RingCentral and NiCE have extended their agreement to market the RingCentral Contact Center.
The RingCentral Contact Center is a dressed-up version of NiCE CXone Mpower, which features a tight integration with RingEX, RingCentral’s collaborations platform.
By combining these two technologies, businesses can converge CCaaS and UCaaS solutions that lead their respective Gartner Magic Quadrants.
In doing so, they can create a single, interoperable communications environment.
The relationship has lasted ten years and proved fruitful for both vendors. Now, Vladimir Shmunis, Founder, Chairman, and CEO of RingCentral, shared his excitement at prolonging the deal.
During the company’s latest earnings call, Shmunis stated:
We look forward to working with a NiCE team offering a best-in-class, integrated AI-powered cloud telephony and contact center suite that is the ideal choice for enterprises with complex and advanced use cases.
The extension will be music to the ears of many existing RingCentral Contact Center customers. After all, rumors of a soured relationship had spread across the industry.
These started back in November 2023, when RingCentral announced a competitive CCaaS solution: RingCX, which now has 1,200+ customers.
After, in July 2024, NiCE released its own UCaaS solution: NiCE 1CX.
The announcements generated plenty of speculation around the partnership’s long-term future. That only grew when RingCentral decided to migrate its own contact center team from the RingCentral Contact Center to RingCX in late 2024.
At the time, when discussing the NiCE partnership, Shumnis stated, “RingCX is our go-forward solution,” and didn’t commit to extending the relationship.
However, the partnership appears to be back on the right trajectory, and Scott Russell, CEO of NiCE, celebrated that news by committing to closer collaboration.
“We’re excited to work together to take our partnership with RingCentral to the next level, one defined by the seamless convergence of AI-powered customer and employee experiences,” he said.
The path ahead is about working together collaboratively to unlock more opportunities, and meet businesses wherever they are in their AI journey to modernize how they connect, collaborate, and serve their customers.
The extended partnership also supports NiCE’s vision to become a system of interaction, offering organizations a complete view of conversations around customer cases.
With many brands pushing cases across the business to various subject matter experts (SMEs) on platforms like RingEX, internal conversations now make up part of that view.
With 1CX, NiCE underscored its understanding of this. Yet, with RingEX, it can pull conversational insights from a widely-utilized, global solution into a richer customer view for many more organizations.
What Now for RingCX?
Despite the partnership, RingCentral doubled down on RingCX as a future revenue driver, noting that half of its $1MN+ deals last quarter featured the CCaaS solution.
Those included wins with a “leading” US-based restaurant chain and a university with 5,500+ employees leaning on RingCX.
Both businesses can now combine RingCX with RingEX and RingSense, RingCentral’s conversational intelligence solution, on one unified enterprise communications platform.
That is an excellent option for many businesses. But RingCentral recognizes that many larger enterprises have specific requirements only a broader platform can satisfy.
As such, many of the larger enterprises that utilize RingEX need a CCaaS alternative. The RingCentral Contact Center still presents an attractive option here.
Shmunis doubled down on this point: “RingCentral for UCaaS and NICE for CCaaS, they are extremely well received throughout, but especially in higher-end enterprises with more complicated needs.”
“The combination with RingCentral just continues this product, which was very successful from the get-go,” he concluded.
What Else Did RingCentral Share During Its Earnings?
Alongside the NiCE partnership, RingCentral announced it has expanded its relationship with AT&T, which will now resell RingCX and RingSense alongside RinEX.
The enterprise communications stalwart also named Vaibhav Agarwal its new Chief Financial Officer, an internal hire who succeeds Abhey Lamba. Lamba will, however, stay on until the year’s end as an Executive Advisor.
In terms of actual earnings, RingCentral announced quarterly revenues of $599MN, a five percent increase year-over-year (YoY), aligning with the high-end of its guidance.
