RingCentral and Google are teaming up. (Credit: RingCentral)
Google is counting on yet another partner to help plug the gaps in its challenge to Microsoft's popular office software suite.
Its helper this time is RingCentral, and the target is a familiar one for anyone who's been watching Google Apps for Work struggle to match Microsoft's Office 365 products feature for feature: unified communications.
Ever since Google bought a startup called GrandCentral and turned it into Google Voice, the company's struggled to build a viable competitor to what was first Lync and is now Microsoft's Skype for Business unit. Google's venture arm has backed GrandCentral founder Craig Walker's startup Dialpad to help, and Dialpad remains a partner for Google's productivity software. But with bigger customers, Dialpad is still small, despite a major deployment it scored in March.
That's at least how RingCentral sees the enterprise world, according to senior vice president Richard Borenstein. His company, already a Google partner, has been working for weeks on a new tier of their unified communications product. Purpose-built for Google, it replaces the company's Meetings with Hangouts, adds single sign-on with Google credentials, and integrates with various apps.
RingCentral, which went public in 2013 and has a market capitalization of about $1.5 billion today, has been in the Google app marketplace since February 2015. Its new bundle, called RingCentral Office Google Edition, sells an unlimited Google Apps account alongside RingCentral's core product, for $30 per user per month. It'll sell initially through channel partners.
RingCentral's customer base already overlaps frequently with Google Apps for Work, says Borenstein. But strategically, this was a move that demonstrates that Google is looking for help in selling Apps for Work. "This brings to the table a piece of the puzzle they don't quite have."
Dialpad might dispute that as the company moves up-funnel. But what's clear is that Google is looking to outsiders even as it adds new products to the Apps suite. Earlier in June it announced a digital assistant called Springboard that is intended to make it easier to surface information from across the full range of Google apps such as Gmail and Docs. TechCrunch quoted a Google executive at the time as saying “The average knowledge worker [currently] spends the equivalent of one full day a week searching for and gathering information.” The company also unveiled its own version of an internal corporate website that customers can customize called Google Sites.
Though Google is popular with small businesses and startups, Gartner research has historically found that Microsoft Office dominates the market of big businesses, with as much as 80% of share of companies that generate revenue of $10 billion or more. Simply bundling RingCentral with the apps suite is unlikely to make much of a dent in that status quo on its own.
But partnerships like the new joint sales effort demonstrate that Google continues to look to work with smaller partners to plug gaps that it's been unable to fill internally--and that the challenge to match Microsoft's full suite is still a work in progress.
