8×8
Careers at 8×8
Mission
8x8 is committed to developing and delivering innovative, reliable, scalable and secure cloud software for business communications with a strategy focused on capitalizing on the current market growth dynamics of cloud adoption and communications software.
Business highlights
Headquartered in San Jose, CA, the company has developed a strong global footprint with 12 global data centers across 8 countries. 45,700 enterprises spread over 114 countries benefit from the company’s virtual contact center solutions. The company has operations across all 6 continents, but derives majority of its revenue from the Americas (87%), followed by clients in Europe (12%).
With 120 patents, the company’s cloud solutions replace traditional on-premise PBX hardware and software-based systems with a flexible and scalable SaaS alternative, encompassing cloud business phone service, contact center solutions, and web conferencing.
Key Offerings
Global Business Voice (8x8 Virtual Office), company’s flagship software product, is an end-to-end solution that enables a customer to use a single business phone number to place and receive calls from any supported device over any available Internet connection. Local numbers are available in over 80 countries and toll-free numbers are available in over 100 countries. The company further provides local number porting in more than 40 countries.
Its 8x8 Virtual Office and 8x8 Virtual Office Pro software enable all of the firm’s authorized personnel to access its corporate directory, sorted and searchable by name, branch and department. The company’s another offering, 8x8 Virtual Contact Center, provides a software to enable a multi-channel contact center.
Competition
The company faces competition from several types of organizations across different verticals. In cloud services providers, the company competes with Ringcentral, Fuze, Incontact, Five9 and Interactive Intelligence. In the communications & collaboration software category, it shares the market with vendors like Cisco, Google and Microsoft.
8x8 also faces severe competition in the incumbent telephony & legacy equipment category, competing with AT&T, Centurylink, Comcast and Verizon.
History
The company was founded as ‘Integrated Information Technology’ by Chi Shin Wang and YW Sing in 1987 as a fabless vendor of semiconductor products. Over the 1990s, the company renamed itself as 8x8 and got listed on the NASDAQ. It expanded its offerings and commenced producing software, chips and other technologies for video conferencing and subsequently launched a family of VoIP chips and software for IP phone and VoIP equipment. Subsequently, it acquired Odisei and Force and end to end VoIP services got included in its portfolio.
In 2002, the company relaunched itself under the Packet8 brand and in 2003, launched its first videophone services. The Company further expanded its customer base by agreeing to cater to 200,000 customers who lost phone services when VoIP startup SunRocket was liquidated in 2007.
The company’s growth was fueled by acquisitions between 2009 and 2015; it added Unified Communications to its portfolio in 2009; in 2010 it acquired Central Host and began offering cloud-based hosting services. In 2011, the company acquired Zerigo, a U.S. based cloud services provider and began offering cloud servers and managed DNS services; in the same year the company acquired Contactual, a leading hosted contact center.
With a vision to expand overseas, it acquired Voicenet, a U.K. based cloud services company. Its global foothold was further strengthened in 2015 with the acquisition of U.K. based DXI Ltd, a cloud based contact center solutions vendor. In June 2015 the company acquired assets of Quality Software Corp.
In August 2014, Gartner positioned 8x8 in the Leaders Quadrant of its Magic Quadrant for UCaaS (Unified Communications as a Service) for the third consecutive year. In May, 2015, Infonetics Research named 8x8 as the #1 cloud unified communications provider in its 2015 Cloud UC North American Service Provider Scorecard.
Future Growth Strategy
8x8 follows an integrated growth strategy, whereby it focuses on expanding its ability to effectively and efficiently deliver its software solutions into an increasing number of countries and regions, within a single cloud platform from a single vendor to ensure its competitive advantage.
It continues to invest in its software and software delivery infrastructure to provide a high-level of availability, reliability, security and compliance and to offer an intuitive, seamless communication experience that spans voice, messaging, and video.
The company also plans to focus more on the mid-market and distributed enterprises through increasing emphasis on its direct and channel sales strategy. For expansion, it looks to identify, acquire and integrate strategic technologies, assets and businesses.
