By Jim Lundy
RingCentral Buys Hopin Assets—Launches RingCentral Events
This week, RingCentral announced that it was buying the events business from a company called, Hopin, which was the darling of events during the Covid era. However, with Covid being over, there’s been a cooling off of the virtual events market, and that resulted in the sale. This blog talks about RingCentral’s latest move to bolster its video use cases.
Analysis
RingCentral bought part of the Hopin business but it didn’t buy all of it. Quite frankly, it doesn’t seem like much is left of the Hopin company because its primary business was virtual events.
For RingCentral, this is a good move because it bolsters its overall video platform. It also gives it a major use case that it needed to add.
Hopin immediately becomes “RingCentral Events” and this will allow them to compete with Cisco Events, CVent, On24, Zoom events, and enterprise video firms such as Brightcove, VBrick, IBM, Kaltura, and Panopto.
Overall, this is an overdue pivot for RingCentral, which has had its RingCentral Video for several years, along with its relatively new RingCentral Webinar. They have been gradually building out its video collaboration offerings since they went their separate ways with Zoom several years ago.
Hopin Jumps Out of Events
Obviously, there is a return to physical events and less of a demand for four virtual events, and this has led to the demise of Hopin. One of Hopin’s issues is that its pricing was very low and its video quality was spotty. That did not help with customer loyalty.
I did sit in on many events using Hopin during Covid and remained hopeful for the firm. However, the very intense competition in the overall collaboration market took its toll and now Hopin Events has a new home.
Bottom Line
RingCentral has a larger footprint besides webinars now that it has RingCentral Events. We expect to see more consolidation of standalone webinars and events firms as enterprises look for one stack to manage both.
What Does Cybersecurity Look Like in the Age of AI?
Join Aragon Sr. Director of Research, Craig Kennedy LIVE on August 17th at 10 PM PT
Cybersecurity in the Age of AI: Fighting Fire with Fire
Cybercriminals are aggressively weaponizing artificial intelligence (AI) to launch increasingly effective cyberattacks against organizations. These cybercriminals are using AI to launch sophisticated and stealthy cyberattacks, such as creating realistic deep fakes, generating malware that can evade detection systems, creating convincing phishing emails, or identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities in real-time.
In this webinar, you will learn how AI can help you fight fire with fire to combat and survive these AI-powered cybersecurity attacks.
Some key areas we’ll cover:
- How cybercriminals are changing the game with AI?
- What solutions are available to combat these threats?
- How emerging AI technologies will transform cybersecurity?
This blog is a part of the Digital Workplace blog series by Aragon Research’s CEO, Jim Lundy.
