CCaaS and CPaaS take centre stage for 8x8 in its latest earnings call, as it suggests it is "migrating" away from being "UC-led".
8x8 met or exceeded estimates for total revenue for FY24 Q2 ($185 million), with Samuel Wilson, CEO at 8x8, saying that 8x8's CPaaS business was "a significant driver of the quarter-on-quarter growth" for the company, highlighting its new Omni Shield product, which intends to safeguard organisations from fraudulent SMS activity. Wilson also underlined that the adoption of 8x8's recently launched CCaaS product portfolio continues to accelerate, stressing the impact of its new AI-powered intelligent customer assistant. The AI assistant facilitated 50 percent quarter-over-quarter growth in self-service conversations. There was also the enhanced 8x8 Contact Center, featuring native secure video interaction functionality, which improved the product.
The significant impact of its CCaaS and CPaaS arms towards 8x8's Q2 results also reflects the adjusted influence of its UCaaS services as the company looks to move away from UC as its business nucleus. Although the company released several UC-based updates last quarter, including "Conversational IQ" for UCaaS, bringing contact centre-level speech analytics into unified communications frameworks, there has been an apparent change in strategic direction.
Lisa Martin, Chief Revenue Officer at 8x8, articulated this point during the call:
We are transforming our organization as our go-to-market motions, migrating from UC-led to contact center-led, and from a single product focus to a portfolio of products."
Martin herself arrived at 8x8 in June, bringing extensive experience with contact centre businesses. 8x8's new Chief Marketing Officer, Bruno Bertini, also has an experienced contact centre background.
The ambition to tweak 8x8's core focus from UC to being a contact centre-led organisation and to expand beyond 8x8's XCaaS solution to a more holistic ecosystem of products was echoed in the call by Wilson.
"8x8 is in the early stages of transforming our XCaaS communications and contact centre platform into a complete AI-powered customer engagement platform and ecosystem," Wilson said. "We are seeing early success with increasing customer adoption of multiple products in our portfolio and higher customer satisfaction."
