RingCentral notes unified communications gains with PCCW Global private network

Communications service provider PCCW Global has announced a partnership with cloud-based unified collaboration and contact centre systems firm RingCentral to provide on-demand private network connections to the latter’s global unified communication services.

RingCentral describes itself as a leading provider of cloud message video phone customer engagement and contact centre solutions for businesses on a worldwide basis. Its offerings are claimed to be more flexible and cost-effective than legacy on-premise PBX and video conferencing systems and the company sees its mission as empowering modern mobile and distributed workforces to communicate, collaborate and connect via any mode, any device, and any location.

The firm says that as it continues with its focus on ensuring customers have the flexible options they need for effective business communications, the rapid growth in the number of companies adopting its core Global Office technology is creating opportunities for its partners, from integrating applications and services to providing new network connection services.

With PCCW Global’s Console Connect technology, it believes it can enable customers to utilise private network connections for their business communications with additional control and management capabilities. It says some enterprises in industries such as healthcare, financial services and education will see particular benefit from networks with high availability and superior quality to access its services and ensure business continuity.

PCCW says that since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, there has been an enormous rise in the use of collaboration tools as enterprises look to support an increasingly virtual workforce. Also, it says, by having the ability to augment and scale their networks to accommodate rapid growth or spikes in demand is a powerful tool for software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers such as RingCentral and its enterprise customers.

Today’s enterprises are becoming increasingly reliant on a larger pool of SaaS, unified communications as a service (UCaaS) and cloud providers, and as these business-critical services and applications move to the cloud, the performance of network connecting them becomes more important.

This could mean that instead of manually provisioning a fixed bandwidth circuit – which can take up to three months – and contracting for a minimum of six months, Console Connect is regarded as being able to meet this demand, and with a service-level agreement guaranteeing sufficient quality of service.

PCCW Global says that as businesses accelerate their adoption of cloud-based technology and unified communications, the availability of cloud-based communication services on the Console Connect platform will give them greater network flexibility and reach. With PCCW Global’s Console Connect software-defined interconnection platform, which is available via more than 350 datacentres globally, enterprises can establish on-demand private network connections to RingCentral’s global unified communication services through the Console Connect web portal.

Once RingCentral customers are connected to the Console Connect platform, they can establish private connections between their enterprise sites and RingCentral cloud services. RingCentral can also now self-provision bandwidth instantly, flex up and down as they need and only pay for what the company uses.

The underlying PCCW Global private MPLS network isolates traffic from the public internet and is said to deliver “significant” security and performance benefits for enterprise customers using the Console Connect platform, including lower latency and reduced risk of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Michael Glynn, vice-president of digital automated innovation at PCCW Global, said the partnership will result in desirable benefits for enterprise customers, such as flexibility and agility, coupled with the security and high performance of the underlying PCCW Global network.

“Some of those network security and performance benefits are extended to an enterprise customer’s remote workers, who will most likely be using a VPN to access their work applications or collaboration tools,” he said. “Once connected to their corporate network, remote workers will then be using a secure, direct connection to access these applications, which eliminates some of the risk and performance issues they would encounter if they were only using the public internet.

“This could, for example, ensure higher-bandwidth availability for critical real-time voice data transmission, reducing lag from a SaaS provider’s hosted platform to an end customer/remote worker.”