RingCentral is buying Hopin’s Events, an event management platform for virtual and hybrid events, and Hopin Sessions, a personalized engagement system, as the company increasingly goes toe-to-toe with Zoom Video Communications.
Zoom has been encroaching on RingCentral's turf with virtual meetings, Zoom Phone and contact center products. Zoom Spaces is for conference room systems and Zoom Events provides an event platform. RingCentral with the Hopin assets will now face off with Zoom Events.
Hopin will keep StreamYard, Superwave and Streamable and replace CEO Johnny Boufarhat with Badri Rajasekar, Hopin's Chief Technology and Product Officer.
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RingCentral said in a statement that the acquisition includes technology, customer relationships and engineering, product and sales employees. RingCentral's plan is to expand into interactive events.
Terms of the deal weren't disclosed.
Hopin Events is a platform that an host events including conferences, multi-track sessions, sponsor booths and registration tools. RingCentral will take Hopin Events and combine it with RingCentral Video, RingCentral Rooms and RingCentral Webinar.
Constellation Research's take
Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller follows Unified Communications- and Contact Center-as-a-service. Here's what she had to say about RingCentral's move in a research note on the fly:
"The Unifed Communications space is trying to keep things spicy with Zoom and RingCentral flexing to bring more capabilities and channels into the UCaaS and communications ecosystem. Zoom, ever since that failed acquisition of Five9, has had its eyes on rounding out their CCaaS ecosystem and aggregating the tools, capabilities, and partnerships to advance on their promise of a contact center cloud offering on top of their UCaaS tool collection. RingCentral has been forging partnerships to extend native connectivity with platforms and ensure that CCaaS is actually part of their larger unified communications story. So now, events and event engagement tools enter the fray.
Hopin is a leader in the modern event management space, delivering solid modern solutions for virtual events like webinars and large-scale hybrid events. Between their Events and Sessions offerings, enterprises can host those large-scale user conferences, festivals and fairs on the same platform they host side meetings, webinars or video calls. Now with RingCentral event pros can connect those live event meetings at conferences, follow-up calls and conversations to webinars, demos and customer success meetings.
For RingCentral, where this gets interesting is when you look at their announcements across the year for expanded partnerships (AWS and Avaya to name a few). You also can’t quite ignore the rumor mill that has RingCentral going deeper with the likes of 8x8 to round out CCaaS offerings and tap into the XCaaS motion that 8x8 has been advancing. The goal here seems clear: More intentionally connect unified communications and contact tools, workflows and modes of bi-directional collaboration."
