For those of us who have been using Ribbit’s various Web-based call processing and voice processing services on an a la carte basis, this week brings major news about the business unit’s acceptance into the incumbent telco’s mainstream. On May 25, Ribbit proudly posted on its blog that BT had launched Onevoice Ribbit v1.0 which, in effect, makes Ribbit’s IP-based, enhanced telephony features available to employees on normally locked-down corporate networks (aka Virtual Private Networks or VPNs).

The service puts the lie to concerns that incumbent telcos would squash IP-Telephony in an effort to preserve traditional toll charges. It recognizes that multinational, multi-site companies have huge financial incentives to avoid paying the tolls and taxes associated with international calls (just like individuals have been doing for years, using Skype, Fring, Truephone or other VoIP carriers).

In addition to cost savings, BT markets OneVoice Ribbit 1.0 as a feature-rich single-number service. Each user will have a single “direct dial number” that is associated with multiple phone lines. Most commonly the list will include that person’s business line, wireless phone, residential phone or a “softphone” in Web browser. Users can designate which phones should be involved for both inbound and outbound call handling.

As for the features and functions that should be important to corporate customers. Phones (endpoints) can be added or changed by users through a Web site. In addition, there are a number of (now) time-tested features that employees will find attractive, including the ability to view call logs and manage voicemail, which includes voicemail-to-text transcriptions. Transcribed messages are delivered a text to either an email address or a mobile phone in the form of SMS. In both cases, the message includes a way to listen to the original message, in the very likely instance that transcriptions contain errors or are hard to decipher. The full list of features is available here.

BT acquired Ribbit for $105 million in July of 2008. It was an act of faith and courage bolstered by confidence that the parent company could harness the creativity of a generation of developers whose sensibilities were not borne out of the Bell System. As the list of features and functions indicate, the Ribbit crew realized early on that phones could do more, and they focused on what the old guard (like me) would call “single number/find me-follow me” offerings.

With a rich set of tools for Web services development and a general trend toward moving all sorts of media streams and activity streams into the cloud, Ribbit’s biggest challenge was to narrow the set of offerings to services that individuals would use frequently in the office, at home and in between. In this respect it is often compared to Google Voice, but the affiliation with BT and the incorporation into OneVoice means that BT’s technical salesforce can bring a BT branded solution to its customer base. That should be a clear advantage over Google, but only time will tell.

Categories: Articles

Tags: Cloud-based telephony, Ribbit, Recombinant Communications, BT