Conferencing Goes Mobile: RingCentral Debuts HD Video Meetings Product

In a perfectly connected world, one part of the puzzle has been missing: being able to conduct video conferences on the the go. But that hurdle has been overcome with the launch of RingCentral (News - Alert) Meetings, a new offering from RingCentral Inc., a leading producer of cloud business communications solutions.

The product fills a special niche, as it can be utilized by virtually any device available to mobile workers today.

“The RingCentral Office integrated solution is device-, location- and network-agnostic,” said Amy Lind (News - Alert), IDC research manager of broadband, enterprise voice and IP communications services, and unified communications at RingCentral, “enabling employees to efficiently communicate with customers, partners, suppliers and others wherever, whenever, and on any device they want.”

And it would seem that with every worker becoming more and more mobile these days, this type of product is overdue.

“The time is right for us to bring a mobile-centric video conferencing product to our mobile first cloud communications system,” Praful Shah, Senior Vice President of Strategy at RingCentral, told TMCnet.com. “The technology is now there and the business users are ready for it.”

RingCentral Meeting was initially introduced earlier this year, but this new release will now include it in all RingCentral Office Editions including Standard, Premium and Enterprise. Which edition a user chooses to utilize will vary by the number of attendees.

“We now offer Meetings across all our Office editions, enabling companies of all sizes to collaborate over HD video and Web conference.” noted David Berman, president of RingCentral, in a statement. “In today’s dynamic work environment, with mobile employees and distributed workforces across locations, employees need to stay connected and collaborate in real time to achieve optimal business results.”

RingCentral’s Meetings offers an impressive lineup of features, ideal for connecting any worker from any location into a video conference. Included among those features are:

• Widespread Device Support, enabling Meetings’ use with iOS and Android (News - Alert) smartphones and tablets, PCs and Macs;
• Multi-point HD Video Conferencing, enabling users to hold HD video conferences with up to 50 participants, and featuring an active speaker spotlight;
• Interactive Screen Sharing, allowing presentation, application, content and website sharing;
• Integrated Conferencing, for audio conferencing with standard phones and VoIP calling from any device;
• Meeting management, enabling meetings to be scheduled, started and managed from smartphones, tablets, PCs and Macs. Scheduling meetings can be done via Outlook, Google (News - Alert) Calendar or iCalendar, and participants can be invited using SMS or email.

In today’s fast-paced business world, people need to be able to connect and share where and when they want to,” RingCentral’s Shah told TMC. “Our Meetings product is easy to use on any end-point and does not require set-up or technical know-how. Just click to join, add participants, or share content.

“’Meetings’ takes mobile first to the next level,” he added. “It enables iOS users to share content right from the iPhone (News - Alert) or iPad in addition to a rich desktop feature set on Mac and Windows. In a nutshell, this product takes decades of experience in the online meeting space a recasts it from the ground up, with the mobile user in mind.”

Edited by Alisen Downey