RingCentral, a cloud-based phone and communications system for companies, is bringing its service to Google for Work, the search giant’s suite of business tools.
RingCentral Brings Its Cloud Phone Service to Google for Work
Make calls from your office number right in Gmail.
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Dubbed RingCentral Office, the service will allow Google for Work users to make and receive phone calls, send text messages and faxes and even set up Web meetings without leaving Google’s Gmail environment. The move is the latest in a series of partnerships that RingCentral has made with cloud services including Salesforce.com, Box and Zendesk.
I saw a short demonstration of the service, and it reminded me a bit of Google Voice, which allows calling and texting from the browser, but with more features aimed at people who spend a lot of time on the phone at work. CEO Vlad Shmunis said in an interview that RingCentral had surveyed its 300,000-odd customers and “it was pretty clear that a lot of them are Google for Work users. We’re simply making it easier for them to move all of their IT operations to the cloud.”
Aside from in-browser calling and texting, the service will also work with RingCentral’s existing services to connect office numbers with mobile phones. It is also tied to Google Hangouts, Google’s video conferencing service, and allows Web video and audio meetings with as many as 1,000 people.
Founded in 1999, RingCentral, based in San Mateo, Calif., went public in an offering that raised nearly $100 million in 2013. It’s expected to post a little less than $220 million in revenue when it reports its fiscal 2014 next week. And while many of its customers are small businesses, it has a few with as many as 1,500 employees. Among those larger customers are Coursera, Lyft and SimplyHired.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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