Google, RingCentral partner to take on Microsoft

The search giant Google and the cloud communications specialist RingCentral are joining forces to serve apps and UC to the enterprise.

They’ve got a new offering called RingCentral Office Google Edition in the form of a plug-in in the Google Apps marketplace. It is intended to bring together RingCentral’s communications platform with Google Apps and related technologies like Google Hangouts.

The idea is to be able to take on the likes of Microsoft, which itself moving to better integrate Office 365 and Skype.

While the big tech companies have been very good at the cloud lately, they haven’t done that much in the cloud communications segment of the space, at least organically. Hence, despite the many infrastructure projects that Google for Google to seek out partners to better address the enterprise opportunity seems like a natural move.

For Google it’s just another small piece of what has become a very big jigsaw puzzle. But it could be a big deal for RingCentral, whose quarterly revenues of $86 million would be more sensitive to the success of this new application package.

RingCentral is one of the new generation of UC specialists that are finally shaking up the industry the way we all thought VoIP would do 10 years ago.