Benefits at 8×8
Business model of 8×8
Customer Segments
8x8 has a niche market business model, with a specialized customer segment. It primarily operates in the cloud communications and collaboration services, a market in which the North American spending is expected to increase at a CAGR of 29% to US$14 billion in 2021. In this market, the company caters to a range of business customers, including SMBs and mid-market & larger distributed enterprises.
It serves 45,000 customers operating in over 100 countries across six continents, and has become the industry’s leading provider of secure, reliable enterprise cloud communications solutions.
8x8’s offerings are uniquely positioned to serve businesses of all sizes and can easily scale up, globally distributed enterprise customers. Its turnkey solution spans the breadth of communications and collaboration needs, provided with industry-leading reliability at an affordable cost. This allows customers to focus on their business instead of managing the complexities of disparate communications and collaboration platforms and the integration of these platforms with other cloud-based business applications.
Value Proposition
8x8’s value proposition lies in helping enterprises solve critical challenges facing businesses today through increased customer satisfaction and loyalty, effective collaboration and communication, freeing up IT resources, with maintenance-free communications and easy deployment and unifying communications throughout the entire enterprise.
It also creates value for enterprises by integrating mobile devices such as smartphones, tablets and laptops into the communications strategy, viewing real-time and historical data about crucial business functions for faster, better decisions and by keeping costs low and productivity high, with one easy-to-use economical system.
This offers its clients security and compliance, reliability backed by exceptional customer support and performance assured services with a global presence and network.
Channels
The company markets its services directly to end users through a variety of means including search engine marketing and optimization, third party lead generation sources, industry conferences, trade shows, webinars, traditional advertising channels and other demand generation activities.
It employs a multi-tiered direct sales force and indirect channel partner network consisting of VARs (value added resellers), master agents, system integrators and service providers in the U.S., Canada, UK and Australia to identify, qualify and manage prospects throughout the sales cycle.
The company’s sales professionals work closely with inside technical support, sales engineers and deployment specialists to develop customized proposals based on individual customer requirements.
Customer Relationships
8x8 lays special emphasis on customer service, quality and building strong relationships. Its solutions have been designed to allow users to communicate and collaborate with others in an integrated and fluid manner. Also, its cloud software solutions encompass all of the primary communications capabilities required by businesses - voice, video, presence, chat, conferencing, collaboration, contact center and analytics - providing multiple buying paths and usage scenarios for customers.
The company’s solutions link customer information with internal collaboration capabilities to provide synchronized customer engagement. It has also released a series of analytic tools in 2016 that give businesses visibility into employee communications in the contact center and the enterprise.
8x8 serves its customers via a global reach to 114 countries. Moreover, it also maintains a call center in San Jose, California and have a staff of ~90 employees and contractors that provide customer service and technical support to customers.
Key Activities
8x8 Inc provides cloud-based, enterprise-class software solutions that transform the way businesses communicate and collaborate globally.
The company's integrated, ‘pure-cloud’ offering combines global voice, conferencing, messaging and video with integrated workflows and big data analytics on a single platform.
Key Partners
The company has telecommunications interconnect and service agreements with VoIP providers and PSTN telecommunications carriers, such as Level 3 Communications, Verizon Communications and Inteliquent.
Key Resources
8x8 has been awarded over 120 US patents since its inception and has several more in its pipeline which is a key resource to the company. In addition, the company heavily relies on its 810 employee’s workforce for running its R&D, marketing and other key activities.
8x8's twelve data centers across eight locations around the world is also a valuable resource for day to day running.
Cost Structure
8x8's main cost consist primarily of personnel related expenses which includes deployment engineering, costs associated with outsourced customer service call center operations, commissions and other marketing and promotional expenses.
Other significant costs include expenses related to the services purchased and the technology licensed from 3rd party carriers.
Due to the industry that the company operates in, 8x8 makes significant investments in research and development to keep itself at pace with rapid technological changes and advancements.
Revenue Streams
8x8's core offering of cloud communication software solutions is the main contributor to its revenue and remains its main focus area for the future.
The company also generates revenues from the sale of its IP telephones for providing its cloud telephony service.
