By Michael Helmbrecht (VP of Product Management)
We’re excited to announce that RingCentral is acquiring products from Hopin, a leading provider of audience engagement software solutions, which includes the award-winning Hopin Events platform, an all-in-one event management platform that enables planning and producing event experiences for virtual and hybrid events.
We’re also bringing onboard talented engineers, product managers, designers, sales, marketing and support teams from Hopin who have built and led the Hopin business. They bring extensive technical and go-to-market expertise to expand the capabilities of RingCentral across our robust video product line.
As an innovation-centric organisation, we’re always looking at how we can provide new and useful capabilities to our customers so they can be more productive and drive better business outcomes. This acquisition is truly an exciting milestone in our journey to transform video communications. It strengthens RingCentral’s position as the complete communications platform, both today and in building our vision for the future. We’re excited to create even more easy-to-use and highly differentiated experiences across meetings, webinars, events and rooms.
What are the products being acquired?
Hopin Events
Hopin Events is an all-in-one event management platform for supporting hybrid and virtual events, such as conferences or summits that have multiple tracks and run for multiple days. Designed to be flexible and highly customisable to fit the complex needs of event organisers, the platform’s capabilities range from supporting hands-on sessions, expo booths, ticket management, post-event data and more. Ideal for event teams, marketing agencies that design and operate events for clients, and HR leaders, Hopin Events will help us deliver the flexible, scalable and interactive experiences which our customers need.
Hopin Session
Hopin Session is an interactive product designed for hosting external webinars, training and meetings with fully customisable and engaging experiences. It is differentiated by its customisable branding options and highly interactive in-meeting tools.
What was the motivation behind the acquisition?
This acquisition expands our video portfolio to cover the most important customer use cases across events, meetings, rooms, and webinars. We believe that combining these new products with RingCentral’s video portfolio and distribution will strengthen our competitive position and better serve our customers. In addition, the Hopin teams that will join us on this journey bring unique skills and experience for catalysing and building a highly differentiated video product line across meetings, webinars, and events.
Specifically, here’s why we are excited to make this happen:
- Expands our Video Portfolio to include virtual events: RingCentral will now have a highly regarded virtual events solution for customers to support their fully virtual or hybrid event needs.
- Provides Highly Engaging Experiences for Customers: The highly customisable and engaging in-meeting tools with Events and Session bring an easy-to-use experience that complements our existing video solutions and will also revolutionise the experiences of our RingCentral Video, Rooms, and Webinar products in the future.
- Enhances GTM Execution and Strategy: We’re getting an experienced video go-to-market organisation with talented sales, customer success, marketing, and operations teams that will help RingCentral better serve the video communication and collaboration needs of customers.
What does this mean for RingCentral and the future of our video business?
As a company, RingCentral provides exceptional communication and collaboration experiences to meet the needs of users across the enterprise. And in particular, we’re driving towards a powerful, unified and modern experience in our Video products. Today, our RingCentral Video, Rooms, and Webinar products offer easy to use video capabilities that are tightly integrated across our RingCentral MVP solution and our entire suite of tools to provide exceptional value.
Today, our video product suite addresses the needs of customers with the following:
- RingCentral Video – a cloud-based meetings solution that lets customers start, schedule, or join meetings from anywhere, including a web browser, a desktop app, or a mobile app.
- RingCentral Rooms – a cloud-based video conference room solution that brings our video collaboration into any space.
- RingCentral Webinar – a webinar solution that allows customers to broadcast a meeting to a large audience of up to 10,000 participants from desktop, browser or mobile.
With this acquisition, this suite will now be extended to include hosting and management of virtual and hybrid events, all at competitive pricing.
The addition of the mentioned Hopin teams and products to our portfolio gives us the technology and skills to accelerate our development of an integrated video product line that will be positioned to win across a wide range of customer needs, from the simplest meetings to the most complex virtual events. We’re excited to build out the differentiated future that we plan for our video products, with intelligent features that enhance communication and collaboration, improve productivity, and achieve superior outcomes.
Originally published Aug 09, 2023, updated Nov 28, 2023
