Retaining its top spot in the Gartner’ UCaaS Magic Quadrant for 2021, RingCentral -leading provider of business cloud communications, continues its globe trot, raining announcements and boosting its rise in the industry. Following the recent deals with Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Avaya, Atos and Vodafone; the big announcement this week is its deal with Mitel, global market leader in business communications and becoming its exclusive UCaaS partner. Perceived by industry leaders as a great strategic move, the deal saw a significant impact on the market with RingCentral’s shares trading high after the announcement.
What’s the deal?
RingCentral is to provide Mitel’s global customer base with a seamless migration path to RingCentral’s Message Video Phone™ (MVP®) cloud communications platform. For the unfamiliar, RingCentral’s MVP® is a complete cloud phone system that integrates message, video, and phone in one place.
With 70 million users in 100 countries; Mitel is an industry leader providing business connections to a wide range of businesses across the globe with the biggest reach in North America and the UK. Through this partnership, RingCentral MVP is made available to this huge on-premises client base via CloudLink, an innovative cloud platform. For Mitel, this is a great step towards the headway it has been making in Cloud based business communication since the last 2 years.
Tarun Loomba, President and Chief Executive Officer at Mitel. “The unique depth of this partnership furthers our strategy of delivering world-class communications to our customers and providing them a clear and flexible path for the future.” Mitel will continue to support customers on its MiCloud Connect platform and, working with RingCentral, will provide a seamless path to RingCentral’s best-in-class cloud-based MVP for all its customers. Mitel’s own MiCloud Connect is recognized and used globally, but RingCentral’s product quality and features make it a clear win-win.
“We are bringing together the best of Mitel and RingCentral to give customers the right communications and collaboration solutions for their needs,” said Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral’s founder, chairman and chief executive officer. “Given our maniacal customer-centric focus, we’re delighted to now be able to offer customers a flexible and differentiated digital transformation path.” Product will continue to be branded RingCentral MVP.
The Financial Terms
RingCentral will pay Mitel $650 million to acquire intellectual property rights and patents covering network and call management, security, and infrastructure. Mitel’s existing investor group led by affiliates of Searchlight will invest $200 million in equity in RingCentral as part of the transaction.
About RingCentral
RingCentral, Inc. (NYSE: RNG) is a leading provider of business cloud communications and contact center solutions based on its powerful Message Video Phone™ (MVP®) global platform. More flexible and cost effective than legacy on-premises PBX and video conferencing systems that it replaces, RingCentral empowers modern mobile and distributed workforces to communicate, collaborate, and connect via any mode, any device, and any location. RingCentral offers three key products in its portfolio including RingCentral MVP™, a Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS) platform including team messaging, video meetings, and cloud phone system; RingCentral Video®, the company’s video meetings solution with team messaging that enables Smart Video Meetings™; and RingCentral cloud Contact Center solutions. RingCentral’s open platform integrates with leading third-party business applications and enables customers to easily customize business workflows. RingCentral is headquartered in Belmont, California, and has offices around the world.
About Mitel
A global market leader in business communications powering more than two billion business connections, Mitel helps businesses and service providers connect, collaborate and provide innovative services to their customers. Our innovation and communications experts serve business users in more than 100 countries.
