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, 8x8
"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.
