This week, Gartner published the 2021 Magic Quadrant for Unified Communications as a Service, Worldwide, and we are ecstatic to share that 8x8 has been named a Leader for the tenth year running. That is more than any other vendor in the Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant. And, I believe it’s a solid testament to the tremendous benefits that 8x8 delivers to organizations by unifying customer and employee experience with XCaaS™. The 8x8 eXperience Communications Platform™ for XCaaS integrates contact center, voice, video meetings, chat, and APIs, all built on a resilient, secure, and compliant global cloud architecture.

We believe this enduring Gartner Magic Quadrant leadership position affirms 8x8's relentless innovation, customer commitment, and our investments in integrated communications tools that erase the boundaries between UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS. Over two million business users now rely on 8x8 to engage with customers and collaborate with globally distributed teams. This recognition by Gartner reinforces that despite the challenges brought in the past 18 months to every organization worldwide, 8x8 was able to continue to innovate rapidly, delivering the critical communications capabilities needed to respond rapidly and prepare for the move to hybrid work.

One analyst put it best at our recent Analyst Event: "Even after all these years of fierce competition, it's like a breath of fresh air to see the energy, the vision, and innovation that define 8x8."

At 8x8, we have a deep engagement with our customers; they inspire and propel us to push further. But above all, they trust us to be a strategic partner in driving business agility through connected EX and CX-focused communications, collaboration, and engagement.

As customer and employee expectations evolve quickly, we continue to deliver innovations faster than ever. In 2021 alone, as companies reopened and switched to a hybrid workplace, we added several new capabilities that empower organizations to supercharge collaboration between different teams, enhance employee productivity, and meet customers on their terms, including:

However, crafting tomorrow's vision for our customers is more than just adding the latest capabilities and features. It is reliant on an extensible XCaaS platform architecture that eliminates silos and brings employee and customer experience together. 8x8 is widely recognized as a leader in bringing UCaaS and CCaaS together, having been featured prominently for ten consecutive years on the UCaaS Magic Quadrant and seven straight years on the CCaaS Magic Quadrant. It is the advantages of this combination, though, that get me excited, which we at 8x8 have defined as the five XCaaS pillars:

  • Company-wide collaboration for every employee, everywhere, including users of Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, or Google for Work
  • Unified administration across UCaaS and CCaaS, which is not credibly possible in a multi-vendor scenario
  • Single integration framework for a lower total cost of ownership
  • Cross-platform AI & analytics to measure usage, adoption, and real-time quality
  • Single point of accountability, brought by one reliable vendor with the industry's only 99.999% financially backed SLA across UCaaS and CCaaS

Each year, vendors will enter or leave the Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant as technologies evolve. New contenders will undoubtedly be excited by their newly-discovered recognition, and rightfully so. But it's 8x8's single-minded dedication to customers and spirit of innovation that drives us through a decade of intense competition to end up as Leaders, once again.

Get your copy of the 2021 Gartner UCaaS Magic Quadrant here.