Ribbit adds voice to Salesforce – at $25 a pop

Alternative service provider Ribbit this week said it has gone live with a service integrating mobile voice calling and other telephony features into Salesforce.com

Ribbit for Salesforce is now commercially available following an extended beta test. Pricing starts at $25 per user per month, including unlimited voicemail and inbound calling. Voice-to-text translation ($10) and outbound calling ($15) through the service is extra but relatively cheap. Seventy companies participated in the beta test of the integration.

The key to the service is its deep integration with the Web-based Salesforce application. Users can integrate voicemail messages with customer records within the sales automation application. In a neat trick, Ribbit has integrated a softphone into the Salesforce.com interface that is tied to a sales person’s cell phone; messages left on the cell are routed to the Web, and calls made from the Web go out with an identifier tied to the user’s mobile number.

But more than just linking messaging systems, Ribbit leverages the open APIs of its own platform and Salesforce.com’s AppExchange Web services interfaces to integrate voice deeply into the sales work flow.

According to Ribbit CEO Ted Griggs, sales automation is just the first of many vertical application areas Ribbit plans to target. One major channel will be software-as-a-service provider OpSource, which today delivers Web-based applications in a variety of verticals. Ribbit will be rolling out its OpSource integration program later this year, Griggs said.

While working on the Salesforce integration, Griggs said, Ribbit developers created an entire enterprise application engine that sits on to of Ribbit’s core APIs. The app engine includes tools enabling single sign-on; group provisioning and activation; billing and ordering; and more.

“[CRM] is the first of many ecosystems we’ll see our way into,” Griggs said.