Undoubtedly the biggest story of the week is the revelation that Zoom is suing RingCentral for, on the surface, breaching its copyright and trademark. But it’s more complicated than that when you dig a little deeper.
I think most people in the industry will have expected the relationship between the two to weaken somewhat when RingCentral launched its own video offering last year – after years of powering its previous offering with Zoom’s technology.
Frustratingly, it’s not quite clear exactly what Zoom’s grievance is because the court filing is heavily redacted. Perhaps it’s as simple as “they launched their own product which violates our agreement”, but the wording around the redacted parts makes the situation feel more insidious than that. Zoom explicitly states that RingCentral is misleading the public and even shareholders.
What is clear is that Zoom no longer wants RingCentral selling RingCentral Meetings (which is built on Zoom technology).
The story has moved at pace this week with various statements being released. Late on Thursday (UK time), RingCentral announced that it had been awarded an injunction against Zoom allowing it to continue selling RingCentral Meetings. RingCentral had earlier implied that Zoom was stopping customers from using the Meetings, and said it wants to keep selling the Meetings to give customers more choice. Behind the scenes, though, it is in the process of moving people from Meetings to its own offering.
Zoom’s latest statement said that the injunction was ordered by the judge before it could respond, adding that the matter is being heard by a judge next Thursday. Watch this space!
Elsewhere, Teams has continued to dominate the headlines following Ignite but not always for the right reasons.
An outage ravaged Microsoft 365 on Monday, taking down Teams globally (for some users) in the process.
Microsoft later said that the issue had been caused by an authentication update to Azure Active Directory, which is used across the ecosystem. It was a timely reminder of how reliant we have become on UC and collaboration platforms.
We’re continuing to up our UC&C channel game at UC Today (shameless newsletter plug here), so the launch of Workplace’s new partner programme is nice timing. I was surprised to see that 50 per cent of new business brought in by the Facebook-owned platform comes through partners.
By coincidence, I already had a meeting scheduled with Workplace’s EMEA boss, Nazir Ul-Ghani for this week and he said he expects that 50 per cent to grow as the platform’s adoption continues. Keep an eye out for that interview next week!
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