RingCentral Answers Call for Office 365 Integration

Cloud business communications provider RingCentral is expanding its relationship with Microsoft (MSFT) to integrate its RingCentral Office offering with Office 365, creating a total work environment from one interface.

“There is tremendous growth in the marketplace, with 46 million paying users of Office 365,” noted Richard Borenstein, senior vice president of Business Development at RingCentral during an interview at Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2015. “This is a big step for customers to have seamless integration between their communications and their productivity suite.”

The integration will offer users all the capabilities of the RingCentral Office cloud-based service, including calling, SMS text messages, conferencing and web-meeting, from within the Office 365 user interface. What’s more, users can click to call any phone number—both internal and external—from within any of the Office 365 applications, and contacts are automatically combined between Outlook and RingCentral Office.

“There are massive constituents of people using their preferred product, and now, instead of having to toggle between point to point solutions, it’s all in one place,” Borenstein said. “Microsoft is trying to bring in best-of-breed partners to have comprehensive offerings, which is different from what they used to do. Now they want to bring to users what (users) want to use.”

Borenstein noted that RingCentral is also working to integrate the collaboration capabilities the company acquired with its recent purchase of Glip.

“We will be first business communications provider with collaboration capability, extending our leadership in the marketplace by understanding collaboration is something customers want to use,” he said.

The added features, which will be available to RingCentral users at no added cost, will enable users to find documents, build teams and find communications in a certain thread, among other processes. RingCentral plans to integrate Glip into its core offerings by Q4, Borenstein said.

RingCentral is one of a handful of companies taking part in WPC15 and showing its love for Microsoft’s technology. Microsoft, in turn, showed its love for the channel, announcing, among other things, an expansion of its Cloud Solution Provider program.