Zoom has been granted permission by the US Courts to block RingCentral Meetings for customers onboarded since 1 February.
The latest instalment in the ongoing battle sees the pendulum swing Zoom’s way, reversing a decision two weeks ago that had blocked it from pulling the plug on the product for new customers.
Zoom said in a statement: “We are pleased with this initial ruling in favour of Zoom and look forward to resolving this issue through the continuing legal process.
“We believe RingCentral is inappropriately using Zoom to attract new customers, only to then switch them over to its own inferior meetings product. This is unfair to customers, who deserve better.
“If RingCentral truly believes in their own meeting product, they should use it”
“We’ll continue to support legacy RingCentral Meeting customers until the end of our contract sunset period, but we are not enabling Zoom for RingCentral customers signed up after the sunset period began on 1 February 2021.
The court battle centres on a long-standing partnership that has seen RingCentral’s Meetings product powered by Zoom’s videoconferencing technology.
Earlier this month it was revealed that Zoom had last year informed RingCentral it would not be renewing the terms of its agreement which, it claims, means RingCentral cannot use Zoom’s name and brand as a selling point for the product.
RingCentral denies this and was awarded a temporary restraining order, which blocked Zoom from taking technological steps to hamper RingCentral’s ability to sell the product.
This restraining order has now been lifted, with Zoom now in a position to block customers who have purchased Meetings, as well as any customers onboarded in the future.
RingCentral said in a statement sent to UC Today: “The court has decided that it needs additional information before coming to a determination on the merits. This means that the legal process will continue.
“Since April 2020, as part of the RingCentral Office Message Video Phone (MVP) solution, we have been providing customers with a choice between our own video capability, RingCentral Video and RingCentral Meetings, powered by Zoom.
”We have led with RingCentral Video, and we are very happy with the customer adoption and momentum of RingCentral Video with most of our new customers choosing this option.
“We believe that our MVP platform provides our customers with the best communications solution and the market has clearly noticed the rapid customer adoption of our video solution. While nearly all existing customers are not affected by the court’s decision, we will continue with the legal case as we believe in giving customers choices. We have faith in the judicial process and are confident that we will prevail.”
