RingCentral Deepens Ties With GoogleRingCentral Deepens Ties With Google

To accelerate adoption of cloud communications as part of Google Apps for Work, RingCentral announces new product bundle and channel partner.

RingCentral has strengthened its commitment to providing an integrated communications experience for organizations using Google Apps for Work productivity tools, today introducing a new product bundle and its first partnership with the Google channel.

The new offering, called RingCentral Office Google Edition, includes Google Apps Unlimited and a new, purpose-built WebRTC edition of RingCentral Office that integrates with Google Apps, including Gmail, and Google Hangouts. The bundle costs $30 per user per month, aggressive pricing meant to accelerate adoption, Richard Borenstein, RingCentral's SVP of business development, told me in a briefing on the news.

RingCentral will initially offer the bundle in the U.S. next month, with availability in Canada and the U.K. to follow. On the Google side of things, existing Google for Work customers will be able to add the RingCentral integration for $20 per user per month, and then be able to place calls directly from within Google Apps.

To propel adoption among the Google for Work base, RingCentral has added the Google channel as a sales outlet for this bundle, and will provide sales training and support on the integrated communications capabilities as appropriate, Borenstein said. Agosto is the first Google for Work channel partner to sign on to resell RingCentral Office Google Edition.

For RingCentral, the Google bundle and channel partnership represents a progression of the Google integration initiative announced in February 2015, Borenstein said. Since making its initial RingCentral for Google plug-in available from the Google Apps Marketplace, RingCentral said it has counted nearly 200,000 installs.

For Google, this latest news represents a tightening of the relationship with an enterprise-scale cloud communications provider. As Brian Riggs, Ovum analyst, pointed out in his April No Jitter post, "Google's Curious Approach to UC," Google has forged partnerships with RingCentral and others to bring UC capabilities to its business productivity suite rather than building its own business communications services or buying a UC-as-a-service provider.

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