While RingCentral maintains its partnership with Zoom, its new browser-based video now comes standard in RingCentral Office. It is also standard in Avaya Cloud Office, although Avaya will continue to sell its own video solutions to their enterprise customers.
RingCentral Video
Today, RingCentral is announcing the North American general availability of RingCentral Video, a new video offering that is now a core component of the RingCentral Office MVP solution. It also becomes a core part of Avaya Cloud Office, through the strategic partnership between RingCentral and Avaya.
RingCentral’s video offering until now has been RingCentral Meetings, which is a white-labelled version of Zoom, and that will continue to be offered. However, RingCentral Video, as a newly-developed product, brings some new feature functionality to the table.
“Zoom has been a partner of RingCentral for quite some time,” said Zane Long, SVP, Global Channel Sales at RingCentral. “We have a strong multi-year partnership with Zoom and RingCentral Meetings is powered by Zoom. Customers can keep that with no interruption. With RingCentral Video, however, we have developed our own offering with video content sharing, voice, text and SMS.” All these are tightly integrated to facilitate collaboration across all modes of communication without losing context.
“It’s very fast, with no downloads or plug-ins required,” Long stated. It does this by using a browser for its interface by leveraging and extending Google Chrome’s WebRTC.
“It’s really smart, with analytics providing access to KPIs [Key Performance Indicators] like adoption, usage and Quality of Service metrics, as well as providing things like background noise reduction,” Long added.
He also stressed that RingCentral Video is extremely secure.
“It has state of the art video encryption,” he said. The open platform is also tightly integrated with a host of popular business productivity applications, including Google [G-Suite and Gmail], Microsoft [Teams and Office 365], Hubspot, Slack, Theta Lake, and Zoho. RingCentral for Salesforce is available on Salesforce AppExchange. Others, including Canvas, Epic, Gong.io, and Zendesk, are on the roadmap.
The Avaya overlap comes through the strategic partnership with RingCentral announced in late 2019 to bring an Avaya-branded UCaaS service based on the RingCentral platform come to market. That product, Avaya Cloud Office, reached General Availability on Tuesday.
“The rationale for our partnership with RingCentral is that our product for the SMB and midmarket, IP Office, was an on-prem product,” said Dennis Kozak, Avaya’s SVP, Digital Transformation. “We had our ‘Powered By IP Office’ for the cloud, but it didn’t quite meet the needs of the market. We have a very large IP Office install base, and this partnership lets us bring them a public cloud solution and a UCaaS true value proposition of a fully integrated suite. It’s truly an ideal offering for both companies, which allows RingCentral to leverage the Avaya Go-to Market engine with 4700 channel partners.”
While Avaya Cloud Office overall will help facilitate the migration of Avaya’s install base in the midmarket and SMB to the cloud, this integrated video component also addresses the video needs of these same types of Avaya customers, without conflicting with their existing enterprise video portfolio.
“Avaya has two video products – Avaya IX Workplace Client For Windows, which was formerly Equinox – and Avaya Spaces,” Kozak noted. “Their primary route to market is on-premises based, for those who want to make a partial journey to the cloud, or use our ReadyNow private cloud offering. They appeal to our enterprise base, while the Avaya Cloud Offering which has the RingCentral Video product bundled in is aimed at that IP Office install base that wants this all in a single application.”
Accordingly, Kozak stressed that while they had been offering Avaya IX to their SMB and midmarket customers before, they will now sell the Avaya Cloud Office with this dedicated video to this market, while continuing to sell Avaya Spaces and Avaya IX to the enterprise.
RingCentral Video will also power the new RingCentral Rooms video conference space product, which is currently in beta and is expected to be generally available in Q2, 2020.
