For Ring Centralu2019s CIO, itu2019s about making sure u201cour IT spend is going against the most critical things to move our company forward.u201d Credit: iStock Trevor Schulze is Global Chief Information Officer at Ring Central, a rapidly growing provider of unified communications as a service. Before joining Ring Central, Schultze held CIO and other IT leadership positions at Micron Technology, Broadcom, AMD, and Cisco Systems. With its global customer base approaching 350,000 businesses and its annual revenue edging toward $1 billion, Ring Central needed to ensure that its internal IT operations could keep pace with its rapid growth. The company brought in Trevor Schulze in late 2018 to serve as the CIO guiding that process. “They brought me on to level up the maturity of the IT organization and to put us in a position to grow to become a multibillion-dollar company,” Schulze explains. Achieving that objective requires not just IT solutions that can scale, Schulze says, but that can also deliver on three core business objectives: improving revenue, customer experience, and employee experience. In pursuit of those goals, Schulze is willing to look beyond the default applications that come bundled as part of multifunction enterprise resource planning (ERP) suites. While the major ERP suites deliver many advantages, the strength of the individual functional elements can vary significantly. “You may realize that one area is a point of weakness in a large suite and conclude that the vendor isn’t going to adequately invest in it,” Schulze says. “In that case, you have to look for alternatives.” Ring Central is a cloud-native company and its IT department is fully cloud based. As such, any complementary IT solutions that Schulze considers must also be cloud-based services. “We believe that the cloud gives you competitive advantage for speed, cost, and productivity,” he says. Most critical, however, is the requirement that any solution aiming to replace or extend an ERP suite’s built-in capabilities must give Ring Central a clear strategic advantage or some form of competitive differentiation. Schulze also evaluates each candidate vendor’s track record, its financial stability, and its future prospects. As an example of an innovative company that has found “the sweet spot” in this regard, Schulze cites Coupa, a leading provider of a cloud-based spend management solution suite. “Coupa is an established company that has strong revenue and backing, and they’ve found an operational area where they can really show good differentiation,” he says. Not surprisingly, spend management itself is a critical area of focus for Schulze, as for most CIOs. Given that “the demand signal is always three to five times your capacity,” Schulze has to prioritize which demands to address with his available budget. “I need to make sure our IT spend is going against the most critical things to move our company forward,” Schulze says. That means continually tracking investments to ensure they’re supporting core business objectives. If those investments are helping to drive revenue growth, making customers happier, or improving employees’ experience and productivity, the IT department shouldn’t have to worry too much about external budget pressures. By clearly supporting these critical business needs, “You’ll have fewer executive conversations along the lines of ‘Is your IT spending meeting your expense targets?’” Schulze says. Business Spend Management leader Coupa gives companies the visibility, control, and insights they need to better manage their spend, and in so doing, facilitates IT and business unit partnership. For further information about Coupa’s platform, go to https://www.coupa.com. Click here to read this ongoing series of interviews about how the role of the CIO is evolving as digital transformation initiatives mature. Related content brandpost The CIO’s Guide to Business Spend Management: A Crash Course What you need to know about the next essential software category.rnrn By Dwight Davis Feb 08, 2021 5 mins Business CRM Systems brandpost Cloud Migration + Cost Savings = Innovation + Agility Faced with the need to reduce IT costs while at the same time increasing IT innovation, Unisys embraced cloud computing and a comprehensive search for savings.rnrn By Dwight Davis Jan 26, 2021 4 mins ERP Systems Internet Cloud Computing brandpost Cloud Computing Mitigates Pandemic-driven Disruptions The emergence of COVID-19 turned millions of employees into remote workers and introduced a host of business demands and challenges. Companies such as Autodesk that had already embarked on cloud-based strategies have been better able to navigate with By Dwight Davis Dec 16, 2020 4 mins Cloud Computing brandpost Coronavirus Pandemic Spikes Demand for Remote Team Collaboration Slacku2019s cloud-based services and infrastructure have managed to keep pace as the surge of at-home workers has caused usage to skyrocket. By Dwight Davis Dec 08, 2020 4 mins Slack Cloud Computing Data Center Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe