After Raising $10 Million From Investors, Is RingCentral Ready For Its IPO?

Before answering, you might want to hear from someone that uses the service.

Namely, Benzinga. We use

, and on the day we announced that Benzinga had received a

from the founders of Groupon,

. RingCentral attempted to

by offering us a one-month credit, but that hardly made up for the downtime we were forced to endure on one of the most important days in Benzinga history. Since that time, RingCentral has been a much more stable service. But, as one of my colleagues remarked, “Their transferring system is [still] wonky.” (To transfer calls, we must press a ton of keys, jump through rings of fire, cross our fingers extra tight and hope the stars are aligned.) It's a flawed system that will hopefully get better with time. Time may not on RingCentral's side, however, as it has persuaded Cisco

and Scale Venture Partners to invest $10 million in the company. According to

, the cloud-based phone service had previously raised $45 million from Cisco, Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures, DAG Ventures, and Silicon Valley Bank. TechCrunch says that earlier this year, RingCentral partnered with AT&T

and Roger's Canada (among other wireless carriers), who offer RingCentral to their customers. Vlad Shmunis, RingCentral's chief executive, told TechCrunch that the new funding will be used for both expansion and the delivery of new products/services. “It's a matter of educating businesses that they can save thousands up front by going with the cloud,” he said. “We see the cloud has a winning business function for any market.” But that's not all. Shmunis also told TechCrunch that RingCentral could see an IPO in the future. This is all good news. And again, the service has been better since that fateful day last May. But when Shmunis says “future,” I sure hope he means “in five or more years.” For the time being, the company needs to focus on perfecting its service for the 200,000 customers already on board.