8×8 Announce XCaaS Enhancements

8×8 have announced new 8×8 XCaaS (Experience Communications as a Service) enhancements, including support for video meetings with up to 500 active participants and advanced mobility, to drive organization-wide collaboration for a hybrid workforce.

“Our employees live in 8×8 Work to communicate, collaborate and engage with colleagues and customers across all of our operational centres and teams.

As our centralized meeting platform, the latest improvements deliver great efficiencies and will assist with reducing our IT software support footprint,” said Tony Forder, Head of Information Technology Operations at transcosmos Information Systems Ltd.

“Support for 500 video meeting participants will not only benefit our global customer service and support centres, but will also improve the reach of our service and quality leadership teams.”

“8×8 Work is a great tool for ensuring communications, collaboration and cohesion amongst our teams, partners and the community, regardless of location or device,” said Cecil Lawson, Information Technology Manager, City of Campbell.

“With support now for 500 simultaneous participants in online video meetings, we can evaluate our technology stack to reduce our costs by utilizing more of the 8×8 product suite when conducting large public meetings.”

8×8 XCaaS is built on the 8×8 Experience Communications Platform, a single-vendor cloud technology platform for both employee and customer engagement, which includes fully integrated contact centre, voice, video meetings, team chat and embedded APIs.

New 8×8 company-wide collaboration features support:

Better Video Meetings

• More Meeting Participants: The 8×8 Work app easily handles larger video meetings, supporting up to 500 active desktop users in a single meeting, and all with the ability to collaborate and share video, audio and screens. This capability is available for all 8×8 X Series plans that include video meetings without any additional licence costs.
• Leverage Existing Investments: Expanded access includes more endpoints, allowing attendees to join 8×8 video meetings and share screen content from huddle rooms using legacy SIP devices. This enables organizations to leverage existing hardware investments at a time when demand is impacting deployment of newer technologies.

Deeper Integration With 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams

• Visibility Across the Organization With 8×8 Presence Sync: The presence status of Teams-based users is updated in real time, and is visible in 8×8 Work and 8×8 contact centre, facilitating sales, service and support agents to quickly connect and collaborate with Microsoft Teams-enabled experts to resolve issues faster.
• Integrated Business Messaging: The 8×8 Voice for Microsoft Teams direct routing solution provides an organization’s hybrid workforce with individual business phone and fax numbers. This enables employees to conveniently send and receive SMS or MMS messages (US and Canada) or faxes (Globally) directly from any Teams native interface to further extend the experience for users.

Enhanced Workforce Mobility

• Share From Mobile Devices: Mobile participants are able to share content while accessing video meetings via the 8×8 Work Mobile iOS and Android apps.
• Tap to Reply: The 8×8 Work Mobile app allows users to reply inline to new 1:1 and team chat messages directly from their mobile device’s notification section without having to open the app, making it easier to respond to messages.
• Handoffs With Context: Users on the 8×8 Work Mobile app can warm transfer active calls to the desired recipient, and provide pertinent information for added context.
• Share Voicemails With Other Users: Voicemails can be shared with colleagues in team chat rooms using 8×8 Work Mobile to speed collaboration and issue resolution.

“The ideal unified communications and collaboration architecture enables individuals to collaborate via integrated voice, video, or messaging, through a unified interface that extends to back-office, field workers, and customer service agents alike.

“And a single-vendor, end-to-end approach not only offers end-user benefits, including reduced task switching and improved collaboration and productivity, but also optimizes total cost of ownership (TCO) as well,” said Irwin Lazar, President & Principal Analyst at Metrigy.

“Our analysis of real-world operating costs of more than 560 end-user organizations found that a single-vendor approach results in 56 percent lower TCO compared to a multi-vendor strategy with the key areas of savings include staffing, licensing, and the cost of managed services.”

“Organizations recognize the importance of modern communications experiences for powering business agility, especially as they drive new work requirements for a distributed workplace,” said Rob Pilgrim, Global Vice President of Product Management at 8×8, Inc.

“We continue to innovate across 8×8 XCaaS, allowing organizations and their employees to maximize productivity and responsiveness as they collaborate from anywhere, on any device in the app of their choice.”