RingCentral, Inc. announced an expansion of its hardware ecosystem and new feature enhancements for RingCentral Rooms. With return to office becoming a focus for many organizations, 76% of respondents in a recent survey reported that technological improvements and upgrades to conference rooms is a key priority. 

RingCentral Rooms enables organizations to transform their meeting spaces into dynamically enabled video conferencing destinations. It extends RingCentral Video and allows customers to have the same great video experience in a conference room that they already have in a home office or on the go. Now customers can select among several new hardware partners to enhance their conference rooms with high-quality, intelligent audio and video, and whiteboard - allowing room participants to better collaborate and be better seen and heard.

"RingCentral Video has been great for maintaining that sense of team, especially during the lockdowns when we were all remote. And now that some of us are coming back into the office, having RingCentral Rooms is also great to make everyone's conference room experience consistent and ensure we can always include anyone, anywhere, in our meeting," said Justin Collins, IT manager at Credit Human Federal Credit Union. 

New RingCentral Rooms Hardware Partners  
As old conference rooms undergo improvement, IT decision makers are turning to technology providers for the most advanced rooms solutions that allow workers to collaborate efficiently. To meet these needs, RingCentral is partnering with three added hardware vendors.

Avocor: RingCentral has partnered with Avocor, a leading global provider of touch-enabled interactive displays, to unveil new innovations for RingCentral Rooms. Through this partnership, the company is bringing RingCentral Rooms For Touch to market, which allows customers to join and end meetings with the touch of a finger. Through a new series of Avocor Collab Touch hardware displays with RingCentral Rooms for Touch software built in, customers can harness new capabilities-including digital whiteboarding and on-screen annotation. RingCentral Rooms for Touch will be compatible with Whiteboard, a virtual collaborative canvas, which is now available to customers in beta.

EPOS: A premium audio brand, Epos, recently announced a new line of meeting room solutions using EPOS BrainAdapt, a group of technologies that are designed to support the brain's natural way of processing sound. It enables users to easily adapt to a hybrid meeting sound environment and reduce cognitive load through a video bar device. With support for RingCentral Rooms on EPOS Expand Vision 5, customers will be able to leverage the premium audio of EPOS and the latest collaboration features for meeting rooms to deliver a great experience for customers. (RingCentral Rooms software is scheduled to be certified with EPOS Expand Vision 5 video bar by Q4.) 

Jabra: By partnering with a leader in personal sound and office solutions, RingCentral Rooms is able to harness Jabra's advanced on-board AI to deliver an intelligent feature set that takes users' video experience to the next level. Jabra's PanaCast 50 intelligent video bar is certified for RingCentral Rooms. PanaCast 50 can automatically detect who's speaking and intelligently adjust the picture to focus on them, delivering a better meeting experience that puts the most important content front and center.

"Strong relationships with strategic hardware partners are important as we strive to address the complex challenges around fostering collaboration in modern hybrid work environments. We are excited to work with innovative partners like Avocor, EPOS and Jabra," said Kira Makagon, chief innovation officer at RingCentral. "When paired with our partners' advanced hardware offerings, RingCentral Rooms can unlock the full potential of today's hybrid workforce and enable equitable collaboration for workers wherever they are."

In addition to these new partners, RingCentral continues to innovate through long standing Rooms partnerships with hardware solution providers Logitech, Poly and Yealink, giving users a wide range of RingCentral Rooms-enabled, all-in-one video conferencing solutions. 

A Plethora of Rich and Intuitive Rooms Features 
In addition to partnerships, RingCentral has also announced key new feature enhancements for RingCentral Rooms that will enable interactive experiences for customers in hybrid work environments. These features include: 

• Whiteboard for RingCentral Rooms: Available in beta, Whiteboard for RingCentral Rooms allows users to co-create and collaborate with other participants regardless if they are in a room or home office. It's easy to annotate and organize ideas with digital sticky notes and shapes using the whiteboard's immersive, near infinite canvas.
• Proximity sharing mobile: Sharing content from a user's mobile device amongst meeting participants in a room is now made possible with the new proximity sharing mobile feature. 
• Share and View room camera full screen: Just like screen sharing, this feature further elevates the collaboration experience by sharing the meeting room camera full screen to enable remote participants to get closer views of what's happening in a room. 
• E2EE Rooms support: RingCentral Rooms supports end-to-end encryption, which means data is encrypted for its entire journey between endpoints, and no one other than meeting participants have access to that information. 
• Closed Captioning: With closed captioning, users can enable on-screen captions. This gives better engagement for those who need extra language assistance, are hearing impaired, or simply want to be able to follow along and read what's being said in the room's environment.
• HDMI share: With new HDMI share, it's easy to share presentations or content from a user's laptop into the meeting room. Simply plug the RingCentral Rooms HDMI into any laptop to instantly share screens with all meeting participants. 
• Rooms activation code: Instead of using admin credentials to register each new conference room with a Rooms license, it's just a matter of hitting a few buttons. Admins can provide an activation code for each room and turn on Rooms remotely, easing the burden on IT.

"As businesses adapt to the hybrid work model, one thing is clear - investments in office meeting spaces will continue to grow," said Roopam Jain, VP of Research at Frost & Sullivan's Connected Work Practice. "RingCentral's new features, including Whiteboard, are designed to enhance team creativity and inclusivity with the goal of narrowing the effectiveness gaps found in most hybrid collaboration environments and better connect today's dispersed workforce."

For more information about RingCentral's hardware partners and its Rooms-enabled solutions, visit https://www.ringcentral.com/office/rooms/appliance.html.