With a 15 year track record in cloud communications service provision, RingCentral are no strangers to transformational shifts in the communications technology landscape. Expanding at almost double the rate off their nearest competitor), the company is championing innovation for the workplace, and continually evolving its product suite to meet business needs. And it’s those business needs which are driving new partnerships – such as that just announced with value-added technology distributor Westcon.
I caught up with RingCentral’s MD of EMEA, Sahil Rekhi, to explore this shift, and the impact of the new partnership:
“Westcon are joining forces with RingCentral as a key channel partner, and they will be working as a master distribution agent – initially in the UK and Ireland – to bring the RingCentral service portfolio to their clients”
“The richness of the whole portfolio brings together UC and CS and collaboration services into a single unified market experience for end customers. And we’re bringing a really rapid pace of innovation to that market, as these products are evolving fast with 5 maybe 6 major releases every year – driving additional value to the end customer, which for 99% of the time is at no extra charge”.
Harmonious partnership
RingCentral have pioneered a truly partnership approach with their distribution agents through their Channel Harmony programme, which actively collaborates with them both to make the sale and to monetise it throughout the life of the contract. With over 9,000 partners globally it creates an unusually close relationship, which works for providers, resellers and users alike.
As Rekhi explains, “Typically, you find a reseller signing up to a service, then all the sales marketing activities are done by that partner or reseller themselves. RingCentral works in a slightly different way: we bring on Westcon as a master distribution agent, we then spend a lot of time and resources in driving channel-based marketing activities and enablement for them and their partners within their ecosystem. What we are requesting them to do is actually register business opportunities and introduce us to their new customer acquisitions that they’re looking to make. We then have a direct sales team who interact with the end customer to close the service contracts.”
Everything the customer needs
Being able to offer clients a complete solution makes it easy for the partnership model to meet every arising need for internal and external communications.
“You don’t need to integrate with or purchase additional services, it’s all available within RingCentral, and our API is available for any bespoke extensions – we have over 1,500 plug-and-play apps ready on our app store to add even more functionality”
The transition to UCaaS is fundamental to the shifts that Rekhi is seeing in the present market:
“Our direct sales team directly interact with the end customer, delivering a consumption model where it’s all packaged into a single simplified per-user per-month contract, pricing is easier for consumption-based billing for the end customers”.
Westcon’s expertise in UCaaS onboarding combines perfectly with the RingCentral portfolio of services to deliver the flexible and scalable solutions their customers are requesting, from SME to enterprise.
As Rekhi concludes, “the market dynamics are changing. And I think that the way people are working today – more global organisations, more mobility enabled employees with flexible working practices, organisations, small and large across the spectrum are asking their partners [for greater flexibility] – most if not all, companies have already made a transition to cloud for some of their services within the IP stack.”
The new partnership will enable responsive and bespoke service provision to complete the transition to truly unified internal and external communications, for every customer.
