RingCentral, PCM Team Up for Enterprise Cloud Communications

CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — RingCentral has entered a partnership with PCM to bring cloud communications solutions to enterprises across North America and the United Kingdom.

RingCentral’s Zane Long (left) and PCM’s Paul Harrold at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas.

The announcement was made during this week’s Channel Partners Conference and Expo. As a multivendor provider of technology solutions, PCM works with: small, medium and enterprise businesses; state, local and federal governments; and educational institutions across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.

Paul Harrold, PCM’s vice president of collaboration practice, tells Channel Partners that RingCentral is an important direct UCaaS partner that his company has today.

“They’re a leader in the space,” he said. “We have over 1,000 sellers in our organization and it’s my job … to make sure that we vet it out and do our due diligence on our partners, and they clearly made it easy for us.”

RingCentral works with distributors, master agents, channel partners and carrier partners to deliver cloud communications solutions to businesses globally.

Zane Long, RingCentral’s senior vice president of global channel sales, said PCM is the kind of partner his company looks for.

“This is an entirely different type of partner that we’re working with, and working with PCM and the ability for us to work together to take advantage of what’s happening in the UCaaS market, we’re still very much in those low innings of baseball,” he said. “So we have a lot of room to grow together and the way that we’re going to execute on that, the plans are in place and we’re just really, really excited about this partnership.”

In fourth-quarter 2018, RingCentral’s channel grew 80 year over year and accounted for about $180 million in revenue, Long said.

“That’s an extraordinary achievement, but we would not have that kind of revenue generation without partner contribution,” he said. “So with this partner program and partners like PCM, there’s no way that RingCentral would be looking at those kinds of revenues if it weren’t for the relationships and the partners.”

PCM includes a Microsoft practice, a security practice, a hybrid data center practice and a collaboration practice.

“We’ve got a massive customer base today, and as we’re looking at providing solutions for our customers, it’s very easy to partner with RingCentral to bring them in to look at how do we solve the business challenges that we have today using their technologies and their solutions,” Harrold said. “It’s a great partnership because we sell so many different things at PCM, we can be looking at things here, here and here, and then we can pass on these UCaaS opportunities and know that we’re putting that partnership in good hands with our customer base.”

PCM has “massive growth goals,” he said.

“We’re a new practice here and my leaders are expecting us to grow significantly,” Harrold said. “This UCaaS annuity space is a big area for us with our customer base and we think that we can do a significant amount of growth this year.”