Ribbit, the web phone company recently acquired by BT, continues to tie together many of your communication tools with the release of Ribbit for Salesforce 2.0, which adds compatibility with landline phones, Google Talk and Skype.
Calling itself "Silicon Valley's first phone company," Mountain View, Calif.-based Ribbit has built a platform for easily integrating phone capabilities into web applications. Ribbit for Salesforce, which launched in May, was the first big demonstration of the platform's potential -- it linked your mobile phone to Salesforce's customer relationship management (CRM) software, allowing users to make, log and transcribe their calls and messages in Salesforce. The new features are probably less essential, but they bring Ribbit even closer to making your Salesforce account the center of all your business communication. For example, you can now answer calls on Google Talk, or receive voice mails as an instant message.
That sounds cool, but I wonder if Ribbit can find much traction at a time when companies are taking a hard look at their budgets. Ribbit acknowledges that it's a challenge to convince companies to consider a new service when the economic outlook is bleak. But Ribbit also makes a convincing case that its product is a smart investment. By making calls easier to track and manage, and by allowing customers to read voice mail transcriptions rather than listening to message after message, Ribbit for Salesforce can actually save employees a huge amount of time, freeing them up to be more productive.
Ribbit also plans to boost adoption with its just-announced channel partner program, where companies like Bluewolf and SimpleSignal sell Ribbit for Salesforce as part of their own offerings.