RingCentral - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

RingCentral provides cloud computing

Cloud computing

Cloud computing is the delivery of computing as a service rather than a product, whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices as a utility over a network ....

based phone systems, designed to help small businesses manage mobile, fax, and email communications. Its products include RingCentral Office, RingCentral Mobile, and RingCentral Fax.

History

Headquartered in San Mateo, CA, RingCentral has approximately 300 employees. It was founded in 2003 by Vlad Shmunis who previously started Ring Zero Systems. RingCentral is funded by Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital

Sequoia Capital is a Californian venture capital firm located on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, California. The Wall Street Journal has called Sequoia Capital "one of the highest-caliber venture firms", and noted that it is "one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture-capital firms"...

, Khosla Ventures

Khosla Ventures

Khosla Ventures is a venture capital firm focused on early stage companies in the Internet, computing, mobile, silicon technology and clean technology sectors....

, and DAG Ventures

DAG Ventures

DAG Ventures is an American venture capital firm based in Palo Alto, California. It is known as a "coattail" fund for co-investing in later-stage private financing rounds alongside more prominent top-tier venture funds such as Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital, and Accel Venture...

Products

RingCentral has three product offerings: RingCentral Office, RingCentral Mobile, and RingCentral Fax.

As reported by Forbes

Forbes

Forbes is an American publishing and media company. Its flagship publication, the Forbes magazine, is published biweekly. Its primary competitors in the national business magazine category are Fortune, which is also published biweekly, and Business Week...

, "What makes RingCentral so potentially disruptive is that it offers an inexpensive ($99 per month for four users), Web-only solution with no hardware to be installed at all, except for handsets which the customer supplies. Reportedly, with the right handset and a good enough Internet connection, RingCentral offers excellent quality. RingCentral enables small and midsize businesses to have what might otherwise be unaffordable smart-PBX features, including call control, extensions, Outlook integration for dialing and faxing, hold music, call logs, and rules-based call routing and answering."

RingCentral Office

RingCentral Office is a complete Internet-based phone service designed for small businesses. It can be used to connect teams in different locations.

RingCentral Mobile

RingCentral Mobile provides customers with a local or toll-free number that connects their existing phone lines as virtual extensions. Features include call forwarding

Call forwarding

Call forwarding , in telephony, is a feature on some telephone networks allowing an incoming call to a called party to be redirected to a third party. For example, the third party may be a mobile telephone, voicemail box or other telephone number where the desired called party is situated. It was...

and answering rules. Users can also receive calls, transmit faxes, and listen to voicemail

Voicemail

Voicemail is a computer based system that allows users and subscribers to exchange personal voice messages; to select and deliver voice information; and to process transactions relating to individuals, organizations, products and services, using an ordinary telephone...

through an online account.

RingCentral Fax

RingCentral Fax is an Internet fax

Internet fax

Internet fax uses the Internet to receive and send faxes.Internet faxing, "e-Fax" or "online faxing" is a general term which refers to sending a document facsimile using the Internet, rather than using only phone networks with a fax machine.Depending on the specific method/implementation ,...

service that gives users the ability to send and receive faxes through the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

without a fax machine. Users can transmit documents online, sign and edit their faxes digitally, and receive text

Text messaging

Text messaging, or texting, refers to the exchange of brief written text messages between fixed-line phone or mobile phone and fixed or portable devices over a network...

and email

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

alerts when a new fax arrives.

RingCentral VoIP Lines

VoIP lines enable users to make outgoing calls with a softphone

Softphone

A softphone is a software program for making telephone calls over the Internet using a general purpose computer, rather than using dedicated hardware. Often a softphone is designed to behave like a traditional telephone, sometimes appearing as an image of a phone, with a display panel and buttons...

or VoIP phone.

Awards

RingCentral was named a 2010 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer. Explaining what makes the company a pioneer, the World Economic Forum

World Economic Forum

The World Economic Forum is a Swiss non-profit foundation, based in Cologny, Geneva, best known for its annual meeting in Davos, a mountain resort in Graubünden, in the eastern Alps region of Switzerland....

states, "RingCentral has radically changed the cost structure for business phone systems from tens of thousands of dollars to as low as US$ 10 a month and is delivering these services in the US, Canada, and the United Kingdom."

PC Magazine

PC Magazine

PC Magazine is a computer magazine published by Ziff Davis Publishing Holdings Inc. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009...

awarded RingCentral with an Editor’s Choice Award. RingCentral also won the 2009 Product of the Year Award from Internet Telephony Magazine and was named a 2009 Webware 100 award winner.