RingCentral provides phone system integration and utilities to a traditionally under-served category, small to medium sized businesses. Similar to GrandCentral, RingCentral (founded in 1998) uses a virtual number to offer more services to their users existing mobile, fax, and landlines. RingCentral numbers can feature an auto-attendant, multiple extensions, call forwarding, voicemail, click-to-call, screening, logs, and Outlook integration.
On Monday, the company will announce they raised a $12 million series A financing from two highly respected firms, Khosla Ventures and Sequoia. RingCentral is also adding a new CFO, Dinesh Lathi, who was an ex-VP of eBay. They have currently provisioned over 100,000 numbers and serve over 40,000 paying customers with plans ranging from $9.99 per month to $24.99 per month.
With the recent acquisition of GrandCentral, VOIP as a utility instead of as a means for cheap calling rates has been a more successful strategy for the new telcos as of late. Virtual numbers, while requiring people to switch numbers, allow customers to use their phones without needing to download or adjust their calling behavior with new programs.
RingCentral is based in Redwood City and currently has 80 employees.
acquisition target for Yahoo?
btw, why did Google stop grandcentral?
GrandCentral is no so much stopped, but rather “on hold” with more invites trickling out after the acquisition. They’re probably integrating the team and product into Google.
Nick, you might also want to take a look at Virtual PBX – http://www.virtualpbx – my client. Virtual PBX originated this category of hosted PBX services.
I have been using RingCentral for more than a year now. Their service has been outstanding. I just hope they don’t get too big.
Most VOIP companies I’ve dealt with have had various levels of quality, but they’ve all had problems. Is there anything about RingCentral that would result in better then average quality?
I have a couple RingCentral numbers and have been super happy with their service.
Yeap, Yahoo will acquire RingCentral . Ringcentral guys are going to write something ten times better than grandcentral.
Nick, please clarify!!!!! Is a new round of financing (i.e. Series B) or did they draw down the rest of their Series A. Please be very specific here. It looks like the company has fed you information that is “long tailed”.
http://www.thea...al_pbxer_r.html
Thanks Todd! I appreciate the feedback.
#7 Rivals
……”Ringcentral guys are going to write something ten times better than grandcentral.”
What exactly are they going to do, invent dial tone? C’mon guy!
The fact that Grandcentral was sold was due to relationships at Google. They simply did a fantastic SALES job on Google when you take into account the rumored price of $50M with non-existing revenues.
ALSO, the article says RingCentral has 8 employees? This is completely irresponsible reporting. They have far more than 8 employees. Unless of course they have gone through some layoffs.
First off, the article is completely laced with incorrect information. Second, the service ranges from $9.99 a month to $99.99 a month. Third, RingCentral has upwards of 30+ employees.
Sorry but wrong all around.
Great service, used it for a long time, hope it doesn’t go big on me
Our company signed up for RingCentral a few weeks ago and the service has been awesome. You can basically customize virtually anything you want to, and the VOIP quality has been POTS-quality.
The article failed to mention that RingCentral recently introduced a VOIP Phone service, similar to what Vonage offers, except that the quality is actually much better than Vonage. There’s even an option where you can purchase an IP phone and connect it to their network.
In my opinion, RingCentral is basically what you get when the potential of VOIP is realized to its full extent. Hats off to the principals and managers at RingCentral; they deserve the success they’ve enjoyed so far.
#12
*After reading info on your website (healthcare) please explain to me what POTS quality is? I know what that is becuase I’ve been in the telecom business. Most readers on this board won’t understand those fancy buzz words. With all due respect looking at your site I would take your posting more seriously if you discussed the subject of liposuction versus telephony:)….may be you can also break down the compression they are using for VoIP; is it G.723 or G.729
*…”The article failed to mention that RingCentral recently introduced a VOIP Phone service, similar to what Vonage offers”
—–What the hell does this mean? Are they now selling hardware (i.e. ATA type box). If so, are they set up to handle all the inbound calls they are going to receive foe hardware support? Do their investors know that the model has changed from on-demand to a hardware supplier?
*..”There’s even an option where you can purchase an IP phone and connect it to their network.”
—– Not sure I follow here. Are you suggesting that if you purchase a Cisco/PolyCom/Avaya/Alcatel IP phone you get free calls? Why not save the money and just buy a Plantronics DSP headset and use a soft phone?
Yes, RingCentral is a very good service for a sole proprietorship or very small business. The management team has done a great job of executing. But, the space is starting to draw attention from some companies with deeper pockets (i.e. J2 Global, aka eFax).
Another very happy RingCentral customer.
