8×8 Inc. has unveiled world’s first Communications Cloud that unifies enterprise communications, team collaboration, contact centers and real-time analytics in a single platform on March 8. Subsequently, the company also announced that it has acquired LeChat, Inc., the maker of Sameroom™, an interoperability app platform that enables cross-team messaging and collaboration in the enterprise. The product launch and acquisition augurs well for the enterprise communications technology firm, intending to provide a centralized collaboration platform for sales, marketing, customer service and technology teams.
By launching 8×8 Communications CloudTM, the company intends to enable companies to select collaboration services that best meet their teams’ needs without having to worry about interoperability between various platforms. Currently, LeChat’s Sameroom integrates with over two dozen different messaging and team collaboration apps, including Slack, Skype, HipChat and more. Thus, the two developments, though exclusive in their occurrence, are connected by virtue of their delivery model.
Sameroom brings to 8×8 a depth of experience in building and launching high-scale, commercial group-messaging solutions, as well as extensive knowledge of the industry’s leading team collaboration apps, making it possible to establish reliable, bidirectional collaborative environments involving unrelated organizational units using different chat platforms.
Andrei Soroker, co-founder of Sameroom, says, “Team collaboration has long been the internal approach of choice for technical teams. But as these tools started to spread across the enterprise, the lack of cross-team and cross-platform interoperability resulted in two fundamental problems – noncompliance and fragmentation.”
“8×8 understands that true unified communications and collaboration requires a new and open approach to team collaboration, which is why Sameroom was acquired. With this move, Sameroom will now be able to help more companies enable team collaboration as the technology becomes core to the 8×8 Communications Cloud.”
CEO of 8×8 Inc., Vik Verma, adds, “With Sameroom, our customers will enable their internal teams and external partners to collaborate across different team messaging apps of their choice, creating an open, more seamless communications and collaboration environment that is fully compliant with corporate policy. This new technology is the key to delivering messaging capabilities to all of 8×8’s services. We’re ushering in the era of the first true and open communications cloud, complete with cross-cloud integration, interoperability and real-time analytics.”
Commenting on the other important milestone 8X8 achieved with introduction of world’s first communications cloud, Verma said, “The 8×8 Communications Cloud marks the beginning of a new era for our industry where all communications, team collaboration, contact center and analytics are unified in a single, open platform that integrates across all clouds and applications used by lines of business. This convergence of two healthy and thriving markets- communications and collaboration- is going to change the way employees, customers and partners use and consume communications intelligence, making them better informed, more productive and more effective than ever before. The days of a fragmented communications landscape are numbered.”
The release of 8×8 Communications CloudTM comes within a month of partnership with CarrierSales, which is a leading cloud deployment enabler for enterprises. By teaming up with CarrierSales, 8X8 brings enterprise-grade, cloud contact center and unified communication solutions to businesses of all sizes, selling its proprietary Visual Contact Center and Virtual Office Solutions via Cloud.
8×8’s strategic product innovation received a major push when it announced the appointment of tech industry veteran Dejan Deklich as Senior Vice President of Global Research & Development. He is piloting the team that is responsible for developing product vision and roadmap for next-generation enterprise cloud architecture. Competition is getting sleek and heavy in enterprise collaboration sector, even as Google just announced a Slack-like addition in Hangouts!
More power in Clouds!
