IDC 1875

I D C C U S T O M E R S P O T L I G H T

Adapt i ve Se l f -Service C loud Opt ion He lps R ingCentra l Opt imize B ig Data and Complex Sys tems

March 2015

Sponsored by Qubell

Introduction

RingCentral Inc. is a publicly traded provider of

software-as-a-service (SaaS) communications solutions

for businesses. Delivered via a state-of-the-art cloud

infrastructure, its phone and communications systems can

offer customers a flexible and cost-effective way to support

distributed workforces, mobile employees, and the

proliferation of "bring your own" communications devices.

Its flagship service, RingCentral Office, is an enterprise

solution that allows customers and their employees to

communicate via voice, text, and fax on multiple devices,

including smartphones, tablets, PCs, and desk phones.

Founded in 1999, RingCentral is headquartered in San

Mateo, California, and has offices in Denver, Charlotte,

London, and Xiamen, China.

RingCentral has experienced rapid growth in the past

several years as businesses redefine how they work and

increasingly seek integrated cloud communications solutions

that can be used across the enterprise. With a large and

growing customer base, the cloud-based provider deals daily

with the rapid deployment of complex, heterogeneous

software systems and the related challenge of configuration

management. Although the company built internal tools to

address this challenge, many hands still needed to touch a

component before it went to production, resulting in a

manual process that was both inefficient and error prone.

RingCentral wanted to increase efficiency with automation

and self-service for faster testing and application releases

via dynamic and rapid provisioning and also to decrease

errors by minimizing human intervention in software

deployment and configuration management. The company

began looking for an automated solution suited to its

complicated software environments and found it in

application deployment and configuration management

tools from Qubell Inc.

Solution Snapshot

Organization: RingCentral is a publicly

traded provider of cloud-based phone

and communications systems for

businesses.

Operational Challenge: RingCentral

needed to solve configuration

management problems for rapid

delivery of changes and quality for

complex Hadoop big data analytics and

other systems on which the company's

phone and communications business

depends.

Solution: The company selected

Qubell Inc. and its autonomic

application management platform.

Project Duration: Initial big data

deployment took 6 months (rather than

12+ months). Other deployments are

ongoing and will be completed in 1Q15.

Benefits: The company moved from an

outdated version of Hadoop and gained

application speed, quality, and reliability

with Qubell self-service. Teams spin up

tests in days, not weeks, and deploy on

Amazon cloud for agility in a dynamic

market. Data analytics enable insight

into phone and communications

performance and usage.

©2015 IDC 2

Implementation

RingCentral has customers in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom in industries such

as healthcare, financial services, legal, retail, and real estate. The company has successfully

developed a brand cache, further differentiating its offerings and increasing brand awareness in an

already crowded market serving small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). However, companies

live or die today based on how well they innovate and deliver services to their customers — and

RingCentral is no exception.

To engage its customer base with innovative communication services, RingCentral requires both

speed and agility to deliver new releases quickly, frequently, and reliably. Given the nature of its

business, the company is in a state of constant deployment with frequent major new releases. "We're

in a really agile environment, and so this problem never goes away," says Kira Makagon,

RingCentral's Executive Vice President of Innovation, who is responsible for product strategy, product

management, engineering, and operations. "It only gets worse if you don't manage it."

RingCentral's homegrown solution for configuration management and software deployment was no

longer robust enough to support the company's increasingly complex business and production

environment. "There are many variables that go into our configuration," says Makagon. "We have lots

of components — over 200 that get deployed — and they are in different categories. Assembling all

of that in a standardized fashion while minimizing the amount of human intervention is the challenge."

Although the company ran faster than competitors, its processes were inefficient. And, says

Makagon, "Inefficiency means errors and bottlenecks." The company needed an automated solution

that would help it implement and manage changes to its complex online services rapidly and without

risking stability.

RingCentral put together a team from engineering and operations to evaluate products that address

configuration management, quality, and deployment orchestration. However, the team found few

tools with the flexibility and functionality required. "We looked at a number of products, but they

weren't flexible enough for us," says Makagon. "They just could not adapt to our environment. We'd

have to redo quite a bit of what we do, and that's very expensive."

Enter Qubell Inc., a provider of application-centric environment and configuration management

solutions. The company's application management platform can enable more adaptive applications

with self-managed services to help configure and optimize the applications in response to changing

and dynamic environments. Customers can use Qubell to create a cloud platform for integration

testing and production deployments that can reconfigure themselves as changes come through the

application pipeline from development to production.

An advantage of Qubell's solution is its ability to fit into and work with an existing environment. Thus,

RingCentral was able to leverage existing assets and avoid reworking what it had already built.

"Qubell's tool lets you plug in your own scripts and parameter configuration. It is flexible about where

it points to so you can deploy where you need it. Their model also allows lots of substitution and is

easily changeable," notes Makagon. "It's modular enough where it's easy for a company like us to

manage exceptions than it would have been with other tools."

To evaluate the platform's effectiveness, RingCentral brought Qubell in for proof-of-concept pilots.

One major project completed last year enabled a big data deployment; other projects will include

other infrastructure components.

The project manages RingCentral's big data deployment, which is both internal and customer facing.

