RingCentral Hires Avaya, ShoreTel Vets, Debuts New Room Conferencing Service

**Editor’s Note: Click here for our recently compiled list of new products and services or here to see which channel people were on the move in May.**

RingCentral is targeting enterprise growth by launching new room video-conferencing services, expanding into new countries and hiring veteran industry talent.

RingCentral Rooms is a cloud-based video conferencing service aimed at taking on legacy hardware competitors like Cisco. It is compatible with off-the-shelf room cameras and is used with a visual app on an iPad. RingCentral Room Connector, available in July, enables any legacy room conferencing system to connect to other RingCentral Rooms or RingCentral Meetings participants on desktop or mobile devices.

Zane Long, the company’s vice president of channel sales, tells Channel Partners that RingCentral Rooms will disrupt the market.

“An important tool for enterprises, our partners have been keen to identify more room conference solutions to weave into their portfolio of offerings for enterprise customers,” he said. “We’re seeing more and more companies shift away from legacy system hardware to cloud solutions for flexibility, mobility and overall productivity — and our partners are telling us the same thing. We’re bringing partners a scalable, cost-effective software application solution they sell and help deploy, across any-size room, without sacrificing enterprise-grade quality.”

Partners face the same barriers as enterprise customers looking to purchase a legacy telepresence-type system, Long said.{ad}

“The systems of the past (the Cisco, Polycom, Lifesizes of the world) are complex, difficult to use and costly,” he said. “Because of this, Frost & Sullivan has pegged room video-conferencing market penetration at less than 10 percent. With the recognized momentum of cloud technologies among enterprise customers and channel partners alike, room video conferencing represents a next frontier for disruption.”

Also, RingCentral is expanding Global Office into 12 additional countries, including Denmark, Finland, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia and Sweden — available today; and Austria, Belgium, Italy, Norway, Portugal, and Taiwan — available in July. Global Office is a UCaaS platform for multinational businesses.

“RingCentral’s global expansion into additional countries will broaden the scale at which our partners are selling to customers, in particular those multinational enterprises with distributed workforces,” Long said. “This opportunity will result in a larger potential user base and expanded geographic service coverage by partnering with customers on a global scale to increase the overall lifetime value of an account, which is a win-win for RingCentral partners.”

And finally, as part of its continued enterprise expansion, RingCentral has brought on new hires. Carson Hostetter, formerly Avaya’s vice president of sales, joins RingCentral as vice president of enterprise sales. David Marler, formerly in leadership positions at ShoreTel and CA Technologies, joins RingCentral as vice president of customer success, and Chuck Emmette, also a former Avaya vice president, joins as head of professional services.

“While the cloud is transforming business communications, the journey to the cloud requires thoughtful change management for enterprise customers,” said David Sipes, RingCentral’s chief revenue officer. “We are investing deeply in every touch-point of the customer journey, from sales to customer deployment and ongoing customer success. Our goal is to be a trusted partner every step in that journey so enterprises fully benefit from the power of our cloud platform.”