SANTA CLARA, Calif., May 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- 8x8, Inc. (NASDAQ: EGHT), provider of Packet8 residential, business and video Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone services, today announced that a recent report by telecom research firm AMI Partners ranked its Packet8 Virtual Office service as the #1 hosted VoIP phone system choice by U.S. based small and medium sized businesses.
According to the SMB Interest Perks Up in Hosted VoIP report, compiled in April 2007, Packet8 Virtual Office had 6,000 customers, ahead of competitive offerings from XO Communications, Cbeyond and Covad. AMI's research methodology was based on key inputs including end user surveys of SMB and mid market companies as well as briefings, data and publicly available financial statements and news releases from voice communications vendors.
"AMI Partners' recent VoIP report is a very insightful and comprehensive study of the rapidly growing market for hosted VoIP business phone services," said 8x8 Vice President of Marketing & Sales Huw Rees. "We are very pleased that our Virtual Office solution, which is based on 8x8's own technology, was one of the first hosted PBX solutions to be deployed worldwide and that it has gained significant market acceptance with more than 7,000 businesses now using the service."
Hosted VoIP phone services deliver PBX functionality as a service available over the IP network with all equipment and management hosted externally by the service provider. Monthly service charges paid for hosted telephony business services include access charges, usage charges and charges for value added features such as find-me-follow-me, integrated voicemail/email, web based call logs, etc.
The AMI Partners report claims "SMBs are getting used to doing things in a hosted fashion. They are already implementing hosted solutions for collaboration, business applications and infrastructure solutions -- e-mail, e-commerce, CRM, ERP, accounting, personal productivity, document sharing, security and backup from small innovative companies that are providing hosted solutions that can be integrated through hosted solution integration platforms like AppExchange from salesforce.com."
Offering a combination of unlimited local and long distance calling in the United States and Canada plus advanced PBX features for just $49.99 per month/extension, the Packet8 Virtual Office solution is currently being used by more than 7,000 U.S. business organizations. Virtual Office enables small and medium sized enterprises to secure distributed corporate class telecommunications capabilities for a fraction of the cost of wireline business services from traditional phone companies. Unlike comparably priced single line VoIP phone services which offer features more suited to individual residential users, Packet8 Virtual Office provides companies with complete business phone system functionality along with the flexibility to operate each extension from any geographically dispersed location with high-speed Internet access.
The Packet8 Virtual Office service includes an auto attendant, worldwide extension dialing, business class voicemail, a full featured conference bridge and ring groups, in addition to a rich variety of other business class PBX and dial tone features not normally found on premise-based PBX systems. Packet8 Virtual Office reduces an organization's total cost of ownership for telecommunications services because of its minimal initial investment combined with unlimited worldwide calling to other business extensions and Packet8 subscribers, unlimited local and long distance business calling in the United States and Canada and access to Packet8's low per-minute international calling rates to overseas wireline and mobile phone numbers.
