By Wendy Harmon

Wendy Harmon

This year, the Channel Partners Conference and Expo celebrates 25 years, and here at RingCentral, we’re looking forward to getting back to what makes the channel so rewarding: building relationships, simplifying the partner-vendor relationship, and celebrating the camaraderie that comes with working in such a dynamic environment.

The theme for this silver anniversary of the industry’s largest independent event: “The best is yet to come.” And that could not be more true for RingCentral, our partners, and the channel as a whole.

Stronger than Ever

We are – finally, hopefully – emerging from the pandemic. And we’re doing so stronger than ever. Thanks to the foundation of Channel Harmony, we’re building relationships and making the connections that drive partner and customer success.

By eliminating all conflict with direct sales, and allowing our internal teams to work collaboratively with partners by ensuring full compensation for all involved, RingCentral simplifies the vendor-partner relationship to make it easy to win together. In its essence, that’s what Channel Harmony does. It frees us all up to do our best work for the customer.

Accelerated Innovation

As the world has evolved, so too have our solutions. At RingCentral, we’re building upon our Message, Video, Phone, and Contact Center foundations with the introduction of new webinar capabilities. Supporting large meetings up to 10,000 attendees, webinar is currently in beta and will be generally available this summer. Combined with AI innovations like meeting summaries, closed captions, and whiteboard, RingCentral is helping customers adapt to the realities of hybrid offices as a permanent model of how work gets done. And hybrid work is simply impossible with on-premise communications — it only works in the cloud.

The most pressing trend as we enter this new paradigm is undoubtedly the need to combine unified communications and contact center solutions. Integrating UC+CC leads to bigger deals for the partner and better solutions for the customer. When we talk about truly unified communications, CCaaS is an integral part of the equation — they are no longer separate platforms.

And vendors are certainly recognizing this, with a lot of fancy branding around their solutions. Whatever you want to call it is up to you. But the fact remains that, through our partnership with NICE CXone, only RingCentral combines two upper-right Leaders in the Gartner Magic Quadrants for UCaaS and CCaaS into one integrated solution.

Differentiated Partnerships

While the pandemic certainly accelerated cloud adoption, there is still more transformation to come. Given the changes customers have already had to navigate, it’s critical that vendors and partners make their path to the cloud as simple as possible.

One way RingCentral has done so is through its strategic partnerships with on-premise providers like Avaya, Atos, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, and now Mitel. We firmly believe that if there’s any way we can help our partners drive cloud adoption, we should pursue it. So these relationships are all about offering choice, so you can design a solution no matter your customer’s use case.

Has your client been using an Avaya on-premise system for years? We got you. Were they a Mitel customer looking to fully switch to the cloud? That works too. No matter their existing infrastructure or preferred pace of migration, we can help them make the transition to the cloud at their pace. Which means partners have more ways to earn and grow their business.

Time to Get Aggressive

The channel has two years of pent up energy and drive — it’s time to unleash it! For RingCentral, that means getting back to what made our partners and program so strong all along: unlocking collaborative potential through Channel Harmony, celebrating our relationships and successes with world-class, in-person events, and doing whatever we can to help you run your business your way and focus on what you do best.

We strive to be the easiest cloud communications vendor to work with, both for partners and customers. We know we have the best UC+CC product and Partner Program in the industry, and it’s time to show it to the world!

We’d love for you to join us as we help customers thrive in the new world of hybrid work. If you’re headed to Las Vegas, please visit booth #1215 to learn how RingCentral means simpler communications and simpler partnerships.

As the leader of RingCentral’s Global Partner Program initiatives, Wendy Harmon drives worldwide channel partner enablement and support to make it easy for partners to win more with RingCentral. Harmon holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of Colorado, Boulder. Prior to joining RingCentral, she served as Chief Operating Officer of Hubble by insightsoftware.com, where she led global on-premises and SaaS teams for a total of 14 years.