Acquisition allows compliant, real-time team collaboration within and
outside the enterprise
SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--
8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ:EGHT), the world's
first Communications Cloud, announced today its acquisition of LeChat,
Inc., the maker of Sameroom™,
an interoperability platform that enables cross-team messaging and
collaboration in the enterprise. The acquisition catapults 8x8 into an
industry-unique position in the team collaboration market by providing
interoperability between more than two dozen team collaboration clients
as part of the 8x8 Communications Cloud™ (see
related press release). Sameroom further strengthens 8x8's cloud
communications capabilities and provides employees, customers and
partners with the ability to collaborate across disparate team messaging
solutions, as well as the capability to launch 8x8 communication
services from within these apps.
According to Mary Meeker's 2016
Internet Trends report, the team collaboration market is continuing
to grow, and messaging tools are outpacing other popular apps. However,
today most solutions place users in communications silos because they
are not designed to interoperate with each other. Increasingly,
companies are using chat services to augment or replace traditional
email for team collaboration. However, the side effects of this trend
are posing new business challenges such as fragmented, siloed
information; multiple accounts for each employee; the inability to
securely extend collaboration outside of the enterprise; and violations
of corporate data governance policies. The fragmented user base and
scattered information ultimately deters enterprise-wide adoption of team
collaboration solutions.
"The acquisition of Sameroom marks an important milestone for 8x8 as a
company and the cloud communications market as a whole. We're ushering
in the era of the first true and open communications cloud, complete
with cross-cloud integration, interoperability and real-time analytics,"
said Vik Verma, CEO of 8x8. "With Sameroom, our customers will enable
their internal teams and external partners to collaborate across
different team messaging apps of their choice, creating an open, more
seamless communications and collaboration environment that is fully
compliant with corporate policy. This new technology is the key to
delivering messaging capabilities to all of 8x8's services."
Sameroom brings to 8x8 a depth of experience in building and launching
high-scale, commercial group-messaging solutions, as well as extensive
knowledge of the industry's leading team collaboration apps. Sameroom
makes it possible to establish reliable, bidirectional collaborative
environments involving unrelated organizational units using different
chat platforms.
"Team collaboration has long been the internal approach of choice for
technical teams. But as these tools started to spread across the
enterprise, the lack of cross-team and cross-platform interoperability
resulted in two fundamental problems - noncompliance and fragmentation,"
said Andrei Soroker, co-founder of Sameroom. "8x8 understands that true
unified communications and collaboration requires a new and open
approach to team collaboration, which is why Sameroom was acquired. With
this move, Sameroom will now be able to help more companies enable team
collaboration as the technology becomes core to the 8x8 Communications
Cloud."
How Sameroom Works
Sameroom addresses these fragmentation and noncompliance challenges by
enabling users to stay in their "home" team collaboration service and
simply connect with other users' "rooms" on the same or different
platforms. Sameroom relays all messages and files to the connected rooms
in real time. This way, users in different groups only need to maintain
their home team collaboration account. Since all of the data is
replicated and each room retains its own copy, none of the parties
violate any corporate data governance policies.
Over 200 enterprises, including leading universities, ecommerce
websites, car sharing services, professional sports leagues and more,
are using Sameroom everyday to communicate between various internal and
external team collaboration channels. With this acquisition, Sameroom
customers will continue to enjoy the same seamless interoperability and
will also soon be able to leverage embedded enterprise communications
features from 8x8, such as starting online meetings, audio calls and
video conferencing, from within their team collaboration service of
choice.
In related news, today 8x8 introduced the
world's first Communications Cloud, which combines unified
communications, team collaboration interoperability, contact center, and
analytics in a single, open and real-time platform. The company also
announced a number of new business application integrations, aimed at
enhancing business workflows by making real-time communications,
collaboration capabilities and intelligence available for third-party
cloud applications, all customizable via an Open
Cloud approach to fit individual enterprise needs.
The acquisition of Sameroom further enhances and extends the 8x8
Communications Cloud by allowing companies to select collaboration
services that best meet their teams' needs without having to worry about
interoperability between various platforms. Currently, Sameroom
integrates with over two dozen different messaging and team
collaboration apps, including Slack, Skype, HipChat and more.
To learn more about Sameroom's capabilities, visit: https://sameroom.io
and read Sameroom co-founder Andrei Soroker's blog
post.
About 8x8, Inc.
8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ:EGHT) is the world's first Communications Cloud. 8x8
easily and seamlessly connects employees, customers and applications to
improve business performance for organizations anywhere in the world.
For additional information, visit www.8x8.com
or connect with 8x8 on LinkedIn,
Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.
8x8, 8x8 Communications Cloud and Sameroom are trademarks of 8x8, Inc.
All other marks are trademarks of their respective owners.
View source version on businesswire.com: http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170308005467/en/
8x8, Inc.
John Sun, 408-692-7054
john.sun@8x8.com
or
InkHouse
for 8x8
Tracey Workman, 781-366-1789
8x8@inkhouse.com
Source: 8x8
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