RingCentral Expands Beyond Phone Service With Glip Acquisition

RingCentral, a cloud-based phone and communications system for companies, will today announce a plan to expand into messaging and collaboration with the acquisition of Glip.

Terms are not being disclosed on the deal. Glip is a lesser-known competitor to larger office messaging tools like Slack and HipChat. RingCentral CEO Vlad Shmunis said the union will create the first platform combining traditional phone communication with the Web-based messaging and managing tools that are gaining traction in many companies.

Glip is already integrated with several cloud services, including Asana, Box, GitHub and Zendesk. And RingCentral announced earlier this year a tie-up with Google for Work that allies its phone service with Google’s Gmail environment.

Shmunis said services like Slack and HipChat are more oriented to the needs of software developers. “The problem of messaging and collaboration is much wider than that,” he said. “Glip is for everyone else.” He said RingCentral is working on a “close integration” of its Web-based phone services with Glip.

Glip is based in Boca Raton, Fla., and appears to have been self-funded. Its three founders, Peter Pezaris, David Hersh and James Price, met at Carnegie Mellon University in the 1990s. They sold Commissioner.com, a fantasy sports site, to CBS Sports in 1999, and a second company, Multiply.com, to a South African Web media company called Naspers in 2010. Glip’s customers include IBM, CBS and Harvard University.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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