March 08, 2017 08:15 AM Eastern Standard Time
SAN JOSE, Calif.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–8×8, 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 8×8 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 8×8 Communications Cloud (see related press release). Sameroom further strengthens 8×8’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 8×8 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 8×8 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 8×8. “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 8×8’s services.”
Sameroom brings to 8×8 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. “8×8 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 8×8 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 8×8, such as starting online meetings, audio calls and video conferencing, from within their team collaboration service of choice.
In related news, today 8×8 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 8×8 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 8×8, Inc.
8×8, Inc. (NASDAQ:EGHT) is the world’s first Communications Cloud. 8×8 easily and seamlessly connects employees, customers and applications to improve business performance for organizations anywhere in the world. For additional information, visit www.8×8.com or connect with 8×8 on LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+ and Facebook.
8×8, 8×8 Communications Cloud and Sameroom are trademarks of 8×8, Inc. All other marks are trademarks of their respective owners.
Contacts
8×8, Inc.
John Sun, 408-692-7054
john.sun@8×8.com
or
InkHouse for 8×8
Tracey Workman, 781-366-1789
8×8@inkhouse.com
