July 27, 2026
NiCE and RingCentral Expand Ten-Year Partnership As Former Now Sells RingEX
NiCE will start selling RingCentral’s phone system, RingEX. The two CX giants have shared a partnership together since 2015, but only in one direction. RingCentral resold NiCE’s contact centre technology, badged as RingCentral Contact Center, to its own customer base. NiCE hadn’t previously returned the favour.
Under a new multi-year agreement announced this past week, that changes. NiCE will now resell RingCentral’s unified communications platform. Meanwhile, the older arrangement, RingCentral marketing its CXone-powered contact centre product, gets extended for another year.
Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral’s Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive, described it as a change in the relationship’s tone:
“NiCE has been a trusted partner for more than a decade, and this expansion takes our relationship to a new level. With NiCE now offering our UCaaS solution alongside the continued success of RingCentral Contact Center powered by CXone, we’re now giving businesses of all sizes a proven, integrated path to modernise how they connect, collaborate, and serve their customers.”
The mechanics of the revised partnership are simple enough. NiCE’s sales team picks up a new product to sell into its existing customer base. RingCentral keeps doing what it has done for ten years.
Arguably, the more compelling angle is the technical pitch sitting underneath the general commercial update. This includes real-time presence visibility between contact centre agents and back-office staff. There is also the ability to pull a specialist into a live customer call with a single click instead of a transfer and a hold queue. NiCE’s Cognigy-powered AI layer, the companies say, spans both platforms. This aims to treat human and AI agents as one pool rather than two systems bolted together afterwards.
Scott Russell, NiCE’s Chief Executive, put the logic this way:
“By expanding our partnership with RingCentral, we’re bringing together two recognized industry leaders so organizations gain the full strength of both: elite employee communications and an enterprise-grade CX platform, deeply integrated and ready to scale with AI.”
Why Now for the Expanded RingCentral and NiCE Partnership
NiCE has spent much of 2026 rebuilding its pitch around the idea that contact centre buyers are tired of point solutions. This is a theme it pushed hard at NiCE World London 2026, arguing the era of five separate tools and an integrator to connect them is giving way to platforms that arrive pre-wired.
RingCentral, meanwhile, made a second and equally telling move in the same window. It has restructured its Avaya partnership, with Avaya Cloud Office customers transitioning across to RingCentral directly. Neither deal is enormous by itself. However, in tandem, they convey a company tidying its channel relationships into fewer, tighter ones.
What It Means If You’re Buying RingEX or Other NiCE and RingCentral Services
If you already run NiCE and RingCentral side by side, little changes immediately. The technical integration exists today, and this is mostly a commercial rearrangement. The more relevant audience is anyone currently juggling separate UC and CX contracts with different vendors. Feasibly, there is now one sales conversation available instead of two. That could mean a worthy, if modest, procurement simplification. One relationship, one roadmap discussion, and one renewal date to track rather than two.
It’s worth asking, before signing anything, how deep the integration actually runs. That distinction could be critical. RingCentral still sells its own contact centre product, RingCX, which it has been building out with agentic AI capabilities of its own, alongside the CXone-powered version tied to NiCE. Two products with overlapping names and different owners is precisely the sort of detail that gets glossed over in a sales deck and rediscovered six months into implementation.
