AWS re:Invent Event Recap

RingCentral sponsored the 2016 AWS re:Invent conference in Las Vegas the week of November 28. The RingCentral Developer booth was perpetually busy and we wanted to share the experience, data, and results of some new experiments we tried at this conference to engage developers.

Answers to the most frequently asked questions received

1. What is RingCentral doing at AWS re:Invent?
   RingCentral runs heavily upon AWS, many of our customers either run their business on AWS, or use applications from the RingCentral App Gallery. It just made sense to be where our customers are. Additionally, many of the apps developers are creating using the RingCentral Platform are deployed on AWS, and there are a number of use cases that leverage AWS such as cloud storage on S3, chatbots on EC2, etc
2. What makes RingCentral different than other Communications-as-a-Platform companies?
   RingCentral is a complete Unified Communications-as-a-Service (UCaaS) solution that includes voice, video, team messaging, collaboration, SMS conferencing, online meetings, contact center and fax. RingCentral Developer Platform, enables customers, developers and partners access to RingCentral’s services programmatically enabling them to create valuable business communication integrations with other business service providers and to automate business workflows.
3. What does RingCentral do?
   RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a global provider of cloud unified communications and collaboration solutions. More flexible and cost-effective than legacy on-premise systems, RingCentral empowers today’s mobile and distributed workforces to be connected anywhere and on any device through voice, video, team messaging, collaboration, SMS, conferencing, online meetings, contact center, and fax. RingCentral provides an open platform that integrates with today’s leading business apps while giving customers the flexibility to customize their own workflows. RingCentral is a leader in the 2016 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service Worldwide for the second consecutive year.

Booth sponsorship by the numbers

• 81 new Free RingCentral Developer Accounts created
• 750 booth gifts given away
• 250 RingCentral Developer t-shirts given away
• 200 RingCentral Developer stickers given away
• 62 new developer applications created

Raffle and Action Prize Data

We decided to try something different this year to engage developers beyond just sharing badge scans to be entered in prize drawings. Our “big booth prizes” allowed us to experiment with layering our prize offerings to suit the various types of people visiting our booth (developers and non-developers):

1. Google Pixel phone
2. Raspberry Pi 3 Project Kit complete with 7" touchscreen and case
3. 360Fly and Deluxe VR Kit

For the 360Fly, which was available for all attendees, people only needed to allow the RingCentral booth staff to scan their badge, and show us they were following us on our RingCentral-Developers Medium Publication or RingCentralDevs Twitter handle. We saw a 43% increase in our follower count on Twitter from this action item. Here the winner is…

Spencer Kotowick — Cloud & Infrastructure Engineer at Vin65

The remaining prizes developer-focused and we used the focus as an experiment to see if we could get developers to answer a call to action:

For the Raspberry Pi 3 Project Kit, developers had to signup for a Free RingCentral Developer account, and be present for the drawing. We saw a 212% increase in new free developer account signups over previous 12 week average. Here the winner is…

Raphael Huisman — CTO at Overpass.com

For the Google Pixel, developers needed to use their Free RingCentral Developer account to create an application using the RingCentral WebPhone Client Library (voice via WebRTC), and show us their working application at the booth. This action item increased our WebRTC application usage by 35% over previous week averages. Here was the winner:

Chris Everling — Test Software Engineer at Interactive Intelligence

What did we learn from making this decision to “layer” our prizes based on actions we wanted developers to take…? It works, but our work is not over.

You could help by providing your perspective

As a developer, when you sign up for prizes at conference booths, tell us about:

• Your expectations for follow-up communications?
• Your best/worst experiences with these types of communications?
• Your recommendations about how best to engage developers with the goal of building valued, trusted relationships

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