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NewsGlobe: Currents
RingCentral adds VoIP
Internet connection added to virtual phone system for small businesses
by Jim Barthold
RingCentral, with a business model based on making small
businesses look big—at least from a telecommunications
perspective—has added a VoIP service to its virtual phone
system. Called DigitalLine, the added feature lets customers
use a mix of land line, mobile and now VoIP to both place
and receive phone calls.
“You can actually receive and answer on your PC an inbound
call and not just forward it. We introduced VoIP in a way that
allows users to try it and see how it works over their
broadband, and then decide to move forward with additional
capabilities from our DigitalLine service,” said Jay Blazensky,
vice president of Business Development for RingCentral.
The virtual phone service provider now has more than 40,000
paying subscribers in a group comprised of very small
businesses of one to 10 employees, SOHOs, mobile
professionals and online merchants. The customers are
connected via a single phone number that tracks them down
to any device operating on the network, including the PSTN as
well as IP networks. The service also offers call screening and
800 numbers, auto-attendant functionality and music on-hold.
DigitalLine is a soft client sitting on top of the RingCentral
offering that gives customers full VoIP functionality.
“You can now not only answer calls but you can place
outbound calls using a headset through your computer,” said
Blazensky. “In addition to having the softphone which is a
download from RingCentral, you also have the option to
purchase an analog adapter that allows you to use your
existing analog phone … so you can talk over a regular
handset if that’s what you prefer over the softphone.”
The package is priced to sell—and to meet the budgets of the
small customers RingCentral pitches. A $4.99 monthly
package lets customer place and receive calls using the
softphone from the computer and minutes spent on the
phone come out of the existing RingCentral plan. A limited
plan, at $9.99 provides 500 VoIP minutes and a rate of 3.9
cents per minute beyond that; an unlimited plan is $24.99.
The DigitalLine service includes a soft client that opens a
stream of information including made calls, missed calls,
voice mail and other capabilities on a softphone, as well as
click-to-send faxes.
“There’s quite a bit of functionality now integrated with the
RingCentral service,” Blazensky said.
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