NewsUC&C3 Dec 2021 · 3 min read

Big UC News from 8x8, Microsoft and Slack

Welcome to our round-up of the biggest news in the UC space over the past seven days.

Welcome to our round-up of the biggest news in the UC space over the past seven days.

Following on from Ericsson’s announcement last week that it plans to acquire Vonage, we’ve another huge deal revealed just days ago.

8x8 to Acquire Fuze

The biggest news of the week came when 8x8 announced it would be acquiring Fuze in a deal worth $250m.

8x8 said the acquisition will bolster its XCaaS offering, which combined unified communications and contact centre technology, as well as expand its reach globally – particularly in Europe.

UC Today spoke with 8x8 CEO, Dave Sipes, just hours after the acquisition was announced.

He said:

“The migration to cloud-based communications and engagement is accelerating as organizations worldwide shift to hybrid work models, creating a multi-billion-dollar opportunity”

“The acquisition of Fuze expands our operational scale and extends our global presence as we meet enterprise demand for our XCaaS integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution”

Microsoft launches standalone Teams subscription

Microsoft is taken the fight to its collaboration competitors with a new Teams subscription priced at just £3 per user per month.

The new offering comes with more features than the free version of Teams but does not include other Microsoft 365 applications, such as Word and PowerPoint, that come with pricier packages.

Alberto Martinez Interiano, Product Marketing Lead at Microsoft, said:

“Teams Phone with Calling Plan delivers secure, reliable, and rich calling with features such as auto attendants, call queues, consultative transfer, and voicemail transcription, while leveraging Microsoft’s trusted cloud to deliver reliable, high-quality audio with intelligent and AI-powered capabilities”

EU Software Firms Club Together Against Microsoft

In less positive news for Microsoft, a group of European-based software vendors have banded together to make a formal complaint against Microsoft for what they described as anti-competitive behaviour.

The issue relates specifically to the way Microsoft bundles services such as OneDrive and Teams with Windows.

The complaints – filed with both the European Commission and regulators in Germany – is let by on-premises collaboration vendor NextCloud.

Frank Karlitschek, CEO and founder of Nextcloud, said: “This kind of behaviour is bad for the consumer, for the market and, of course, for local businesses in the EU”

“This is quite similar to what Microsoft did when it killed competition in the browser market, stopping nearly all browser innovation for over a decade. Copy an innovators’ product, bundle it with your own dominant product and kill their business, then stop innovating”

Slack-Salesforce Acquisition is Creating Partner Opportunities

Salesforce completed its $27.7bn earlier this, and recently appointed EMEA boss Pip White told UC Today that the tie-up is creating opportunities for channel partners.

"There’s a big Salesforce ecosystem of partners that have a lot of success in the market and are very keen to have an engagement with Slack, as well as continuing with Salesforce going forward. [There are] the large GSIs, who are thinking about how they can help organisations transform and a different working experience with the use of Slack and the Customer 360 experience,” she said.

“Then there are the smaller partners with a very deep knowledge of Salesforce and they want to now build out their Slack practice and start to engage with customers on those concepts of hybrid work and efficiency”

You can also view our recent interview with Slack UK boss Stuart Templeton here: