‘Take it or leave it’. We’ve all heard the saying at some stage in our lives, whether from a parent scolding us for not agreeing with their choice of food or from a friend attempting to haggle with us while selling a used bike.

However, one area where we shouldn’t become accustomed to hearing this is when it comes to technology — especially corporate software and technology. While there is a plethora of off-the-shelf applications and software that cater to most business requirements, many of these technologies are, unfortunately, limited in their customisation capabilities.

In other words, and to leverage another heavily used saying, ‘what you see is what you get’. While this may work for some organisations looking to address short-term needs, the reality is that these limited technologies are not conducive to growth or expansion.

Therefore, in this article, we’ll explore the importance of technology customisation before delving further into how you can assess whether or not a technology is flexible and, therefore, able to be customised to meet your unique requirements.

Before going into any more detail, it’s probably worth briefly explaining what we mean by ‘customisation’, especially within the context of software or technology.

When we say that technology or software is customisable, what we mean is that those who use it (i.e. the ‘users’) can mould its default settings and capabilities to accommodate their workflows or business processes.

Put another way, rather than having to shape the way they work around the use of a technology — which is what happens with most commercial off-the-shelf-software (COTS) — they can shape it to fit in with the way they work.

A real-life example of this would be Corporate Payroll Services who, in addition to leveraging RingCentral to replace their outdated legacy on-premises business phone system, also took advantage of the open nature of the platform by using the relevant application programming interface (API) to develop custom workflows that worked for them. In the words of their IT Director, ‘without an API, you’re limited to only what the software can do’.

So, in addition to the example provided above, why is custom technology or software relevant to you and your business? Regardless of whether you’re at the small, mid, or enterprise-level stage of your business’s maturity, customisation can drive productivity and efficiency throughout your organisation.

By creating a more purpose-built ‘flavour’ of the off-the-shelf technology, you can add specific feature functionalities to address the needs of any specific team or department. Even better, as your business continues to grow and these teams begin to expand, the custom technology can often grow with you.

This is because typically during the early deployment stages contingencies would have been put in place to prepare for any expected growth. Finally, and arguably most importantly, custom software and technology can help drive profitability.

Similar to the Corporate Payroll Services example above, by tailoring the default functionalities of software or technology and developing bespoke workflows that adhere to individual business requirements, not only can you reduce the disruption caused by deploying a new technology (i.e. the onboarding phase) but you can enable your workforces to become more productive, and therefore more profitable to the organisation. Sounds good, right? But how do you know if a technology can be customised?

Other than the obvious professional services offerings that many vendors promote to communicate how they can build ‘customised’ deployments per customer, an easier way to assess whether software or technology can be tailored is to check whether it is ‘open’ or has any form of developer platform available.

Defined as ‘software with source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance’ any open-source product or application essentially exposes its code to external developers so that they can leverage it to create tailored versions of the core offering.

At RingCentral, we have a dedicated Developer Platform where businesses can access over two hundred APIs for various key communications functions such as instant messaging, voice, meetings, SMSs, and yes — even fax.

If we take the meetings API as an example, your in-house development team can quickly integrate the ability to host and start meetings with key business tools to bring employees, customers, and partners together with video and voice conferencing.

Through this meetings API, users will be able to create meetings, manage access to those meetings, configure audio options to adhere to business requirements, and make any future changes on-the-fly.

So, what this accomplishes, is that in addition to benefiting from the core RingCentral platform, users can further integrate it into specific applications to almost instantly provide video and audio-conferencing capabilities to internal or external stakeholders.

What’s more, assuming that the integration you’ve developed does not already exist within our App Gallery, once developed you will be able to publish it there and not only gain exposure but also access our entire global install base.

Assuming one of our existing customers is looking for a similar integration to the one you just developed, they will be able to easily access it through the App Gallery, potentially opening up a new revenue stream for you in the process.

However, as mentioned above, if you don’t have the in-house skills to develop such integrations, we have several pre-built ones created by our community of developers, which are readily available for you to access.

These enable you to integrate RingCentral with most major business applications such as Salesforce.com, ServiceNow, Microsoft and Google and require very little technical know-how to deploy.

Therefore, the message that we hope to have successfully conveyed to you throughout this blog, is that when selecting software or technology to deploy within your organisation, it is imperative that you first assess whether or not it’s ‘open’.

Not only will doing so ensure that the solution fits your unique way of working, but it can also lead to many benefits such as improved efficiency, better scalability, and ultimately more profitability.

To learn even more about features we have make sure to visit our developer site and if you’re ever stuck make sure to go to our developer forum.