RingCentral has unveiled a cloud-based room video conferencing solution, called RingCentral Rooms, available via channel partners.
The offering aims to eliminate the complex, difficult to use and costly fixed infrastructure systems associated with traditional telepresence-type set-ups.
RingCentral also today announced Room Connector to enable legacy H.323/SIP room systems to participate in RingCentral Meetings.
“Currently standing at less than 10% penetration rate, industry growth of room video conferencing in the future will be driven by video in multiple meeting environments – conference rooms, huddle rooms, open spaces, desktop and mobile devices,” said Roopam Jain, industry director of the conferencing and collaborationpractice at Frost & Sullivan. “The shift to software-centric cloud solutions is creating new opportunities for growth. The addition of RingCentral Rooms is the next step for the RingCentral portfolio and will help them extend their reach and impact beyond desktop and mobile users to conference rooms as well.”
RingCentral Rooms works with off-the-shelf hardware, enabling companies to bring a high definition video experience to their workforce at a fraction of the cost of proprietary hardware, while maintaining enterprise-grade quality. RingCentral Rooms is designed for any conference room, huddle room or large open space rooms. It allows seamless participation with other RingCentral Meetings participants joining from mobile, tablets, desktops, or IP desk phones.
“Today, having high-definition video conferencing capabilities is not just a nice-to-have for Fortune 500 companies, but an essential part of any enterprise’s efforts to bridge the gap between increasingly dispersed teams,” said Kira Makagon, Executive Vice President of Innovation at RingCentral. “With the launch of RingCentral Rooms and Room Connector, we turn every conference room into an active meeting participant. We’re redefining room video conferencing and taking on the legacy players in the industry with an innovative and easy-to-use solution that works in conjunction with our cloud-first, unified communications platform.”
RingCentral Rooms key features include:
- Easy to set up; no IT skills necessary
- No expensive proprietary hardware required
- Utilizes off-the-shelf iPad, Mac PC, and camera hardware
- Calendar integration with Google or Microsoft Exchange
- Ability to see a list of scheduled meetings and one-tap to start a meeting
- Screen sharing with Wi-Fi, Airplay or wired HDMI connection
- Dual screens can show active speaker, content and gallery view.
For companies that have already made the investment in telepresence systems or traditional room conferencing, RingCentral Room Connector integrates with legacy hardware.
RingCentral Room Connector key features include:
- Enables H.323/SIP room systems to participate in RingCentral Meetings and RingCentral Rooms conference sessions
- Supports a wide range of endpoints from Polycom, Cisco, Lifesize and more
- Dual screen support with quality video, audio and web conferencing.
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