I’ve spent some time recently working with an interesting company called RingCentral.

RingCentral has a host of telephony services aimed at very small businesses.  RingCentral can provision a small business with a toll-free or vanity number, any number of extensions radiating from that number, an IVR (basically the system where you punch “1” for sales, “2” for marketing), voice mail, call forwarding rules including simultaneous or synchronous ringing, click-to-call, fax receipt and transmission, call records etc. 

Unlike almost all telephony providers to small businesses (Accessline, CallTower, cBeyond, Covad etc.), RingCentral does not bundle a VoiP telephone service with its other offerings.  That means that a business does not need to “go VoIP” or purchase new telephones in order to use RingCentral’s services.  This turns out to be important to RingCentral’s ability to efficiently service its customers.

In fact, what is special and disruptive about RingCentral are not the services it provides, but the manner in which it provides them.  The company has an entirely automatic, instant, and touch-less provisioning system.  The business provides a credit card number to get access to the online administrative interface.  The interface is very simple to understand, so that non-technical small business owners can easily configure the extensions they want, the call forwarding rules, voice mail greetings etc.  When the purchase button is pushed, the service (dial tone and all) is instantly activated.

Consider this – to “go VoiP” a small business needs to check whether its internet infrastructure is up to the task of handling the additional volume, and typically wait while the IP phones or ATAs (adapters for regular phones) are delivered by mail.  That would take out the “instant gratification” that is so trademark of RingCentral’s offering.

RingCentral is also a poster child for the way a startup should approach Microsoft seeking partnership.  The RingCentral folk had a wish-list prepared, showing good understanding of the MSFT product groups, tradeshows that MSFT participates in etc.  It made my team’s work on their behalf a whole lot easier.