliver the industry’s first integrated cloud business communications and team collaboration solution, which will empower teams to work across all locations, devices, and modes of communication.”

“Collaborating with employees, partners, and customers to solve business problems is becoming more complex, and email is no longer sufficient by itself,” said Peter Pezaris, Founder and CEO of Glip.  “We started Glip with the vision of empowering employees to work more efficiently by developing a world-class messaging solution with integrated productivity tools. We’re excited to join RingCentral to take our vision even further by combining with their state-of-the-art business communications platform.”

There is always a question that growing companies have to answer when it comes to the best way for them to meet customer needs and respond aggressively to changing competitive challenges.  Does one build it or buy it?  Given the pace at which the entire ICT world is changing, as all of the M&A activity around the world, regardless of sector or size highlights, the need for speed in responding to changed circumstances is causing more and more interest in buying what one needs.  Pardon the play on words but this is no Glip on the radar screen.  That said, Glip has established a growing presence in an about part of the real-time communications business and RingCentral now has an app for that.