As part of our UC Insights 2018 series, I sat down to speak with Bryan Martin, Chief Technology Officer of 8x8 to ask him his thoughts about the past year and what he believes is to come in the world of unified communications.
Do you consider 8x8 to be a disruptive vendor in the cloud communications marketplace? If so, why?
"I believe that no one has disrupted this industry, from a technology and business perspective, more than 8x8. We have a long history of helping businesses create value through exceptional employee and customer experiences by providing the tools to communicate, collaborate, and analyse data from every real-time interaction across the organisation, globally, in a single, seamless, easy-to-manage solution. This mission is no longer about just replacing legacy phone systems and contact centre systems. It’s about helping companies become obsessed about their customers by breaking down communication silos and moving communications to a single, seamless system that enables the right expert employees to provide customers with a delightful experience over any channel anytime from any device, and offering the data analytics to anticipate what customers need."
"To do this, we’re bringing real time communications, collaboration and contact centre services together in one platform that’s easy to use and administer."
There’s been plenty of consolidation and new entrants entering the market in 2017, which were most significant for you and why?
"What I think is significant about all of the recent M&A activity is that it proves that the demand for cloud communications, collaboration and contact centre services in the mid-market and enterprise space is here."
"8x8 itself made a significant technology acquisition in 2017 with Sameroom, an interoperability platform that enables cross-team messaging and collaboration across disparate team collaboration services. We did this to strengthen our collaboration offerings and to enable compliant, real-time team collaboration between employees, partners and customers within and outside the enterprise across different team collaboration clients."
"We also increased our channel reach with new partnerships, including Ingram Micro, the world’s largest wholesale technology distributor, to bring our cloud communications, collaboration and contact centre solutions to even more partners and customer deployments around the globe."
What challenges and opportunities do you predict are coming in 2018?
"We are beginning to see the dominance of a view towards a single, unified platform for all communications, moving away from the world where IT buyers cobble together different components to serve the business. I think that 2018 will continue this trend towards truly unified cloud communications solutions that enable every employee and customer-facing rep to communicate, innovate and problem-solve at the new speed of customer expectations."
"A solution that is not fully unified across multiple channels can be hard-to-manage from an IT perspective and clunky and painful to use for employees. This inevitably leads to a poor working environment and employee experience, which can dramatically impact customer service levels. On the other hand, a single, fully unified communications, collaboration and contact centre that is easy to manage, and use by all employees, wherever they are in the organisation and no matter what their age or experience, which can result in happy and efficient staff and a fully collaborative, customer-engagement driven business."
