RingCentral and Mitel enter strategic partnership to enrich cloud comms
RingCentral and Mitel have announced a strategic partnership to provide Mitel's global customer base with a streamlined migration path to RingCentral's Message Video Phone (MVP) cloud communications platform.
As part of this agreement, RingCentral becomes Mitel's exclusive UCaaS partner, providing their customers with a next generation, mobile-first, cloud communications platform with high reliability and security, functionality, and broad enterprise app integrations.
According to a statement, Mitel will continue to support customers on its MiCloud Connect platform and, working with RingCentral, provide a path to RingCentral's best-in-class cloud-based MVP for all its customers in a manner and pace that best fits each customer's needs.
RingCentral will pay Mitel $650 million to acquire intellectual property rights and patents covering network and call management, security, and infrastructure.
Demonstrating its commitment and future plans for the partnership, Mitel's existing investor group led by affiliates of Searchlight will invest $200 million in equity in RingCentral as part of the transaction.
Wilson Sonsini Goodrich - Rosati, Professional Corporation is serving as legal advisor to RingCentral and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen - Katz is serving as legal advisor to Searchlight and MLN TopCo Limited, the parent of Mitel.
Product will continue to be branded RingCentral MVP, accelerating availability to Mitel's entire customer base through RingCentral's and Mitel's combined channels, the companies state.
Additional product enhancements leveraging joint technologies beginning with Mitel phone and device support for RingCentral MVP is planned for the first half of 2022.
Tarun Loomba, newly appointed president and chief executive officer at Mitel, says, "We are excited to bring the market-leading UCaaS solution to our customers and channel partners with RingCentral as our exclusive UCaaS partner.
"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.
CloudLink, a cloud platform designed to enable customers to integrate their on-premises infrastructure with modern cloud applications, will ensure Mitel customers can leverage their existing on-premises PBX capabilities via the RingCentral application.
This use case provides a streamlined, differentiated transition path to full cloud adoption.
"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.
Shmunis says, "Given our maniacal customer-centric focus, we're delighted to now be able to offer customers a flexible and differentiated digital transformation path.
RingCentral is a provider of business cloud communications and contact centre solutions. The company is focused on empowering 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. The open platform integrates with third-party business applications.
Mitel is a global specialist in business communications, powering more business connections and helping businesses and service providers connect, collaborate and provide innovative services to their customers. The company's innovation and communications experts serve business users in more than 100 countries.