Great service, flexible features and strong customer support, all for very little money.
From what I understand they have over 50 employees.
Yahoo! would just screw them up – stay independent, guys.
We have used RingCentral for the past year….. No problems and the features are so awesome especially the click to call back, and call screening…. This platform rocks… Glad to see much success
Well congrats to them for securing funds for big VCs like Sequoia.
getting funds from VC’s always sounds appealing
http://vidsonly.blogspot.com
* Yawn * … smack , smack …..
Yow! What a boring post!
http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com
boring post!
rc
trading tennis blog
The announcement of this deal has been a long team coming. PEWire reported on this back in January: http://www.thea...al_pbxer_r.html
the killer feature missing from all these services, is handling SMS.
I’d like to give out 1 number only to everyone, when they call me it rings thru to whatever numbers i have configured. But if someone tries to text me to that number, it also should get directed to whatver mobile nums i have set up.
Haven’t seen that in any of these services yet, someone tell me if it’s out there. This 1 very key feature is the only factor holding me back from “one number fits all”.
I haven’t used RingCentral, but I do use a Virtual PBX system. I’ve been using Callture’s IP PBX system for two years and found it to be great with features, really easy to use, and reliable. They’re located out of Canada (near Toronto), also where I operate my business from. I know I probably sound like a homer, but I just wanted to provide an alternative for anyone that reads this and wants to compare against RingCentral’s competition.
Professional observations:
1. RingCentral got this funding in December 2006..so this post is rather late
2. Good platform, solid features, works very well. They just added a VOIP product where you can either buy a Voip phone, a VOIP adapter for your existing phone or use their softphone.
3. Poor marketers compared to others in the space
4. Much like their competition, they are ONLY focused on serving the very small business..less than 6 employees or so
5. Yahoo has other aspirations for their own talk service..they will not buy RC or anyone else for the time being
6. Microsoft is also interested in this space and since they just came out with their own VOIP and communication servers they will certainly try and duplicate some of this while at the same time partnering with several others in the same space.
7. Grandcentral was never a competitor…they focused on one number for all, and they never had revenues. RingCentral and its competitors focus on virtual voicemail for the very small business..and are actually making money…big difference.
8. Other strong competitors in this space include Voicenation, GotVmail, Freedom800, VirtualPBX, onebox, evoice, and about 30 other ones I evaluate. Each has differing plans and features but most all focus on the very small business.
9. Most of these companies also have click to call features and efaxing and do not focus on VOIP but rather virtual Voicemail.
10. Skype has such a huge presence and following yet they have done a completely miserable job at grabing the attention and interest of the small business/soho owner..instead giving room to the above competitors to thrive. Skypes service for small business owners, Skype Pro, doesn’t even come close to what the above competitors offer. Skype is too focused on personal telephony features and long distance and ignoring the small business user. Small business require voicemail features, communication features and not only long distance savings. Skype can dominate this space rather easily if they come out with a packae similar to the above companies. If they do, there is easily a few hundred million dollars in revenue for them just from the under 5 employee business space.
Personal observation:
-I like the RC service very much, as well as others such as Voicenation and GotVmail all for different reasons. However, although I have known my share, the Ringcentral owner/ceo is a supreme and world class jerk! And I am being nice.
-J2, which owns onebox, efax and eVoice has a great marketing machine behind it and power over some others seeing that it owns certain patents on efaxing technologies.
-Microsoft is partnering with several of these technologies but is also attempting to capture the market with their own application as it matures.
-Google, Yahoo and Skype as mentioned above can also make a run at this space with their technologies if they remember one thing, this is NOT about personal telephony and savings on longdistance, this is about professional virtual voicemail and pbx features for the very, very small business.
-Several of the above virtual voicemail and pbx companies I mentioned above and that I track will absolutely be bought out over the next couple of years as this industry gets recognized and become more successful. Potential buyers may be the usual in Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, Skype, but also those focused on the very small business such as Intuit, Cisco, VOIP Vendors and definately some telcom carriers and cell phone companies as they continue to loss business.
Plenty to write on the topic, but that is it for now…
To add to Ricky S’s comment.
I have been using Halloo Communication for over three years now. I switched from RingCentral after they had an outage. Solid outfit out of Bay Area. They have really flexible features including queuing in their largest plan which is the one I use. Just another alternative.
I have been using Inteliphone for about a year. I switched from Gotvmail because Inteliphone was more flexible and the plans were easier to understand. Make sure you check out what the hidden costs are with all of these providers (ie. double leg billing, options that you think would be standard that quickly rack up your monthly bill).
Just my 2 cents ( or should I say 2.9 cents )