Call waiting bolsters VoIP services partnership

Dialpad Communications, a VoIP telecommunications provider, will offer its customers the option of online call waiting, thanks to a partnership with RingCentral.

The partnership taps RingCentral’s base of IP applications. The additional service is an enhancement for subscribers who primarily use VoIP because of its cost. It also could prove an attraction for larger SOHO and small office customers to migrate to the Dialpad service, the companies said.

“The two main drivers for voice-over-IP have been cost and value-added services, and so far cost has always been the larger,” said Vince Paquet, Dialpad’s vice president of business development marketing. “As we move to a state where call quality is becoming comparable to a regular phone, the focus is shifting progressively towards the type of application which will make VoIP really worth all the promises we’ve been told about.”

Call waiting, an important feature for dial-up Internet users, is the first feature in “what we hope to be the evolution of VoIP into a feature-rich experience such that traditional PSTN telephony will become obsolete,” said Jay Ward, RingCentral’s president.

Ward said that RingCentral has relationships with all four RBOCs and a variety of CLECs to automatically provision subscriber’s phone lines with a call forward busy service that routs calls to RingCentral’s servers. The servers then notify the client that there is a phone call and provide several options for answering, including a real-time text-to-speech engine.

As a first phase of the partnership, the companies will cross-promote their services, with Dialpad offering RingCentral’s BuzMe Online call waiting service at $5.95 per month.

It is, said Paquet, an indication that VoIP is showing signs of delivering on its feature-rich promise.

“This puts VoIP back on the map. This is a case where being able to bundle these kinds of value-added services and giving them the ability to get call waiting types of services makes a lot of sense,” Paquet said. “In all the mess that telecommunications and VoIP in particular is, you do have two companies with live and growing user bases. That, itself, is newsworthy.”

From RingCentral’s perspective, the partnership is also a sign of a “new-new economy,” said Ward.

“Alliances have to be smart, have to make sense, have to be value-added, leveraging each partner’s strength,” he said. The deal with Dialpad “reaches a new level of consumer utility and both companies are coming together with their unique offerings in an intelligent way to create a new service.”