RingCentral has solidified its position in the cloud-based collaboration market. This has been largely driven by the expansion of its portfolio beyond its flagship chat service (Glip) to include conferencing, team collaboration, voice, and contact center capabilities. A separate but equally significant component has been the inking of partnerships with vendors ALE, Atos, Avaya, and Mitel and service providers such as AT&T, Telus, and Verizon. The recent introduction of
RingCentral Rise represents a new branch of RingCentral’s go-to-market strategy and signals a renewed commitment to the company’s network of service provider partners.
What is RingCentral Rise?
RingCentral ‘Rise’ is an open platform built on the RingCentral cloud that integrates with service providers’ infrastructure. ‘Rise’ is innovative in the way it brings together technology, managed services, and a channel program to create co-branded unified cloud communications that include team messaging, video meetings, cloud phone system, and contact center. Several major service providers around the world are already deploying Rise including AT&T Business (US), ecotel (Germany), MCM (Mexico), and TELUS (Canada).
‘Rise’ stands for Resources, Innovation, Systems, and Experiences:
- Resources. A team supporting marketing, sales, professional services, and post-sales. Includes dedicated provisioning, activation, and logistics support (launch management) as well as upsell and adoption opportunities, e-commerce strategies, and post-launch campaigns.
- Innovation. This entails the extension of RingCentral’s cloud platform across a service provider’s portfolio with open APIs.
- Systems. Service providers can integrate their systems with the RingCentral platform to provide an array of services and features to their customers.
- Experiences. This involves digitizing the customer journey to the cloud and spans marketing and pre-sales, go-to-market, and post-sales phases.
Rise enables service providers to create differentiated UCaaS offers that can help their customers move to the cloud. But Rise goes beyond UCaaS services; also being incorporated are technologies such as 5G, AI, mobile edge computing, Internet of Things (IoT) and security. In addition to the technology platform, RingCentral is offering a go-to-market program including a service provider portal, a channel harmony program, and a dedicated team that helps market Rise to service providers (among other responsibilities).
Bottom line, partnerships are a key piece of RingCentral’s go-to-market strategy and Rise has become central to elevating those relationships to a new level. Rise marks an evolution of RingCentral’s existing platform into a global service provider platform that streamlines the process for them to work with RingCentral. But Rise goes beyond just providing a platform. It is a formalized program, ambitious in scope, that delivers an ecosystem of value-added services. Its benefit to service providers is noteworthy.
