Zoom’s impending entrance to the contact centre space is probably not a shock to many, although the size of its arrival – through the impending acquisition of Five9 – may well be.
The announcement caused such a stir that a number of senior execs in unified comms and customer experience competitors were asked to give their views when reporting their company’s quarterly earnings.
Earning’s call participants are often reluctant to discuss competitors but, on the whole, that was not the case this time.
We’ve pulled together the highlights of the responses from senior execs in the UC and CC space.
Anand Eswaran, COO, RingCentral
“Zoom and Five9 have been partners for two-plus years and we are actually pretty thrilled about our win rates against them over the last two and a half years.
“The other thing that I would probably offer up is, if you just look at our strategy, we’ve been working with NICE inContact for six-plus years. We saw this UC+CC trend long
before it has become fashionable, as it is right now.
“We have a deep integration with inContact. And in fact, what you see is no other Gartner Magic Quadrant-leading, deeply integrated UCaaS and CCaaS solution outside of RingCentral contact centre, and that is what is making a difference.
“We just extended our partnership for a long time to come with NICE inContact and we’re seeing great pipe.”
Jim Chirico, CEO, Avaya
“I think one thing we need to keep in mind is how one determines and classifies enterprise versus non-enterprise. If you take a look… within contact centre, I would suggest that we play in a completely different zone than Five9.
“I think that’s a clear differentiation because it has to do [with] complexity expertise and so on.
“If you look at the acquisition, I don’t think it’s a surprise to anybody that there is a need for consolidation in this industry and I think Zoom and Five9 obviously took advantage of that. but if you contrast that to Avaya, we launched the Avaya OneCloud portfolio over a year ago – probably close to 18 months ago. In fact, we’ve had an integrated platform strategy as being the leader in UC and CC for years”
“This transaction to me is just proof that Avaya’s in a great position. Welcome to the neighbourhood. — rising tide lifts all boats, so we’re excited about it.”
Dave Sipes, CEO, 8×8
“Those are two platforms we compete with today, so fundamentally the landscape doesn’t change. I do believe it’s a validation that other people are coming to the vision that we have of XCaaS, which is bringing UC and CC together and it’s really being driven by the customer demand for that solution.
“I do think you can draw a few conclusions from that. One is the era of build your own contact centre is over.
“The other is, I think, less obvious, but the era of partnering is ending. While this was fine when there weren’t other solutions for customers to be partnered between UC and CC solutions, I think customers want more. They want more integration; they want more manageability long term with integration frameworks that work well; and they want single-vendor reliability across that.
“So, I do think we’re entering the era of the owned and integrated UC and CC product, and that’s an area where we continue to be farthest along on an integrated solution in our XCaaS and message.”
Barak Eilam, CEO, Nice
“There aren’t too many players in this market and, actually, Five9 were not a leader and the Gartner MQ and them being taken out by a video collaboration or video collaboration player is actually good news for us.
“We believe that in order to win the customer engagement market, the direction and the need from customers is to offer full digital CX offering that includes CCaaS, workforce engagement, analytics and AI digital and self-service. That’s what we were building in the last 18 months and this is where we see the success today.
“In this particular transaction, I don’t think Zoom is given size in any of those assets. I don’t see how it solves their problem”
“So quite frankly we’re happy with the upcoming disruption to them and we believe we have a very solid position both with our offering as well as many other partners that we have. And we do great business together.”
Doug Gaylor, COO, Crexendo
Zoom is a player in our field now, obviously leveraging their positioning with the video collaboration and trying to get into UCaaS.
“The acquisition of Five-9 puts them into the high-end call centre application space. We feel like we have got a great call centre application for the SMB market.
“Zoom and Five9, that’s a big acquisition. I was talking to somebody the other day and they say that putting two unicorns when you put two unicorns together, then you got to figure out what you got. I know that with what we’ve got with NetSapiens, we have got a tremendous UCaaS offering with a great contact centre application.
“So for the market that we are going after, I see Zoom as a competitor, but not a serious competitor because we have got our mission and I don’t worry about Zoom getting into our lunch.”
Rory Read, CEO, Vonage
“I think that acquisition kind of validates what we’re trying to do with the Vonage Communications Platform. We’ve been on this strategy for five, six years; we put the right assets together for where the market is going and I think that acquisition, in particular, kind of validates this idea that we’re on.
“I think we have been a first mover in the space to put these together in a platform that allows our customers to get these broad-based of an API-first engagement platform and then to build purpose-built applications in contact centre and then unified communications on top of that API flow.
“The next three to five, seven years, it’s the culmination of Internet, cloud and mobility all coming together to create this kind of perfect storm for communications embedded in all those activities.
“It’s a huge market. I don’t care what all the competition does. We’re going to focus on our customers. This is a customer first-based culture but we understand our customers and give them the best care nobody else can”
“Sure, there’ll be competitors, and there’ll be this one this quarter and the next one next year. It doesn’t matter; this market is huge.”
Shabtai Adlersberg, CEO, AudioCodes
Context: AudioCodes reported a strong lift in its business with Zoom when reporting its last quarter, particularly around Zoom Phone in the enterprise market. Adlersberg was asked if he expects Audiocodes to benefit from the Zoom-Five9 acquisition
“On the first glance, [I’m] not sure, however, should Zoom be successful in integrating with Five9 in terms of their customer base, with Five9 [being] a strong mid-market player, that may help Zoom to win those mid-market players.
“Now, if that happens the answer is ‘yes’, meaning that if Zoom is successful in acquiring more mid-market customers of Five9, that would be good for us.”
David Morken, CEO, Bandwidth
“For us, it doesn’t [change the competitive dynamics of the industry].
“They’re both terrific customers of Bandwidth. We love seeing our customers work well together and, in some cases, join forces. We believe that that combination will serve many global end-users really well.
For us, we celebrate great, innovative teams that we serve and support. In this case, they got together and have a view of the world that’s exciting and we’re going to do our best to keep up with them.”
