As much as my wife and I like the Marriott in downtown Oakland, we would have much preferred to stay and work from home.
But a combination of dry heat and high winds made that virtually impossible.
As you may have heard, here in California PG&E Corp. (PCG) will cut power to areas like ours if there is a high fire risk.
So, we once again found ourselves working out of a hotel room for nearly three days.
The reason is simple. While we have a portable generator, it doesn’t provide us with good Wi-fi or cell-phone coverage – meaning we can’t work.
Between weather events like these and the massive push to working from home that has come with COVID-19, the need for businesses and workers to stay connected has never been more apparent.
Luckily, it turns out there is a clear tech leader highly skilled at providing cloud-based unified communications, and tapping into the $56 billion market that goes along with it.
And today, I’ll show you why this savvy tech firm is set to double its earnings in as little as 18 months…
Unified Communications
Now then, like I said, we’ve been pretty lucky this fire season avoiding shutdowns. We were actually out of town for two of them.
For this last shutdown, we debated about staying home and firing up the portable generator.
While I’m glad we have one, it can’t power the whole house, meaning no air conditioning on a hot day with zero humidity.
But really it all came down to making sure we had reliable cellular and Web service. After all, she has been holding plenty of online video conferences and I do nearly all my stock research online.
So, there we were on the 15th floor of the Marriott with nice views of downtown Oakland. We hit the ground running and had great communications with the outside world with no issues of any kind.
To me, this whole process underscores how much things have changed during the pandemic.
With millions working remotely, we are growing more dependent on a field known as “unified communications.”
That may sound fancy. But at heart, it’s really pretty simple.
In the digital economy, businesses have to have phone and other services that can all be linked together. Increasingly, this is moving to the cloud.
It’s all part of a relatively new sector known as Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS). For businesses, the idea is to get rid of old-school PBX phone systems and replace them with fully digital, cloud-based platforms.
Constant Connectivity
An aggressive leader in this field faces plenty of upside.
Consider that Markets&Markets said UCaaS was a $17.35 billion market in 2016. The firm forecasts the field will grow by 10.6% a year through 2021, when it will be worth $28.69 billion.
But that may be conservative. A recent report in Forbes estimates the market at $56 billion. And Grand View Research says the field is growing yearly at 16.8%.
Now you know why I’m so excited about RingCentral Inc. (RNG). It’s uniquely set up to profit from cloud-based unified communications in the coronavirus era.
Legacy phone systems tied to on-premise phone networks are going the way of the dinosaur.
They’re bulky, a pain to operate, and not exactly flexible enough to handle the needs of mobile employees or a distributed workforce at a time when more than 40 million Americans are working remotely.
And there’s a huge cost appeal as well. By tapping into UCaaS, firms can reduce their communications overhead with a much more flexible system that expands what they are able to do.
With RingCentral, clients pay a simple monthly fee and get all the bells and whistles they could ever want.
Clients gain remote file access, conference call management, as well as all of the features you’d expect with a top-end corporate communications platform.
The Disaster Angle
Talk about reliable service. RingCentral boasts uptime to a staggering 99.999%. That is much better than any on-premises hardware you can buy.
Here’s the part that I really like, given that I live in an earthquake zone beset by wildfires.
For clients facing any kind of catastrophe, they get fantastic service. Their offices literally could be underwater – or without power – and workers could still be answering calls from another location.
Let’s be clear. RingCentral is hardly a household name. But you can bet Big Tech knows all about this company.
AirBnB, Alphabet Inc. (GOOGL), Intuit Inc. (INTU), Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), Oracle Corp. (ORCL), and Salesforce.com Inc. (CRM) and are all part of the RingCentral ecosystem.
Not to mention Amazon Web Services, the world’s largest cloud computing platform. It launched Alexa for Business roughly two years ago.
With this voice-controlled digital assistant, users can perform a wide range of corporate tasks-without being anywhere near a computer keyboard. To pull it off, Amazon turned to RingCentral to power the platform.
Add it all up and you can see that RingCentral is a great growth firm.
Over the past three years, it expanded per-share profits by an average of 30%.
That means they are on pace to double roughly every 2.5 years.
But I like to under promise and over deliver. So, I’m projecting they will double in roughly four years.
Mind you, the company could do even better once the economy fully rebounds.
That’s why it pays off to have stocks like RNG in your portfolio so you can build wealth for the long haul.
Cheers and good investing,
— Michael A. Robinson
Source: Strategic Tech Investor