A while ago I spoke about how much I liked the idea behind GrandCentral but it needed some work.  Recently I wrote about the complete lack of progress I had seen on GrandCentral and my subsequent disappointment.  Right after writing my second article I got a call from the PR department over at RingCentral asking me to take a look at their offerings.  I have been down this road many, many times before and while I agreed to an overview I was well prepared to be let down.  Half way through the call I was so excited about their service I simply wouldn't let them hang up.

There is a gap in the VoIP market for small/medium business (SMB) communication.  We have Skype, Gizmo Project, SightSpeed and others on the consumer end.  These are great for point to point calls but don't have automated attendants, call forwarding, find me, follow me, blast me or any other feature that a true business user would need.  There's Avaya and Cisco's offerings that are expensive and require a tech to install and operate.  These higher end solutions work great for companies that have over 100 employees but really fall down in the 5 to 100 employee work place.  I have been begging and pleading with the consumer companies such as SightSpeed and Gizmo to add SMB features that would make it a useful tool for a SMB but they still see the market as a consumer oriented space or at least want to focus there.  While there are a couple of VoIP SMB solutions most of them either lack features or have a very high cost.  Usually both.

Enter RingCentral.com

Today RingCentral has introduced a new VoIP solution that really excites me.  Before I get in to the new features I want to talk about their older solution which ties into their new offerings nicely.  RingCentral is great at business communications.  As a SMB owner or techie I sign up for the service and get a toll free number with extensions.  Through a very simple to use web based GUI I'm able to administer any aspect of my account.  Things such as different caller greetings for different times of the day, what extension goes where and what happens when someone dials an extension.  Unlike consumer oriented solutions RingCentral is geared towards doing business and making sure that important calls find you and unimportant calls get put on hold.  All the cool features of GrandCentral are there but there's so much more.  If you dial my RingCentral number which is 1 (888) 597-8452 and hit extension 2 you'll get call blasted to my cell phone and desk phone during business hours, or thrown to voicemail if you're calling after hours.  If you're in my address book then you'll get my cell phone, home phone and desk phone no matter what time of day.  Hit the Podcast extension and you're routed to one of the computers I use for our TechnologyEvangelist.com Podcasts but only if you have caller ID enabled (this allows me to track troublesome callers and block those callers that are potential problems during the live podcast).  While these features are all great, it's nothing new.  I had this same service with Webley back in the late 90's and it's very close to what GrandCentral can do (although RingCentral's service makes GrandCentral look like childs play). 


The really cool and exciting portion of RingCentral is their new VoIP offering which uses standards based SIP connections.  Starting today you can sign up for a VoIP inbound and outbound RingCentral account.  I have a few friends that work in SMBs and have VoIP service.  The new RingCentral service is 1/2 the price of what they have now with a ton more features.  Since the RingCentral VoIP solution is pure SIP it works with SIP based hardware handsets such as the Linksys SPA921 or just about anything that supports standards based SIP.  If you want to buy a hardware handset from RingCentral you can, or you can use your own.  If you want to use RingCentral's VoIP softphone you can, or if you're like me and want to run it on Mac OS X you can simply download the free X-Lite client and run a free VoIP softphone on your Macintosh.  Since it's all hosted by RingCentral it all ties together nicely.  When a caller dials your extension it can ring your cell, VoIP hard phone, home phone individually or all at the same time.  It can manage your calls incoming *and* outgoing.  And unlike other offerings in the marketplace, RingCentral seems to understand that a phone number is not just voice.  Using their cross-platform client or direct to e-mail option it's possible to send and receive faxes too.  In fact, faxing is a standard part of the service!

I did a quick price lookup and it ends up being less expensive to get a full RingCentral voice and fax solution that it does to buy just one eFax Plus account, assuming you fax less than 250 pages per month.  If you currently have an eFax account I would suggest taking a good hard look at what you're paying, what you're getting and head on over to RingCentral.  If you're using GrandCentral the switch is nearly a no-brainer.  If you're using any other SMB VoIP solution, I would highly suggest taking RingCentral's new service for a test drive. 

I do have to point out one flaw that I found and that's with SMS.  As I said in my previous articles a phone number is no longer simply a number to dial for voice.  It's a full communications option for voice, fax and SMS.  RingCentral has the voice and fax part down great but they are still missing SMS.  I still dream of a day that I can have a universal number for life that will follow me no matter where I go.  While number portability seems nice on paper, when I switched from Sprint to AT&T for my iPhone I was unable to move my number because of some silly rules.  I can't get faxes on my phone as it stands so that one cell phone number wouldn't work anyhow.  If I had one number that did all of this, I would be even happier than I am now.

While not perfect, RingCentral is by far the best SMB VoIP solution I have seen in a very, very long time.  These guys get it and I have no doubt that they are working on trying to solve the SMS problem as best they can and all the while take business communications to the next level.