CoreDial Ready to Challenge RingCentral, 8x8, Vonage in UC

**Editor’s Note: Read our list of 20 top UCaaS providers offering products and services via channel partners.**

CHANNEL PARTNERS CONFERENCE & EXPO — CoreDial (booth #5044) is ready to take on the “big boys” in UC like RingCentral, Vonage and 8×8, and contact-center leaders such as inContact and Five9, while distancing itself from “tiny, little copycats basically overnight.”

That’s according to CoreDial CEO Alan Rihm, who says this is the year his company will complete the transformation into “a modern version of ourselves.”

CoreDial’s Alan Rihm

“We’ll be 13 years into this by July and we have about 300,000 seat licenses and add anywhere from 5,000-6,000 seats a month,” he said. “We’ve got over 23,000-24,000 businesses on the platform and we’ve got over 800 channel partners, so this is absolutely the year that we come out with the new features and functions that we’ve been working on over the last two or three years and deliver that value to our channel and their customers.”

In February, CoreDial announced it had acquired CCaaS provider Voice4Net. Its WebRTC-based contact-center offerings include cloud, premises or hybrid infrastructures; two-way text messaging via the contact center; interactive voice response (IVR); routing and automation; and a customizable, widget-based interface.

CoreDial is launching its contact-center offering to the channel this week at the Channel Partners Conference & Expo in Las Vegas.

“We’re actually already spinning up our first set of customers,” Rihm said. “There was so much pent-up demand that we fielded some early calls and took some deals, and the pipeline is really strong. So we’re very encouraged that this is going to be a big pipeline for us. Now (partners) can put more business through us, they can do bigger deals, they can sell more more vertical applications. So if a customer not only needs hosted voice and hosted PBX, and SIP trunking, but contact center, they’ve got it.”

CoreDial also is launching its own CoreNexa branded offering to partners. Previously, the company offered a white label-only solution. Partners now have the option to deliver either CoreNexa or their own branded offering.

“While we will continue supporting white-labeling and private labeling, and we’re not pushing this on anyone, it will be an opportunity for them to co-brand … to say I’m part of the CoreNexa platform, it has over 300,000 seats in 24,000 businesses, and so on,” Rihm said. “And they’ve been asking for it.”

And CoreDial also will be unveiling its new UC platform – with WebRTC, and iOS and Android mobility – in the coming weeks.

“It builds upon the foundation we built over the first 10-plus years, which is a really solid platform for the channel, a service delivery platform,” Rihm said. “And now we basically have …

… user interfaces and usefulness for everybody in a company, be it sales, marketing, support, engineering or administration with the UC capabilities. We can serve the modern office where there’s a lot of mobile workers, they might have multiple offices all over the place, they might be leveraging an SD-WAN solution or maybe not, so this basically enables them to run their business on a computer and a mobile phone with almost limitless scalability and tremendous usefulness across the enterprise.”

CoreDial’s sweet-spot end customer is 25 seats on up to 500-plus seats, he said.

“We obviously have bigger and we have smaller, and what we know we’re really good at is our channel is really good at selling, delivering, managing and invoicing for services to the SMB and SME,” Rihm said. “For the first 12-and-a-half years we’ve had a really strong channel platform and we believe it’s the best business model for the channel. And now that we’ve got a robust contact-center solution, and very soon everything we need from a UC and mobile environment, we now have everything that everybody else has, and a better platform and business model.”