Highlights:
- GSP accelerates large service providers’ transition to the cloud
- Service Providers partner with dedicated product and marketing experts on product roadmaps, messaging, sales enablement, and go-to-market plans.
Read any analyst’s report on RingCentral, and you’ll see a theme develop: strong partnerships. The relationships we’ve been fortunate enough to build with global providers like Vodafone, AT&T, Verizon and Deutsche Telekom set us apart. And we keep winning more. How? Why? What does that even mean? We got deep under the hood with the RingCentral Partner Product team to find out what it takes to partner with the heavy hitters, and what it is about RingCentral that makes these partnerships so numerous and successful.
Setting the stage
Dag Peak, VP of Partner Product
RingCentral’s expertise in delivering market leading Message, Video and Phone is certainly well known. But the same can be said of our competitors. Sure, someone can gain a temporary edge in technology, but rarely is it one that lasts very long. Everyone’s innovating, and doing it quickly. So what is it, exactly, that makes RingCentral the call for so many leading organizations? For Vice President of Partner Product, Dag Peak, it starts with speed.
“Why would somebody like AT&T, who has been a telephone company forever, turn to a relatively small company like RingCentral, to get a UCaaS offer? Because these big Service Providers move super, super slow. And we are living in a world where the pace of innovation and the ability to deliver really interesting services that can help businesses be more productive in their world is super important. Compared to a major service provider like that, companies like RingCentral, Zoom or Cisco move at lightspeed from an innovation perspective. So when you combine our Service Provider friendly platform with our pace of innovation, well, that’s why they to come to us.”
Better together
Giving an AT&T or a Telstra access to innovative technology is great…for them. But that’s not a partnership, that’s a sale. According to Dag, there’s more to the story.
“Service providers want the innovative offers we have. But they also bring a lot to the table, too. They bring a huge sales force, they bring a massively valuable brand, they bring a giant network, they bring high speed internet access, and all kinds of other services — security and data center and more. So when you bring those two things together: RingCentral’s offers with their selling channels, brand, customer relationships, and mobile network, there really are some significant synergies that we both get to enjoy. I call it “Better Together” because I really believe that’s what occurs in these partnerships we build.”
The integration situation
We said it before and we’ll say it again – any technological edge in our industry is fleeting. Everyone’s very, very good. So the competition rarely hinges on who’s got the best product. It can come down to relationships. Strength of brand. And of course, price. But what really matters in any partnership is how that partnership works day to day. Dag thinks RingCentral’s ability to integrate our products into providers’ ecosystems; to make them easy to price, sell and run, gives us an edge that’s tough to beat.
“Take MVP (Message. Video. Phone.) for example. It’s a great product. But Cisco and Zoom have great products, too. If the decision was only about MVP, that wouldn’t be good enough. It’s the ability to efficiently consume it that Service Providers are really, really impressed with RingCentral. We’re putting a ton of energy into our integration framework that we call Mercury: that’s everything (and I do mean “everything”) that goes into the Service Provider actually getting and selling our product. For example, Mercury is how the Service Provider can integrate RingCentral MVP into their own selling framework, so that selling MVP is as easy as selling any of their own in-house offers. Mercury also integrates MVP with the SP’s reporting and monitoring and billing systems so that the SP can efficiently support the service after it has been delivered. All of those things need to be stitched together between us and the Service Provider, and that’s something we really pride ourselves on doing well. It’s about making life easier for our partners, so they can make life easier for our shared end customers.”
Agility skills
RingCentral also has the ability to deliver bespoke solutions to the world’s largest SPs, at a pace that allows them to delight their customers’ demands with unprecedented agility. And the key to that is an experienced, expert team.
“I need Product Managers who are familiar with the Service Provider space,” says Dag. “You have to understand all the different internal groups that make up every service provider, and how to navigate through them. It takes an appreciation for the complexity of dealing with and integrating with a service provider—their particular ways of operating, their IT systems, their selling systems, their target segmentation, where they are geographically. So somebody who’s worked closely with Service Provider engineering, product and operations teams is really valuable to us.”
Everyone wins
Ultimately, partnerships are about helping both sides win. For Dag, RingCentral’s approach is tailor-made for precisely that.
“In these partnerships with the SPs, it’s really a situation where everyone wins. The SP gets a market leading UCaaS offer and the powerful Mercury integration framework. RingCentral gets access to end customers and markets that it otherwise would have a difficult time to attack. And the end customer gets MVP provided by the SP brand that they know and trust. That’s a great partnership. And that’s how you actually enable human connection. And that’s what we’re here to do, right?
#HelloToRingCentral
Originally published Sep 14, 2021, updated Sep 23, 2021
