Vendor partners of the program include the likes of; VMware, CloudGenix, Riverbed, Cradlepoint, Windstream Enterprise and GTT Communications.
“RingCentral is committed to enabling businesses to take advantage of the full power of cloud solutions—and our SD-WAN partnerships reflect this strategy,” said Curtis Peterson, senior vice president of cloud operations at RingCentral. “We want to ensure that our customers have a range of industry-leading choices when deciding on their network options when they deploy RingCentral solutions. This flexibility enables customers to choose the right products for all their network needs. By building integrations with leading SD-WAN providers, our new program makes it radically simple for customers to build the network of the future, without a lot of cost or headache.”
Through the program RingCentral certifies partner SD-Wan products that are enhanced to work cohesively with RingCentral’s cloud communications and collaboration solutions. As a result, global enterprises have a number of certified SD-WAN choices to deploy alongside RingCentral solutions.
The company says that the rapid adoption of cloud-first solutions across the enterprise, means that businesses are increasingly shifting their business applications away from their data centres to the public cloud. As a result, making legacy networking architecture unnecessary. This is increasing the significance of SD-WAN technology and its role in enabling faster and more cost-effective enterprise deployments. It goes on to say that SD-WAN is an ideal companion to unified communications-as-a-service (UCaaS) solutions to deliver optimal quality of service to end users by reducing jitter, packet loss and latency.
“SD-WAN and UCaaS are natural partners,” said John Burke, principal research analyst and CIO at Nemertes Research. “SD-WAN reduces branch network outages by 95%, and slashes WAN management overhead by 50%, according to our recent report. Together, SD-WAN and UCaaS combine to fully enable an internet-only, cloud-first agile branching strategy: They deliver robust, resilient enterprise cloud communications services anywhere, with minimal overhead and lead time.”
Certified partners of RingCentral are reconfigured for out-of-the-box usage, enabling business IT departments to support accelerated location expansion and network growth of their companies. Organisations can go live with new locations in a matter of days instead of months.
Speaking on the program, RingCentral partners had this to say:
“Unified communications is a critical and important use case for VMware NSX SD-WAN by VeloCloud. NSX SD-WAN provides a complete cloud-delivered WAN solution for customers to take advantage of unified communications services over any WAN network with performance, visibility and remote monitoring,” said Steve Woo, senior director of product, VeloCloud Business Unit at VMware
“Collaboration is fundamental to productivity, and as such, is considered a service that must work and must work well. By taking advantage of both the CloudGenix and RingCentral platforms concurrently, customers are able to provide the best possible experience for collaboration, integrate direct internet in the branch with security for better cost metrics and performance, confidently integrate cloud and SaaS applications, and improve WAN manageability and availability,” said Joel Christner, senior director of marketing at CloudGenix
“While cloud adoption has become mission-critical, enterprises are struggling to reach the full potential of the cloud due to limitations of legacy networks. As a result, businesses are transitioning to a new software-defined approach to networking in order to become more agile, maximize digital performance and ultimately, reach their cloud and digital goals faster. Riverbed SteelConnect is an innovative SD-WAN solution that provides unified connectivity and policy-based orchestration spanning the entire distributed network fabric. Interoperability between Riverbed SteelConnect and RingCentral will enable better performance for unified cloud communications at a lower cost and improved agility, offering an attractive value proposition for enterprise customers," said Paul O’Farrell, senior vice president and general manager of Riverbed’s Cloud Infrastructure Business Unit.
“Like other modern, cloud-enabled IT infrastructures, UCaaS demands a non-stop WAN edge with direct Internet access at each remote site, which SD-WAN plus 4G LTE uniquely delivers. Cradlepoint is proud to partner with RingCentral. Together, we make it easy for customers to integrate UCaaS solutions into their SD-WAN deployments and benefit from the extended reach and reliability of 4G LTE today with a pathway to 5G in the future,” said Todd Krautkremer, chief marketing officer at Cradlepoint.
“Windstream’s fully managed SD-WAN service is designed to ensure optimal performance and real-time control of all mission-critical cloud applications, including cloud communications. We look forward to leveraging our extensive experience in managing integrated SD-WAN and cloud communication solutions, helping business customers improve employee productivity, collaboration and the customer experience,” said Mike Frane, vice president of product management at Windstream Enterprise.
