RingCentral Global Office, Lumen's Cisco HCS Expand Globally

RingCentral Global Office and Lumen Technologies‘ Cisco Hosted Collaboration Solution (HCS) are going international.

RingCentral Global Office is a unified solution that includes team messaging, video meetings and a cloud phone system. It will be available in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America.

RingCentral also is expanding into several countries, including Estonia, Greece, Lithuania, Slovenia and South Africa.

RingCentral Global Office allows businesses to connect their mobile and distributed workforces across multiple nations. It does so with local phone numbers, PSTN access and other capabilities.

Catering to Distributed Workforces

Lisa Del Real is vice president of global partner programs at RingCentral.

RingCentral’s Lisa Del Real

“This expansion will allow our partners to cater to global customers with mobile, distributed workforces located across multiple countries,” she said.

Partners can offer RingCentral’s Global Office to customers looking to move their communications to the cloud, Del Real said.

Cloud communications continues to gain momentum globally, Del Real said. Companies of all sizes continue to transition their communications to the cloud. That’s to keep global teams and customers connected.

“With this expansion, customers can reap the benefits of cloud communications including reduced costs and higher flexibility, while meeting specific regulatory compliance, security and service level agreement (SLA) needs in each country that it operates,” she said.

This expansion will give RingCentral and its partners a competitive advantage when targeting customers with large, distributed workforces in multiple countries.

“For customers who have a presence in multiple countries, they have traditionally had the complex problem of managing multiple legacy phone systems and multiple carrier relationships,” Del Real said. “With RingCentral, they can eliminate that complexity by managing their entire communications system from a single global platform, while having the peace of mind that all specific regulatory compliance and security needs are being met for each individual country.”

RingCentral offers its services via its cloud-based RingCentral Global Connect Network.

Pandemic Impact

“The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the necessity of migration from on-premises legacy communications solutions to the cloud for many customers, on top of the already growing market,” Del Real said. “And this includes international and global customers.”

Businesses of all types and sizes need technology to communicate from anywhere, from any device across any mode, she said.

“This global expansion will allow our partners to cater to customers with global, distributed workforces that need to keep their employees and customers connected while they work from anywhere,” Del Real said.

Lumen Expanding Cisco HCS

Lumen has expanded its Cisco HCS to Europe, the Middle East, Asia and Pacific regions. It provides customers with simplified IP-based voice, video and messaging services.

This new cloud-based hosted UC solution allows customers dedicated use of the Cisco UC Manager (call manager) and Collaboration Services. Delivered by Lumen, Cisco HCS service includes the full Cisco user experience with several levels of redundancy.

Tera Sumner is senior manager of UC&C product management at Lumen.

Lumen Technologies’ Tera Sumner

“Lumen’s expansion will now showcase our ability on a global scale to offer services in several regions and countries,” she said. “The explosive growth in hosted telephony/collaboration domestically lead to an intense need in other regions.”

Cisco HCS has been available in North America since 2014.

“This offer brings Lumen into the ranks with other global providers such as BT, Orange, Tata, etc.,” Sumner said.

CenturyLink rebranded its enterprise division as Lumen Technologies last month.