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8x8 Celebrates 25 Years In the Business

TMCnews Featured Article


February 08, 2012

8x8 Celebrates 25 Years In the Business

By David Sims, TMCnet Contributing Editor


Break out the champagne, we’ve got a birthday -- 8x8 (News - Alert), which made its name as a VoIP provider, is celebrating 25 years in business in Silicon Valley.


Company officials say it’s worked in voice, video and mobile communications technologies, has been awarded 79 patents and currently provides cloud-based business services.

They’re rounding the corner in fine shape, too -- TMC’s (News - Alert) Paula Bernier recently noted that 8x8 reported “record financial results for the third quarter of fiscal 2012, which ended Dec. 31, 2011.”

Revenue for that period was $23.3 million, a 31 percent increase from the same period last year. It marks a 17 percent sequential increase compared to revenue of $19.8 million in the prior quarter, Bernier said.

Bryan Martin, 8x8 Chairman and CEO, who has been with 8x8 since 1990, said the company has pursued opportunities “ranging from supplying our proprietary vision processor chip to AT&T (News - Alert) for its next generation Picturephone to licensing our service creation software to Lucent Technologies to launching one of the first VoIP phone services."

Company officials say 8x8 was founded in 1987 by Dr. Chi-Shin Wang and Dr. Y.W. Sing under the name Integrated Information Technology, and their first goal was developing multimedia semiconductors, embedded firmware and software. They switched the name to 8x8 in 1996 to “reflect a new emphasis on programmable solutions for the videoconferencing market,” company officials say, tactfully explaining for the technologically-challenged that "8x8" is the number of video pixels, or dots of light, “used as the basic building block in many image compression and video transformation functions.”

They’re not resting on any laurels either. Just this past week TMC had the news that Voxbone announced it is providing geographical and toll-free numbers to help cloud communications provider 8x8 expand its international calling capabilities to serve larger business customers on a global scale.

The new relationship, Voxbone officials say, “enables 8x8 to provide geographical and toll-free numbers for business customers with offices outside of the United States,” while Voxbone also makes it “easy for 8x8 to integrate its recently-acquired hosted contact center capabilities with its established telecommunications services.”

Martin pointed to such successes as the Virtual Office hosted PBX (News - Alert) phone service, Virtual Office Mobile and Virtual Room video conferencing as offerings the company’s particularly proud of. Recapping some company highlights, he noted that in 2010, 8x8 acquired server hosting company, Central Host, and just last year acquired Zerigo, which expanded the hosting portfolio with cloud servers and other advantages, and also picked up Contactual (News - Alert), a cloud-based call center interaction management company.


David Sims is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of David’s articles, please visit his columnist page. He also blogs for TMCnet here.

Edited by Chris DiMarco







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