RingCentral's Unify Office Deal 'Echoes' Avaya Partnership

RingCentral and Atos have expanded their strategic partnership with the launch of a co-branded UCaaS offering, Unify Office (UO) by RingCentral.

Unify Office, offered through the Atos Unify channel program, will be the exclusive UCaaS offering for Atos’ base of more than 40 million users. It should be available starting Aug. 31.

Atos’ reseller community of more than 1,700 partners worldwide can add their own value.

Raul Castanon is senior analyst of workforce collaboration for 451 Research/S&P Global Market Intelligence. He said RingCentral has been “very skillful” with its partnership strategy.

451 Research’s Raul Castanon

“Its agreement with Atos could significantly boost its presence in the European market,” he said. “While there are some differences – mainly in terms of their user base – at a high level, its partnership with Atos echoes last year’s deal with Avaya.”

Avaya Deal Comparisons

Last fall, RingCentral teamed with Avaya to roll out Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral. Available to Avaya partners in the U.S. for more than three months, it’s also now available in Australia, Canada and the U.K.

“It’s worth noting that [RingCentral] has also established partnerships with AT&T in the United States, BT in the U.K. and Telus in Canada,” Castanon said. “This is not an overnight success story. RingCentral has been methodically laying the groundwork over several years by expanding its presence and support in Europe, expanding language support and preparing a joint migration path with its partners. This sets the stage for RingCentral to continue rapidly expanding its footprint and gain a significant share of the UCaaS market.”

Lisa Del Real is RingCentral’s vice president of global partner programs. She said Unify Office gives partners a seamless migration path from existing Atos Unify OpenScape offerings to a leading cloud platform. As a result, end customers can maintain existing partner relationships and easily migrate to the cloud.

RingCentral’s Lisa Del Real

“Each partnership contributes a complementary element to expanding our global market reach,” she said. “Atos is a leading system integrator with a strong UC user base in Europe, particularly Germany, while Avaya is the world’s largest on-premises UC installed base, especially strong in the United States. Together, both partnerships strengthen our ability to address the global TAM with our leading UCaaS solution.”

Unify Office further demonstrates that RingCentral is becoming a “platform of choice for leading UC incumbents looking to move their massive installed UC base to UCaaS,” Del Real said.

Big Opportunity for Atos

Unify Office allows Atos to maximize the global market opportunity in digital transformation. It does so by adding a cloud communications offering to its portfolio.

Atos will also become a Unify Office customer and start to deploy it for Atos UCC, the former Unify division, with plans to expand this across its 110,000 employees.

During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Atos has accelerated its relationship with RingCentral, which is certifying more than 90 Atos channel partners to sell Unify Office.

Atos will add value to RingCentral’s UCaaS offering through the compatibility of its Unify family of devices and service capabilities. In addition, Atos will provide fully integrated digital workplace offers with some of Atos’ biggest technology and alliance partners.

“This is a critical moment for workplace communications,” said Elie Girard, Atos’ CEO. “Organizations are returning to their offices in a new normal and require accelerated digital transformation of their workplace environment. With our unique heritage in unified communications, we’re excited about combining our knowledge with the market leader in UCaaS to start a new chapter for business communication solutions worldwide.”