Verizon Business CEO: ‘The work-from-anywhere model will continue to be a major factor for businesses’
Verizon Business and RingCentral are teaming up to deliver a co-branded, cloud-based enterprise communication service that will integrate team messaging, video meetings and a cloud phone system. According to Verizon, this will add to its unified communications and collaboration (UCC) portfolio and compliment some of its existing enterprise services and offerings.
The partnership will pair Verizon’s connectivity solutions, as well as the speed and low latency from its 5G network, with RingCentral’s unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solution, which includes RingCentral’s carrier-grade messaging, video, and phone platform. The result, the partners say, will be a flexible, easy-to-use and secure offering, suitable for enterprises of all sizes.
“At RingCentral, we truly believe this partnership creates additional value for our customers, and we are excited to innovate together with Verizon to deliver end-to-end digital transformation solutions that embed RingCentral’s Message, Video, Phone technology across the enterprise ecosystem,” said Anand Eswaran, president and chief operating officer at RingCentral. “As business communications including team messaging and video become critical in enabling people to work from anywhere, this partnership with Verizon helps us meet the ever-changing customer needs.”
Just a few weeks prior to the partnership announcement, RingCentral revealed new video and messaging features, including the ability to manage video meetings in any conference room using a RingCentral mobile app, as well as the ability to create personal folders so users can group conversations.
For Verizon, the partnership with RingCentral represents a key development in its network-as-a-service (NaaS), which includes 5G, mobile edge computing, SD-WAN and security, and according to the carrier’s Group VP of Sales Massimo Peselli, has three basic elements or layers: Pure connectivity, the technology and management.
As Peselli explained previously to RCR Wireless News, businesses are becoming “extensively” more interested in software-as-a-service more generally as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic because there is a need to bring applications to those employees working at home. Put simply, things in the cloud are more easily accessible when not in the office.
Tami Erwin, CEO at Verizon Business, also pointed to the pandemic as a driver behind the need for cloud-based enterprise solution: “The work-from-anywhere model will continue to be a major factor for businesses, and we’ve seen the importance of cloud communications growing stronger for enterprises in the past year. Through this partnership, we’re leveraging our best-in-class network with RingCentral’s expertise in cloud collaboration to deliver game-changing cloud-based solutions that meet the needs of enterprises today and future proof how they operate moving forward.”
Denise Lund, research director, Unified Communications and Telecom at IDC commented that Verizon and RingCentral “are coming together at the right time for enterprises.”
“Enterprises have emerged from 2020 planning to spend more on Unified Communications services. Solutions that will resonate will bring scale and innovations that come with being in the cloud together with expertise in enterprise-grade professional services, networks, and security,” Lund added.
