New RingCentral Video Offering Will Help Businesses Confront Teleworking Surge

RingCentral has added its own video offering to its portfolio of cloud-based solutions. The highly-anticipated move is being provided for free to education, healthcare, and non-profit organizations during the coronavirus crisis.

Unified communications-as-a-service powerhouse RingCentral now has another capability in its collaboration arsenal: video.

The brand new RingCentral Video (RCV) offering provides high-quality voice and video, screen sharing, and team messaging on one platform, no extra downloads needed -- just in time to help businesses grapple with their employees working remotely during the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, Zane Long, senior vice president of global channel sales for RingCentral, told CRN.

RCV, as of Thursday, is available as part of the RingCentral Office platform in North America, which includes cloud-based voice, collaboration, and contact center solutions.

RingCentral Office is available right now for free to K-12 education customers, healthcare providers and non-profit organizations being faced with new work-from-home mandates as a result of the outbreak, according to RingCentral.

[Related: Coronavirus Making A Strong Case For UC&C Solutions, Says Partners]

In addition to features such as screen sharing, RCV offers noise reduction, and analytics that IT teams can use to track and measure adoption, usage, and Quality of Service (QoS), the Belmont, Calif.-based company said.

Built on an open architecture, RCV works within popular, existing applications via APIs. Right now, pre-built integrations include Chorus, Google, Hubspot, Kuando Busylight, Microsoft -- both Teams and Office 365, Redtail, RSI, Slack, ThetaLake, Zoho, and RingCentral for Salesforce. RingCentral said more integrations are planned for the future, including with Canvas, Epic, Free Busy, Gong.io, Kaltura, Panopto, Prodoscore, and Zendesk.

"This completes the RingCentral phone, messaging and video solution," Long said. "We recognized that we could do it better because we are a carrier and wanted to build something of our own. RCV is purpose-built inside the RingCentral platform."

RingCentral has previously gone to market with a video offering -- RC Meetings -- powered by Zoom Video Communications.

RCV will be expanded into RingCentral's European market in Q2 and the Asia-Pacific market in Q3, the company said.

RCV, unlike some competitive offerings that are facing security and privacy issues right now due to increased usage, is a secure offering, Long said.

"RCV offers state-of-the-art data encryption and multi-layer security, and no downloads or plug-ins required," he added.

RingCentral in October inked a partnership with unified communications giant Avaya to create a UCaaS offering that leverages RingCentral's technology. Via the partnership, RingCentral has purchased $125 million in Avaya stock for a 6 percent equity position in the company, while also advancing Avaya $375 million for future payments and licensing rights.

As a result of the partnership, the two companies formally introduced Avaya Cloud Office powered by RingCentral -- specifically, the RCV platform-- in February, and this week revealed that Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral is now generally available. Avaya Cloud Office by RingCentral includes calling, messaging, video conferencing, file sharing and collaboration across any device or user location.