Unified Communications Featured Article

RingCentral Now Handles Communications for Santa Clara School District

By Casey Houser
Contributing Writer

The Santa Clara Unified School District (SCUSD) holds nearly 2,000 administrators and staff as part of its 28 educational facilities in Silicon Valley. Its position in California allows the school district to gain a front-row view of IT’s impact on education.

Recently, SCUSD wanted to update its communications system. It looked for a cloud-based communications suite that would work well with Google (News - Alert) Apps for Education, a mainstay of productivity and file sharing between educators in the district. SCUSD’s search finally landed it in a contract with RingCentral (News - Alert). This new partnership, which began only in the summer of 2016, is expected to provide SCUSD with a complete set of communications tools that educators can access from any device and which also saves the district money.

Mitch Tarica, the president of commercial sales at RingCentral, commented on this blend of flexibility and cost savings that the district can expect as the pair moves forward with their arrangement.

“We’re thrilled to be selected as a trusted partner to the Santa Clara Unified School District,” Mitch said. “We are committed to serving the needs of school districts and the community at large. It’s our goal to help school districts benefit from a new generation of cloud communication solutions that are cost efficient and provide modern communication capabilities to better serve their needs.”

RingCentral has found tight integration with Google in recent months. Though they have supported each other for some time, the addition of new RingCentral Office Google Edition packages Android (News - Alert), Chrome, Docs, Gmail, and Hangouts alongside unlimited storage in a single plugin now available in the Google Apps marketplace. The coupling of these two companies’ products makes heavy use of WebRTC for the sending of audio, video, and data through Web browsers.

SCUSD has reportedly been using RingCentral communications tools since the beginning of the 2016 school year. It did not take long between the signing of this partnership and the use of RingCentral by all associated educators in the district. RingCentral has noted an increase in education outfits reaching to its own company and the cloud for their communications needs. It referenced a Consortium for School Networking report that suggests the biggest challenge for K-12 education is the usability of their small budgets. Cloud-based apps can help alleviate some of that concern while also remaining flexible enough for even the largest of districts.