8x8 has increased its enterprise customer base through its acquisition of Fuze while achieving a milestone of 50 countries with sales operations. Speaking on its Q4 earnings call, the CEO of 8x8 said the acquisition of Fuze has led to nearly 300 new customers, enhanced the company's 'XCaaS' (Experience Communications as a Service) solution and provided cross-selling opportunities. With a further 120 customers onboarded on top of these to its UC-CC business segment, 8x8 now has a total of 1,320 enterprise customers. Dave Sipes, CEO at 8x8, said: Enterprise adoption of our integrated XCaaS platform continues to expand with XCaaS ARR growth accelerating to more than 35% year-over-year, not including Fuze. "XCaaS now accounts for approximately 35% of combined 8x8 Fuze ARR, and given the Fuze enterprise base, we see an opportunity to grow this materially over the next several years. "We have been excited by the response we are seeing from fee customers and partners, and strengthened European presence is just some examples of the additive impact of the Fuze acquisition across the business.
"Customer retention among the Fuze space has been strong, and revenue of $24 million was above our expectations for the quarter.
"We moved swiftly after the transaction closed to integrate the two organizations and streamline the combined cost structure." The acquisition of Fuze cost approximately $250m split between cash and shares, based on Fuze's share price at the time the deal closed in January. In terms of global expansion, Sipes referred to its recent entry into Indonesia and Thailand, on top of its contact centre becoming available in the Philippines and China earlier this fiscal year. He told analysts that 8x8's UCaaS solution is now available in 50 countries with full cloud, public switch telephone network support, increasing from 41 territories a year ago and covering more than 85% of the world's GDP. 8x8's international business for CPaaS comes predominantly from the UK and APAC countries, notably Singapore, Indonesia, and Thailand, Sipes shared. Sipes also spoke about market trends: "One of the biggest trends we see is, customers are looking to integrate Teams users with their Enterprise Communication platforms. "They are doing it fundamentally through direct routing and Operator Connect solutions. "We have been recognized in the channel as having the best direct routing solution in the market. "We continue to hone that offering as we look at the other solutions in the market [such as] Operator Connect, which tends to be carriers or national service providers, who are usually less global, less feature-rich and siloed in that they're only servicing the Teams users in the enterprise. "Our offering brings functionality to those users as well as powering every employee in the organization, not just the Teams app, endpoint users but also frontline workers and contact centre users. "It is a big trend as the Teams' messaging application is prevalent with many of our customers. We have just scratched the surface [of possibilities] from powering that with a communication platform. It is a big initiative for a lot of our customers today."
8x8 gained 6,500 users by providing BDO with a voice and contact centre for Microsoft Teams.
