8×8, a provider of cloud communications, has announced that it will acquire Wavecell. Wavecell is a Communications Platform-as-a-Service (CPaaS) provider. The company pays $125 million for Wavecell.
8×8 already offers solutions for voice, video, chat and contact centres. The company has 1 million users worldwide, writes ZDNet.
Wavecell in turn offers a cloud-first API platform with SMS, chat apps, video interaction and voice APIs. This makes it possible to deploy enterprise applications such as Application-to-Person messaging, omni-channel customer communication and multifactor authentication to scale.
Wavecell operates in 190 countries through relationships with 192 network operators and business partners.
Increase market presence
The acquisition will give 8×8 the enterprise level APIs and enable it to increase its presence in the CPaaS market. It also increases the company’s global presence. For example, its presence in the fast-growing Southeast Asian market is increasing, for example in Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand and Hong Kong.
The market opportunities in CPaaS are growing rapidly and this acquisition enables us to offer these services quickly to our customers all over the world, says Vik Verma, CEO of 8×8. However, the CPaaS market already has some dominant players. Twilio is the largest party, but also Vonage, Nexmo and Bandwidth are new competitors of 8×8.
8×8 is now the only cloud provider that has the full, global, cloud-native technology stack to provide voice, video, messaging and contact center as pre-packaged applications and enterprise-level APIs.
Jitsi
8×8 expanded its portfolio last year with Atlassian’s Jitsi videoconferencing platform. Jitsi was not a commercial product, but an Atlassian open source project. The project provided the building blocks for the development of communication platforms.
8×8 took over the entire project last year. The company also bought the team of Atlassian developers who maintain the code. With the acquisition, about six projects went to the company’s developers, including Jitsi Meet and Videostream.
Jitsi parts are now processed in the 8×8 Measuring platform. This should make the company more competitive with Slack.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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