SAN JOSE – 8x8 Inc. today announced the world’s first Communications Cloud that combines unified communications, team collaboration, contact center and real-time analytics in a single open platform. As part of the introduction of the 8x8 Communications Cloud, the company also today announced the acquisition of Sameroom, an interoperability platform that enables cross-team messaging and collaboration in the enterprise; a host of new integrations with some of the world’s most popular enterprise applications; and the introduction of new open APIs for customers and partners.

Enterprises today are faced with an increasingly fragmented and siloed technology landscape that impacts their ability to service a global, distributed, remote and multigenerational workforce. With more and more functional teams making IT purchases and employees bringing unsanctioned tools and apps into the enterprise (i.e. shadow IT), CIOs are struggling to unify all communications and team collaboration tools. In fact, Gartner predicts that through 2017, 38 percent of technology purchases will be managed, defined and controlled by business leaders.

“The 8x8 Communications Cloud marks the beginning of a new era for our industry where all communications, team collaboration, contact center and analytics are unified in a single open platform that integrates across all clouds and applications used by lines of business,” said Vik Verma, CEO of 8x8. “This convergence of two healthy and thriving markets is going to change the way employees, customers and partners use and consume communications intelligence, making them better informed, more productive and more effective than ever been. The days of a fragmented communications landscape are numbered.”

The 8x8 Communications Cloud combines unified communications, team collaboration, contact center and real-time analytics in a single open platform. Furthermore, 8x8 enables enterprises to seamlessly connect across clouds, embed and customize communications into business workflows, and connect intelligently to share data with lines of business applications. As a result, companies can optimize their existing investments in sales, marketing, HR and collaboration applications, among others, while making employees more effective and productive in their everyday jobs. To support these new open cloud capabilities, 8x8 today introduced dozens of new integrations, new customer and partner APIs, and Script8, a dynamic communications flow and routing engine with reusable widgets.

The 8x8 Communications Cloud includes out-of-the-box integrations with dozens of the most popular enterprise applications. These integrations expose rich communications intelligence to the applications used everyday by sales, marketing, customer service and support, HR, finance and more to improve workflows and drive better productivity. Sample integrations include:

The 8x8 Communications Cloud offers a number of open APIs that allows customers and partners to expose rich communications data to their existing enterprise applications. New open APIs for customers and partners include:

Script8 is 8x8’s dynamic communications flow and routing engine API that offers reusable widgets for intelligently routing communications data for specific workflows. Script8 empowers end users with simple, personalized and customizable communications experiences, including robust communications control, data source integration and intelligent routing. Some use case examples that 8x8 customers have deployed using Script8 are:

8x8 Inc. (Nasdaq: EGHT)