Charter Teams with RingCentral on UCaaS for SMBs, Enterprises

Broadband provider Charter Communications has tapped RingCentral as its exclusive UCaaS provider for a new offering.

The companies on Monday unveiled Spectrum Business Connect with RingCentral. They announced a similar offering for Spectrum Enterprise, which also brings together RingCentral’s MVP (message, voice, phone) solution with Spectrum internet and network solutions.

RingCentral’s Homayoun Razavi

“Combining Charter Communications’ high-speed broadband services with RingCentral’s cloud communications platform provides Charter’s millions of customers a fully optimized end-to-end solution to easily, securely and reliably manage their businesses communications,” RingCentral chief business development officer Homayoun Razavi said. “We are very excited about our new relationship with Charter Communications. Together, we can provide a variety of businesses across a number of sectors – including health care, hospitality and education – a truly hassle-free solution with one stop for implementation and onboarding, billing, and support.”

Customers can deploy the Spectrum Business Connect solution in more than 90% of Spectrum’s markets. The companies said Spectrum’s full 41-state footprint will get access to the offering in the upcoming months. On the other hand, the enterprise offering will go live nationally early in December.

Charter’s Danny Bowman

“Workplace expectations have transformed dramatically in recent years and we are meeting our customers’ needs as they shift and grow,” Charter chief mobile officer Danny Bowman said. “Spectrum’s new RingCentral solutions will enable our business clients of all sizes to adapt to today’s rapidly changing work environment, giving them the flexibility and remote capabilities they require.”

Charter’s other UCaaS partners include Cisco Webex.

Channel Expansion

RingCentral founder and CEO Vlad Shmunis teased the Charter partnership in the company’s third-quarter earnings call.

RingCentral’s Vlad Shmunis

“Charter is obviously one of the U.S.’ leading MSP cable service providers,” Shmunis said. We could not be happier or more proud with this. We hope there is more to come. Up until now, we have been quite successful, I would say uniquely successful, with global service providers.”

RingCentral partners with a number of service provider partners, including AT&T, Verizon, Vodafone and Telus. Shmunis said those efforts will continue.

He added that RingCentral works with more than 15,000 resellers. Moreover, partnerships with legacy vendors like Mitel and Avaya have helped RingCentral assemble a massive on-premises customer base that it is seeking to convert to the cloud.

“We will continue in addressing what is still the juiciest market to yet go through digital transformation, which is 400 million PBX seats that are still sitting there on-prem and with overall cloud market penetration in the 5% range, about 20 million,” he told analysts and investors.

RingCentral has also recently shed about 10% of its workforce, citing its desire to gain more “agility.”