RingCentral's Nuvola Partnership Emphasizes Global Ambition

Nuvola Distribution has struck an agreement with RingCentral. As a result, its U.K. channel partners can offer RingCentral solutions to businesses in Europe.

RingCentral offers cloud-based unified communications and collaboration solutions. The company, which is based in Belmont, California, started out catering to small and medium businesses here in the U.S. But, recently, the company, and many of its peers in the UC marketplace, have been working to win the businesses of large enterprises and expand globally.

Its partnership with master agent and software services consultancy Nuvola Distribution is part of its effort to do that. Interestingly, the U.K. company also offers its own hosted cloud solution. The Nuvem offering is based on Alcatel-Lucent OpenTouch technology.

But RingCentral is a leader in the unified communications as a service space. At least by Gartner’s account. The research company last month issued yet another UcaaS Magic Quadrant that puts RingCentral in the Leaders box. Others in the Leaders quadrant this time around including Verizon, BT, West, Orange Business Services, and 8x8. BroadSoft and Mitel are listed as Visionaries. Microsoft, Google, and AT&T are considered Challengers. And Star2Star, Masergy, and NTT Group are in the Niche Players box.

“RingCentral is the largest and fastest-growing pure-play cloud communications and collaboration provider, with 37 percent growth year-over-year of RingCentral Office annualized exit recurring software subscriptions based on Q2 2017 earnings results,” RingCentral says. “The company combines cloud PBX, team messaging and collaboration, and video and web conferencing in a single integrated platform for global delivery.”

UC analyst Jon Arnold said RingCentral, West, Mitel and Vonage have been trying to move upmarket for a while. They have to in order to grow, he added, so they talk a lot about how many enterprise customers they have and how they can scale. But outside North America, he added, their penetration is still in the low single digits.

Frank Stinson of IntelliCom Analytics added that the UCaaS providers may be talking more about going global because Microsoft’s strategy is clearly a global one. Microsoft has local service partners that can address the needs of global customers.

Edited by Mandi Nowitz