RingCentral Provides Virtualization for Phone Calls

Published: June 14, 2006

by Alex Woodie

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."

To understand what RingCentral has to offer, 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.

Vlad Shmunis, CEO and founder of the company, describes how it works. "We have a soft switch that we put together, of our own design. It's essentially a Class 5 switch, located in a secure facility. Phone calls initially terminate into that switch, and we take it from there. Using the secret sauce we have, we can determine how to best route a specific pone call."

This feat does require some cooperation from the local phone providers, and RingCentral says it has agreements in place that cover 80 percent of the United States. If the company is not able to obtain a local phone number for a customer in a given area, they can usually assign them an 800, 866, or 877 number. This option is especially good for small businesses, because it allows them to get a professional-sounding voice response system without shelling out the big bucks. Plans start at just $10 per month and range up to $100 per month; the average customer bill is $25 per month, according to the company.

It's the RingCentral Web site that brings it all together. Subscribers are presented with their own portal where they play voice mails, look at their call log, and set up their preferences and call rules. If users have a microphone hooked up to their computer, they can even record their greetings and instant voice messages. The Web site also makes it easy to add additional minutes or to upgrade the plan.

The company has taken care to make sure the Web site is straightforward and easy to use. "We do try to keep it as uncluttered as possible," says Boris Elpiner, vice president of marketing. "When you find out you can control your phone communication as easily as you can control your e-mail, it's a different world."

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. The telephony servers run on Windows servers, while the back-end call-routing and billing system run on Sun Microsystems Unix server running Oracle databases. "Everything we could double up, we doubled up," Shumis says. "It's sort of hard to bring it down right now. If one node goes down, another node picks up. . . . everything is redundant."

That's not to say the company hasn't had an outage in the past. It has, but at least it didn't try to hide from its customers. "On a couple of occasions when we have had minor glitches, we got a call at home. They tracked us down," Elpiner says.

The RingCentral service relies on local networks, which can be spotty at times, so it subscribes to Akamai network redundancy services to replicate the RingCentral Web site using Akamai's global network of servers. "If the true back-end goes down, that's a problem, but that's a very rare occurrence, because we have Sun-Oracle back there," Shumis says. Worst comes to worst, voice mail will always be available, the company says.

On Monday, the company announced new fax capabilities and the new RingMe function. The new FaxOut capability allows users to send faxes from the RingCentral portal, even if their RingCentral call controller is not installed on their computer. The company also introduced Fax from e-mail, an alternative to FaxOut that enables RingCentral customers to send a fax from any e-mail account or accessible device and from any location.

With RingMe, customers get an embedded "button" that can be put on their Web sites or in e-mail signatures. When a customer or Web visitor wants to contact the RingCentral subscriber, all they have to do is push the RingMe button, and the system will initiate a customer service call and call out to both parties.