8x8 aiming to be stronger regional player with Maven Lab acquisition

“It's a great opportunity for us to bring a very exciting product to the market where we are based,” says Sylvain Chaperon, General Manager, CPaaS at 8x8.

Communication Platform as a Service (CPaaS) providers are now focused on enhancing the customer experience by providing more omnichannel customer experiences. For 8x8, this means needing to have the capabilities to deliver end-to-end customer engagement.

The communications platform provider recently acquired Singapore-based Maven Lab to deliver this to its customers in the region. 8x8 is hoping the acquisition will expand its capabilities in the APAC region, especially when it comes to native messaging, automation, and customer engagement capabilities.

In an interview with CRN Asia, Sylvain Chaperon, General Manager, CPaaS at 8x8, Inc shared that this is the first time ever that the CPaaS business of 8x8 has made an acquisition after growing organically for the past two to three years.

“Maven Lab has an excellent product, which is called Moobidesk that fills the gap between the contact center solutions that we still have, and is a lot easier to put in place for any enterprise company. And on top of that is very nicely built, so we will be able to continue to grow on that, to develop additional features. We are planning to expand the capabilities including pushing WhatsApp voice ability to increase to video elevation,” Chaperon explained.

Specifically, the integration of Moobidesk alongside the company’s wider communication and automation capabilities into the 8x8 Platform for CX will deliver a more scalable, unified, and comprehensive platform for the region. This enables improved performance across enterprise messaging and expands the ability to support a broader range of customer interaction channels.

Chaperon added that the acquisition also makes 8x8 to be a strong regional player, especially since Moobidesk is very focused on the Singaporean market.

“It's a great opportunity for us to bring a very exciting product to the market where we are based. So, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, everywhere in Southeast Asia where we have a sales force, where we foresee a strong opportunity from a commercial point of view, they will benefit from all the growth that we have and all the things that a NASDAQ company has. And probably outside of Southeast Asia, we're already looking at Europe and America to see if some things we can complement our existing offerings,” Chaperon said.

The CPaaS market

Given the competitive nature of the CPaaS market, Chaperon explained that there are actually two types of competitors in the market. First, there are large international players and then there are local players.

“A lot of global players do not have a strong local presence. So, to actually being able to grow in a local market, they have some difficulty because we all know if you try to do business in Indonesia or in the Philippines or in Thailand or in Singapore, it's totally different. Then the rest of the competition, which is a local player, which is exactly what Maven Lab was, had difficulty expanding outside of the market where they are,” he said.

As such, Chaperon believes that an advantage of 8x8 is that they are able to compete globally and internationally with the right levels in the capacity of having a local team to support them as well.

“The acquisition does give us quite a strong competitive advantage. I would not say we are the only one, but it's probably only two or three players in Southeast Asia that are able to provide such capabilities in the region,” he added.

Working with partners

While 8x8 does have a direct go-to-market strategy with customers, it also does have a strong partner ecosystem that contributes to a large partner of their growth. Chaperon pointed out that the reason for having a partner and direct approach depends on the type of customers they are working with.

“It will change from one customer to another one, depending on what they want. Let's take the example of a direct first approach because that's going to be a little bit more. You will have customers that will come and say that want an easy solution to do two-way discussion out of the shelf with data feeding their CRM. Can you do that quickly? Can we implement that? And this will be a direct business through us,” he explained.

Chaperon said that these customers will likely require different solutions because their IT system is very fragmented. They have a CRM, a marketing engine, a sales website, and perhaps a contact center somewhere else. They need us to show them how they can start bringing CPaaS capabilities into the system.

“So, that generally will take a lot longer. We take a little bit of professional services, integrations bit by bit. And we'll use more of the API side instead of out of the shelf or specifics done at similar product with system talking to each other. But this is where also we come into the picture with multiple products. So, we can even bring unified communication and CPaaS together, which generally in these things can help support the customer all the way,” he said.

When it comes to working with partners, Chaperon explained that the main difference with partners is that they generally look at a lot more support from the side.

“For ecosystem, whether it is compliance, helping to see how we can support them on professional services or integration or helping the customer. But realistically, be it a partner or us fronting the customer, the need of the customer is generally similar, and the approach is the same. It’s just the selling persons will be different,” he added.