RingCentral, with New Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise Pact, Poised to Be the 'Leading UCaaS Provider'

RingCentral has done it again, this time with Alcatel-Lucent.

RingCentral and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise (ALE) have entered a multiyear partnership. It’s centered on a new co-branded cloud offering, Rainbow Office powered by RingCentral. The offering is an exclusive for ALE.

Rainbow Office powered by RingCentral will be available in the first quarter of 2021. It allows companies to meet their business needs with public UCaaS.

RingCentral and Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise will jointly develop programs around the new offering.

3rd Strategic Partnership

This is the third strategic partnership for RingCentral. Last month, RingCentral and Atos expanded their partnership with the launch of another co-branded UCaaS offer, Unify Office (UO) by RingCentral.

And last fall, RingCentral teamed with Avaya to roll out Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral. It’s been available to Avaya partners in the U.S. for more than four months. It is also available in Australia, Canada and the U.K

Raul Castanon is senior analyst of workforce collaboration for 451 Research/S&P Global Market Intelligence.

451 Research’s Raul Castanon

“RingCentral experienced significant year-over-year growth in the past five years,” he said. “Its partnership with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise – together with previously announced agreements with Atos and Avaya – should allow it to further accelerate is growth. This should allow RingCentral to leap ahead of its competition to become the leading UCaaS provider in the next two years.”

RingCentral has a strong record in product innovation, Castanon said. The partnerships show that it’s also “an innovative company when it comes to business development,” he said.

“The two go hand in hand,” he said. “Its partnership strategy is only possible because of the scalability, features and integration capabilities that the RingCentral platform provides. This has proven successful for its partnership with AT&T. Its approach is quite innovative and combines the benefits of an aggressive M&A expansion without the complexity that the integration of large corporations typically entails.”

Financial Commitment

Under the commercial agreement, both companies will contribute resources toward development, and sales and marketing of Rainbow Office powered by RingCentral. RingCentral will pay Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise $100 million for exclusive access, a minimum seat commitment and future commissions.

Zane Long is RingCentral’s senior vice president of global partner sales.

“This partnership provides a different and complementary customer base relative to our other strategic partners,” he said. “Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s footprint is very complementary to RingCentral, with minimal overlap so for our partners, this announcement further demonstrates RingCentral’s industry leadership and expansion in the UCaaS market.”

Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise is experiencing strong demand for UCaaS offerings, Long said.

“In addition, the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the necessity of migration from on-premise legacy communications solutions to the cloud for many customers, on top of the already growing market,” he said. “For RingCentral, Rainbow Office powered by RingCentral brings our industry-leading UCaaS solution to Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s customer base of 40 million users, of which 70% are in Europe, helping us to further expand our reach.”

Rainbow Office powered by RingCentral will improve Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise’s cloud portfolio. It will allow customers to accelerate their digital transformation with public UCaaS.

“For our customers and partners, this strategic partnership enables us to offer them a wider choice of technology-leading cloud solutions, to comprehensively cover their business needs,” said Jack Chen, CEO of Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise. “This partnership will also enable Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise to accelerate the development and transformation of our cloud business to become the No. 1 player in cloud solutions in Europe and beyond focusing on vertical solutions and services to make everything connect. It will bring significant opportunities for our well-established business partner ecosystem and strong values for our customers.”