Following RingCentral’s announcement of its global partner program, dubbed ‘Reach’, the company has added five Australian partners into its diamond and gold tiers.
The company’s regional vice president partner sales, Ben Swanson, sat down with CRN Australia to share some insights into how the program can benefit ANZ partners.
“Partners are critical to our success globally, but never more so than here in Australia."
"It's now five years since we started on the ground here in Australia, and we've had continued success year over year with our partners.”
“This program, being global in nature, stack ranks all of our partners based on their performance from the year in 2022, and provides partners with a set of tools and resources as they progress through the cycle of the different tiers,” Swanson said.
He highlighted the three tiers of the program which include registered, gold and diamond.
“Every single partner gets access under the registered program, to a dedicated channel manager, access to a world class partner portal, as well as access to all the channel marketing resources and campaigns that are available to them,” he said.
Swanson announced that the Diamond Partners include Melbourne-based MSP Cube Networks and Adelaide-based telco provider TelcoDataCloud.
He said that, as Diamond Partners, they will “get access to some executive sponsorship and discounted certified delivery Partner Program, which is where they install and support our customers through our certified program.”
Swanson also named three gold partners which included Sydney-headquartered cloud contact centre NativUC, Sydney-based cloud specialist Captivo, and telco consultancy Ground2Cloud.
“RingCentral Reach Gold partners truly drive change and make an impact for customers,” Swanson said.
“They get access to discounted RingCentral MVP service, our unified communications (UC) capabilities, access to our partner Advisory Council which is an offsite event where we get all of our top partners in to talk about how we structure our program now and in the future, as well as access to customised training as well,” he said.
As one of RingCentral’s first Australian partners in 2018, Ground2Cloud director Carl Gough commented on the achievement.
“We are very proud of the recognition of our achievements by RingCentral."
"The success we have had with RingCentral and the revenue Ground2Cloud has generated through our partnership has allowed us to bootstrap our social enterprise startup meetmagic,” which Gough said had raised $1.5 million for charities.
Meetmagic advisory board member Andrew Matuszczak said "RingCentral is a one-stop shop. For organisations with a mix of collaboration platforms.
RingCentral brings it all together providing integration and interconnectivity at a very commercial offering with a highly skilled local and international team.”
Swanson said, “Ground2Cloud is a little different to most RingCentral partners, because of the broader social impact it has been making through its subsidiary business.
We’re happy to see our joint success making such a difference and contributing to a truly innovative startup business, and we look forward to continuing to work together across both Ground2Cloud and meetmagic enterprises.”
Swanson shared that the UC market in Australia is “roughly $1 billion dollars” and that unified communications represents “somewhere between 10 and 20 per cent, penetration of UCaaS.”
He also discussed trends he has seen within cloud-based communications, including the trend of customers desiring an integrated UC and contact centre (CC) platform together from a single provider.
“Customers are asking for an integrated UC and CC as a service model."
"So, looking at purchasing from one vendor, or one provider, both their UC capabilities, which is message, video and phone, as well as their contact centre and all the application integration together.”
“We're seeing a strong application ecosystem arise across all the many different variations of cloud applications in there in the marketplace."
"Whether it be a Microsoft, Salesforce, Zendesk, or a ticketing system, all those different flavours of cloud-based applications need a single click, no code integration to be able to work in a single environment.”
Swanson described three main types of RingCentral partners which included born in the cloud, MSPs and traditional voice resellers and contact centres.
When it comes to the evolving hybrid work story, Swanson said “we're seeing a lot of technology being independent of location and independent of device.”
RingCentral uses assisted AI to remove background noise and help natural conversation flow without impacting other participants.
Swanson said another major trend RingCentral is capitalising on is the growth of Microsoft Teams.
RingCentral is helping businesses to integrate their phone systems inside Teams, for both external and internal conversations.
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