Highlights:
- A large part of RingCentral’s growth and success comes from our strategic partnerships with enterprise telecom providers.
- Our biggest partners: Avaya, Atos, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, and Mitel (added in November 2021).
- Here’s how our strategic partnerships work, and why it’s a win-win formula for companies and customers alike.
Amazing innovations happen when great minds come together. So what happens when two great companies come together?
Since our inception, we strived to make a name for RingCentral as an innovative, reliable provider of communications solutions. And in many ways, we’ve succeeded, reaching our $1 billion milestone in 2020.
But we can’t take all the credit for our success. Our strategic partners play a huge part in our ability to deliver leading-edge unified communications and help move companies to the cloud. Here’s how that works.
What are strategic partnerships?
Whether it’s a celebrity footwear collaboration or Starbucks opening outlets inside grocery stores, there are countless examples of successful strategic partnerships in the business world.
A formal business agreement between two separate corporate entities (each of which usually occupies a different part of the market or performs a different function), strategic partnerships provide a several key benefits:
- They help businesses tap into new markets, customers and opportunities
- They help businesses come together to solve problems each organization may not be able to solve on its own
- They expand on the benefits, assets, or capabilities of a single business, creating greater value for customers
In other words, strategic partnerships have the potential to create more win-win situations for businesses and end-users alike.
Win-win is precisely how we’d describe our strategic RingCentral partnerships with leading hardware and PBX providers. Together, we do an even better job delivering great experiences and seamless communications solutions for our channel partners and customers.
Who are RingCentral’s strategic partners?
Together with these top on-premise PBX providers, we’re guiding businesses to the cloud by building upon our partners’ installed base:
With more than 100 million users and 4,700 partners in more than 180 countries, Avaya has one of the world’s largest installed bases of on-premises Unified Communications seats.
As Avaya’s exclusive Unified Communications provider, we’re paving the way to the cloud for Avaya’s customers, allowing them to keep existing investments and reducing the timelines and complexity of migration.
Joint solution: Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral
As a global leader in digital transformation, Atos is an end-to-end partner helping customers prepare for the future.
Joint solution: Unify Office by RingCentral
Leaders in purpose-built technology, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) delivers networking, communications, and cloud solutions that are tailored to meet specific industry needs.
Joint solution: Rainbow Office powered by RingCentral
Announced in November 2021, our partnership with Mitel provides a seamless path to cloud communications for Mitel’s massive global customer base.
As Mitel’s exclusive UCaaS provider, we’re providing Mitel customers with a mobile-first, cloud communications platform offering high reliability and security, rich functionality, and broad enterprise app integrations, while allowing organizations to continue to leverage their existing on-premises PBX capabilities.
Press Release: Mitel and RingCentral Partnership
Our philosophy: 1 + 1 = 3
It’s not just a cliché—sometimes the whole really does add up to more than its individual components. And when it comes to our strategic partnerships, that phrase has never been truer.
By combining the expertise of both parties into a partnership, we’re able to deliver greater value to our customers.
Joint solutions are built upon RingCentral infrastructure and tailored to each company’s needs. And with the Mitel partnership, customers have an accelerated and seamless migration path directly to RingCentral MVP.
How does it work? RingCentral builds the product using our own infrastructure as the base. These are then either customized to fit unique needs of our partners and released under co-branded, joint solutions such as Avaya Cloud Office.
Our partnerships build on the strengths of both parties and augment capabilities on both sides of the equation:
- With RingCentral, customers get the unmatched features and reliability that have made us a UCaaS leader for years running.
- Our partners are better equipped to support customers with a smooth transition to cloud-based communication tools—so it feels like an upgrade rather than a rip and replace.
But there’s an even bigger benefit: by teaming up with providers whose offerings complement our own, we’re all able to focus on what we do best. This allows us to continue to improve and innovate our offerings, while giving customers more robust end-to-end solutions to meet their communication and collaboration needs.
Why customers and channel partners win
Not only do our strategic partnerships provide leading UCaaS features and functionality, but together, we are helping organizations to more effectively meet the needs of the new age of work—and minimize disruptions along the way.
Together with our partners, we’re shrinking migration timelines and reducing the common hassles and complexities of digital transformation—all while enabling customers to continue using existing hardware and lean on trusted existing support relationships.
Our partnerships mean channel partners have a more complete portfolio of end-to-end solutions to offer customers, while allowing them to stay within their chosen hardware brands.
And selling UCaaS allows channel partners to shore up recurring revenue by deploying subscription-based cloud technology, rather than one-time hardware sales. This enables an easier path for channel partners to also begin their own business transformation.
For customers, the benefits are even more powerful: one stop for everything they need to provision their organizations with seamless, state-of-the-art communications.
Originally published Feb 07, 2022, updated Feb 08, 2022
