Last Friday, I attended 8x8’s Analyst Day in New York, held at the Nasdaq MarketSite in Times Square. Was a different setting than usual, but it was part of a broader branding effort, where they got to ring the closing bell - and, along with the industry analyst cohort, financial analysts were there as well. Been a hectic few days, including an unscheduled stop in Montreal, but finally home long enough now to get this post done.
As usual, I ran a running commentary during the event on LinkedIn, and if you follow me there, you can track that. Otherwise, I’ll add some key takeaways here.
Interim CEO Sam Wilson did a great job putting some stakes in the ground for 8x8 to stand out in a very crowded market. 8x8 is the longest-standing independent player in this space, but they don’t own the market, and nor are they the household name they should be by now. So, it was good to hear that they want to be known as “an innovation company, not a product company”. I’ll buy that, and to back it up, he noted that R&D spending is up 4X since 2018.
They are, however, falling into line with some other vendors who see more upside with CCaaS than UCaaS. That makes good business sense, and to clarify, Sam said they weren’t moving away from UCaaS, or their bigger XCaaS story.
He rightly noted how there are lots of customer-facing workers who aren’t in contact centers, so they want to provide one solution that brings all that together. They’ve crystallized that notion with a new value proposition: “Customer Obsessed Communications”. Thankfully they haven’t turned that into yet another acronym - it’s a bit clunky, but I like it.
We heard several presentations around their AI focus, mainly through OpenAI. Everyone has an AI story now, and their approach is to develop a healthy ecosystem of partners, and as we were told, they’ve already got 15 lined up. They’re targeting AI/ML applications across the full contact center spectrum - CAI, WEM, CRM, analytics, automation, etc. The big driver is to help contact centers reduce their biggest cost - labor - and we’re just starting to see the various ways AI can bring intelligent automation to all these areas.
Speech analytics is a big part of this story, and this being a core focus for me, I was really glad to hear that - but to be fair, all CCaaS vendors are on this wavelength. Another important theme was microservices, with a common set of building blocks to support rapid innovation for both UCaaS and CCaaS. Hunter Middleton explained how they have two frameworks for this - Cloud 8 and Infra8 - where they’ve already developed 300 microservices.
There was more on tap, but I’m going to stop now - I think you get the gist. Bottom line - despite still having an interim CEO, this sounds like a company that has every intention of staying in the game, and they showed a confident vision for how to do that. We didn’t hear about their financials or go to market/channel plans, but I think they know their standing in the overall universe, and are executing pretty well.
It was also assuring to know that Bryan Martin - both CTO and Chairman of the Board - was always a stones throw from the podium, quietly watching his team play to what could be a tough crowd - industry and financial analysts. They did a great job overall, and am sure he liked what he saw.
A few photos to share below, and if you like the sights of New York in general, I’ll be posting some urban shots, as I usually do when travelling, on Facebook.
