RingCentral Online Blog

RingCentral's Scalability Helps Virginia Tech Company work Globally

RingCentral Online spoke with Barb Rose, marketing director of Passfaces, an authentication technology company with offices in Oakville, Virginia and the United Kingdom. Founded in 2000, the company's authentication technology leverages the brain's innate cognitive ability to recognize human faces.

Why RingCentral?

BR: It's just a flexible and scalable phone system for the way we do our business. It's been a very effective tool for us in the environment in which we operate. It makes everyone's life pretty easy.

How do you operate?

BR: We're a pretty small start-up company that is disbursed almost worldwide. We have two people in the UK and six people in the states. In the UK, there is a developer and the company owner. We have one person in support, myself in marketing, and a couple of sales guys.

Where in the states?

BR: All over.

How do you use RingCentral?

BR: How RingCentral works for us is that everyone in the company chooses a phone number to where the calls to our main toll-free number get forwarded. If there's not an answer, the system sends the voicemail to our email. Because we have increased availability and accessibility to our messages and calls, everyone's been pleased. For me, calls go to my cell phone, which is great, and I also like to use the internet fax feature. It's very convenient and it's very good to manage calls and faxes remotely, and to own that process. It's a very cost effective solution for us, too.

What were you using before RingCentral?

BR: We had a phone number somewhere with an answering machine that needed to be managed and dealt with on a daily basis. Someone would have to check the voicemail and then email our messages to us manually, and that was not a good thing.

No, I imagine not.

BR: But this is great!

Can you tell me a little about Passfaces?

BR: Passfaces is a graphical, bidirectional authentication product that is used to replace a user name and password for a log on. Users are assigned faces and then taken through a training process so that they’ll remember them. At future logins they can select anywhere from three to seven faces, whatever the institute deemed appropriate for the level of required security. It can't be phished. In every grid, there's one passface and nine decoys and they're presented in random positions within that grid. When you log on to a site, a screen pops up, and you select the Passfaces that were assigned to you in order to access your account.

Sounds interesting. Any final words?

BR: RingCentral is an ideal solution for our small but growing company.

RingCentral and Ditto on the Move

RingCentral spoke with Harish Rao, interim New York Director and Chief Strategy Officer of EchoDitto Inc., a unique Internet consulting firm with offices in New York and Washington DC. Projects have included blogging, Web sites, and fund-raising for clients such as Air America Radio, Alliance for Security, Dear JonStewart.com, Defenders of Wildlife, Miramax Books, Rock The Vote, and the U. N. World Food Programme. Many of EchoDitto's staff worked on Howard Dean’s innovative bid for the US Presidency in 2004.

You use the click to call button. How?

HR: Yes. We use the click-to-call button on our Google Adwords campaign, and we’re able to track how many people click on it. It's been a useful new business tool.

I have embedded the click-to-call button in my email signature line, and a lot of people like that—clients like that a lot. We also have it on our Web site, and visitors use it to contact us.

How has RingCentral helped your company succeed?

HR: Our company has been growing so quickly that we've been moving to larger offices every eight months and RingCentral has been super useful during the moves. Normally, the service rings our landlines and cell phones, but during the moves it was easy for us to change over to just our cell phones so we never missed a beat.

Even though we have a new office and a new phone system, we will continue to use RingCentral because of the flexibility and ease of use. Read more about why EchoDitto loves RingCentral and VoIP.

Why RingCentral?

HR: We love RingCentral because it is easy for individual employees who move around quite a bit to set up where they get their phone calls and they can do it in a couple of different locations, and on landlines and cell phones. They can receive calls no matter where they are.

What about RingCentral is most beneficial to your company?

HR: The ease of configuration of the tool. We have contractors and interns—about two or three interns a month—as well as employees who travel around the country and the world, and it’s important to be able to configure on-the-fly through a simple online interface. Plus, it fits our image of being technology leaders in our field.

What is EchoDitto? What are you trying to accomplish?

HR: Our firm creates vibrant communities online and empowers people through the creative use of emerging technologies.