(Pictured above: (left to right) Derrell James, RingCentral SVP of global services and solutions; Praful Shah, chief strategy officer; Ryan Azus, EVP global sales and services; Zane Long, SVP of global channel sales (standing); Dave Sipes, COO; and Mitch Tarica, SVP of worldwide sales.)

RINGCENTRAL CONNECTCENTRAL — Before the start of this week’s RingCentral ConnectCentral 2018 in San Francisco, partners got a sneak peak of what’s next for the company and how they fit into that strategy.

Zane Long, RingCentral’s senior vice president of global channel sales, said this is the first time his company has had an event in which it could bring together a large group of partners in one location. During a VIP channel partner lunch, company executives fielded questions from partners about its recent acquisition of Dimelo, a cloud-based digital customer engagement platform, strengthening its marketing focus and its recent expansion into Australia and APAC.

“The questions that were asked today let us know that they’re invested and interested in where we’re going next,” he said. “The multiple questions about the acquisition of Dimelo proved that, and this is an important next step for RingCentral as we bring in companies like that to help serve our customers better.”

Last month, Long said hundreds of partners are coming to RingCentral every month looking to make the switch from on premises, to the cloud and UCaaS.

Mitch Tarica, RingCentral’s senior vice president of worldwide sales, said Dimelo’s customers are “thrilled” about the acquisition and are looking forward to seeing RingCentral’s plans for the company. And Dave Sipes, RingCentral’s chief operating officer, said Dimelo is focused mostly on Europe, so there’s a “great” opportunity to take it global.

Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral’s CEO, said his company is all about enterprise, and then flowing down to SMB. He also said Cisco, Avaya and Mitel are competing with RingCentral and are losing because they are unable to come in with a cloud-based replacement solution.

“We will grow in the direction the market takes us … and by no means are we complacent,” he said.

Paul Harrold, vice president of collaboration at PCM, said his company had to come up with a UCaaS offering and all of its expertise was in on-premises offerings, so “we wanted to partner with the best in the business and RingCentral has clearly defined themselves as a leader in this space.”

“One of the things we’re exploring is becoming a delivery partner for RingCentral,” he said. “We’re calling it an enhanced partnership where we can participate in the hardware sale and devices upfront; we use our collaboration solution architects to help design and implement the solution as well in conjunction with RingCentral. We want to continue to show ourselves as a value-add in the partnership here with RingCentral to get a little bit more of …

… the pie with this offering.”

AGC Networks is an international system integrator with a long history of traditional premises-based models in VoIP.

“We started to see an opportunity probably a year ago with as-a-service deliverables, so we chose RingCentral … because of their ability to execute globally, which is what we needed,” said Scott Davis, its senior vice president of sales and marketing.

Ben Swanson, RingCentral channel sales director, is heading up the APAC and Australia expansion. There’s a national broadband network rolling out across Australia, “and as that’s rolling out in certain territories, is actually causing the switching off of circuit-based technology … and customers are needing to make a buying decision,” he said.

“We launched into Australia in May … and we’ve got more than 30-odd partners signed up with a master agent there on the ground and we’re really taking the market quickly by hand, and there’s a huge opportunity here to really capitalize on that investment,” he said. “Australia is a new market for RingCentral and it’s new partners for us overall. We’re starting in Sydney first, one of the largest economic zones there … and we’ve just expanded into Melbourne. We’re recruiting, enabling and supporting partners throughout the same Channel Harmony model that we have here in the United States. It’s proven to be very successful.”

Reliance Communications is an Australia-based telecom equipment supplier, and recently because partnering with RingCentral.

“We’ve been playing with it a little bit, and cautious to see what people are doing, and if they’ll still be here in three months, which they are, and to see where it’s embraced and to see what our clients think of it, and they think the world of it, and our own staff embraced it as well,” said George Minucos, Reliance’s managing director. “The cloud’s being embraced in Australia; the last year or two it’s starting to happen. Customers feel like that’s what they should be doing, which is a good thing.”