8x8 GM CPaaS on the evolving market and how partners have an important role to play
Stephen Hamill discusses how the CPaaS business uses partners.
With everyone working from home during the pandemic, the CPaaS market was thriving but according to Stephen Hamill, general manager, CPaaS, 8x8 the market has changed.
But with this change comes the opportunity to leverage partners to help them reach core customers.
“It was easy pickings for a long while. That's changed in the sense that the industry can't get away with easy money in the way it did,” he explained.
Hamill said the market is becoming more competitive with organisations becoming more niche and trying to make it clearer to their customers who they are.
"We have a challenge with that, because we are very broad in terms of the technologies that we offer, much more so than perhaps most of our competitors,” he explained.
This is where the partners have a role to play.
“Defining ourselves is something that we have to figure out that we do well, and that's why we think that partners is a much better channel for us than trying to tell the whole world a very complicated story,” Hamill said.
“It's much it's much better for us to work with a partner that has a defined go-to-market strategy, has an ideal customer profile, and then we can help them understand how we fit with our ideal customer profile and bring all the things that we have to bear on that.”
Hamill explained how the company wants to help its customers.
“We want to be much more of a use case industry focused company, and work with partners that are interested in driving long term value with their customers,” he said.
The opportunity of AI
One of the opportunities for partners, is the growth and popularity of AI. Hamill explained how the years of ideation and discussing the impacts of the tech is finally coming into fruition.
“The idea of being able to communicate with customers across every channel in a single voice or a single conversation, have them switch channels, have that conversation, pass them through to a live human being when necessary,” he said.
“Being able to do that and drive those conversations and engagements with their end customer, it's the Nirvana that we've been talking about for 10 years, it's starting to really come true.”
Hamill said he has been talking about AI seriously for more than 10 years on stages.
“And it's reality now in everyday life,” he added. "AI is the biggest thing that we're doing.”
“That whole proliferation of any channel, any customer, any time, that's one of those things that we've talked about forever, and particularly in marketing.
“A lot of our traffic is marketing traffic. This whole notion of multi channel marketing and whatever else it's real now, and it's not as hard as it used to be, either.”
Future focus
For the next 24 months, expanding in Australia is 8x8’s focus.
“In terms of our next growth area, we've doubled down on our team there. We've doubled the size of the team,” Hamill explained.
“But we do have a much bigger, CPaaS and UCaaS team, we're bringing those teams together, and we're looking at both organic and inorganic growth in the region.”
They are also looking at possible acquisition targets.
“There are ways that we could expand quickly into Australia. We've been in Australia for at least five years. We're not new to that and we do have a presence in Queensland, Victoria, our biggest presence is in New South Wales. We even have people in New Zealand,” Hamill ended.