let’s embark on a hypothetical example using a typical scenario: Meet Bob the Salesman. Bob, like many of you, has a multitude of phone numbers, including his company’s toll-free 800 number, his three-digit extension, his direct office line, his cell phone, and his home phone number. As a salesman, Bob meets a lot of people and gives away many business cards, which contain his company’s toll-free number and his extension. Bob somewhat values his privacy, so doesn’t hand out his direct line and cell phone number to every Tom, Dick, and Harry. As the people he meets enter further into his circle of trust, they are progressively rewarded with his direct office line, his cell phone number, and for those he considers his best customers, his home phone number, which is reserved for emergencies.
Juggling all these different phone lines and the authentication processes has become a chore for Bob. For starters, there’s four different voice mail systems, each with a different passcode, to keep straight. Somehow, his cell phone number has made its way onto the lists of various agencies that ruin Bob’s evening meal with solicitations and force , Bob to turn the ringer off to eat. (Much to Bob’s surprise, AT&T is no longer the worst of these offenders.) With his cell phone incommunicado, too many clients call Bob at home with less-than-critical situations. Something had to be done.
That’s when Bob heard about RingCentral. With this service, Bob is assigned one more phone number that is the be-all, end-all of the phone number escalation problem. However, Bob doesn’t throw the other five phone numbers out. They’re entered into the system and fully utilized. Depending on the rules Bob sets up from the RingCentral Web site, he can specify the who, how, and when for incoming calls. When somebody dials his new number, the RingCentral controller software on his PC pops up a window on his screen that displays the Caller ID information associated with the call, and provides Bob the option of accepting or rejecting the call, sending the caller to voicemail, or sending them an instant voice message.
Bob can even set up black lists to keep the Podunk Deputy Sheriff’s Union from soliciting donations over his cell during dinner time, or to make sure that calls from his most important clients are pushed through to his cell when he’s out of the office. And instead of four different voice mail systems, Bob can use RingCentral’s voice mail service. And here’s one of the coolest parts: voice mails can be delivered as .WAV attachments via e-mail, and accessed either via a Microsoft Outlook plug-in or over the RingCentral Web site. With this week’s announcement, the service now supports faxing, too.
Despite the advent of new forms of digital communication like e-mail, instant messaging, and text messaging, the good old telephone is still a critical component of modern businesses. While many companies are hashing out their voice over IP strategies, one Silicon Valley firm, RingCentral, has developed a telephony offering that lays a veil of virtualization upon both analog and digital phone connections to provide what its CEO calls “on-demand hosted virtual PBX.”
Since the RingCentral service was introduced in 2003, the company has attracted 25,000 customers, most are small businesses with less than 10 employees. The company estimates that 30,000 to 50,000 individuals are using the service, which processes something on the order of 100,000 calls per day. Measuring its growth in minutes per month, the company claims this metric recently hit 5 million minutes. RingCentral realizes that the telephone is a critical business system, and it has built redundancy into its system.