Leveraging Qubell, this initiative automates a process that used to be done manually: updating cost

centers and managing and rolling out new scripts to integrate and interface with various elements of

the onboarding system. Qubell enables self-administration for both development and data science

teams to automate this deployment process.

©2015 IDC 3

RingCentral's Senior Data Engineer Michael Becker was brought in to set up the company's Hadoop

big data environment; the company was using an outdated Hadoop version at the time, and support

was expiring. To enable data analytics and visibility into customer phone and communications

performance and usage in a way that was cost effective, the company needed to move quickly to the

most current release of Hadoop. Leveraging Qubell's self-service, autonomic capabilities, RingCentral

was able to set up cloud-based testing and orchestration environments for its complex big data

system in a matter of six months. Doing so without Qubell would have taken at least twice as long,

Becker says, and could have been challenging to accomplish at all. The system is used across four

countries by around 20 IT team members.

"We needed the ability to have a sandbox where we could do development, and a sandbox for Hadoop

is not a trivial matter because you have so many nodes that are involved. We needed a turnkey

system," says Becker. "Now we are able to dynamically create and destroy those Hadoop clusters on

Amazon AWS for our sandboxes. And that's also good because we have the flexibility of self-service.

Over the 2014 holidays, we were able to destroy those clusters and save ourselves money on AWS."

As a result of the project, RingCentral is loading onto a single platform the call records landing on its

Hadoop infrastructure and additional call detail records from other systems. The company is now able

to cross-correlate the data for deeper insight into how customers are using their RingCentral phone

systems. This also allows customers to understand usage patterns, what worked, and how they are

leveraging their services to help assess the benefits that they're accruing from RingCentral.

Challenges

RingCentral is a global enterprise whose workforce is widely dispersed geographically. The

production team and developers are distributed worldwide. When it comes to an implementation,

RingCentral not only has to decide how and where to roll out a solution but also has to deal with the

challenge of communicating this information to its distributed teams.

However, Makagon says that the hardest thing to manage has been the expectations unleashed by

implementing new tools. "Developers are pretty finicky, and they all have their things that they want.

Now that they have a chance to switch tools, there's a whole bunch of 'Can we get this done?' and

'Can we get that done?' They all have ideas about it."

Benefits

The Qubell system is an integrated orchestration environment. This meant that RingCentral's teams

didn't have to take different components and put them together themselves for the big data project. The

self-service component is a major benefit, according to Becker. "If I assign a task to a developer to

modify some code on Hadoop, they could self-service a Hadoop cluster, and it will deploy all our settings

and also deploy the code to the existing trunk or branch on that Dev cluster. Then the developer will be

able to do their development, post the code back to the branch, and destroy the cluster."

Other teams without Qubell have to wait for operations to deploy the hardware and operating system

and install the software, which can take two to three weeks compared with one day. Qubell enabled

RingCentral users to set up their sandboxes for Hadoop in days rather than weeks.

"We're able to be very agile. So, if we want to upgrade some components onto our Hadoop cluster,

we can spin up two versions of a cluster and have two different groups working on two different

branches, and we don't have resource contention between them ... and I'm able to determine the

optimal infrastructure for what it is we're trying to do," says Becker. "That gets people excited.

We don't have to get into the details of building out infrastructure, and the ability to spin it up and

down allows us to not even think about that." He says this lets his teams focus on what's important

and differentiating.

©2015 IDC 4

Qubell's consistency across environments creates efficiencies of scale because it automates scripting

and minimizes human error, he adds. Configuration management is also a key benefit. "All our

configurations are stored in Qubell, which is a core part of the full software development life cycle and

enables application deployment," says Becker. Because this big data initiative was a relatively new

project, it was easier to automate.

A harder, separate Qubell project at RingCentral involved deployment of the company's media servers.

This project was challenging because it touched more people and involved software that had been

around longer with associated processes and history, but it was able to be accomplished with Qubell.

Other deployments involving Qubell will be completed during 1Q15, so it is too soon to quantify actual

ROI. However, Makagon sees primary paybacks in Qubell's ability to enable speedier deployment

and to help reduce error rates. "Humans are much more likely to make mistakes," she says. "And

these mistakes can be really costly in the production environment." Makagon expects another benefit

of automating application deployment and configuration management to be efficiency and a potential

staff reduction of around 10% for those manual tasks, with a related retargeting of teams to

differentiating areas for the business and/or staff cost savings.

Benefits resulting from the big data project were very significant because the team previously had to

administer scripts, manage deployment, and then manage rollbacks manually if anything went wrong.

This involved huge team overhead (writing code, algorithms, and managing the data). The

homegrown tools that the team was using before were not as robust and required constant work,

which slowed implementations (a major challenge). And other commercially available tools that the

team evaluated didn't offer the flexibility and robustness of Qubell, according to Makagon. She

recommends that companies making the transition to automation do a full proof of concept because

tools can seem great initially, but when taken to the next level, they can be rigid and not offer depth of

needed functionality.

Qubell's service also makes possible new capabilities for the business. "It will help us with global

deployments for better life-cycle coordination with configuration management, quality, and faster,

continuous release cycles," says Makagon.

Methodology

The project and company information contained in this document was obtained from multiple sources,

including information supplied by Qubell, questions posed by IDC directly to RingCentral employees,

RingCentral's corporate Web site, IDC research, and Bloomberg Business.

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