8x8

8x8, Inc.

Type	Public
Traded as	NASDAQ: EGHT S&P 600 Component
Industry	Cloud-based Business Communications Services
Headquarters	San Jose, CA, USA
Key people	Vikram Verma (CEO), Bryan R. Martin (Chairman & CTO), Mary Ellen Genovese (CFO)
Products	Business VoIP Phone Service Unified Communications Hosted Contact Centers
Revenue	$209.3 million (FY2016)
Number of employees	800
Website	8x8.com

8x8 Inc. is an American communications technology company that provides VoIP telephony services. 8x8 services include cloud-based voice, call center, video, mobile and unified communications solutions for medium to enterprise-sized businesses and distributed enterprise customers. Some of 8x8's services are offered under the brand Packet8.

8x8 was founded in 1987 by Dr. Chi-Shin Wang and Dr. Y.W. Sing formerly of Weitek as Integrated Information Technology, Inc., or IIT. The name was changed in the early 1990s. They began IIT as a fabless vendor of semiconductor products for the math coprocessor and graphics chipset markets. The company produced x87 floating point coprocessor for the 286, 386 and 486 generations of microprocessors as well as graphics accelerator chips for the personal computer market during the late 1980s and early 1990s.

In 1992 the company began shipping a lossless data compression product called Xtradrive. In the early 1990s IIT began producing chips, software and other technologies for the videoconferencing market. The company changed its name to 8x8 and began marketing its own set-top videoconferencing systems for consumers under the ViaTV brand. 8x8 went public on the NASDAQ market in 1997, trading under the ticker symbol EGHT.

In January 1999, 8x8 launched a family of Voice over IP (VoIP) chips and software that were sold to IP phone, IP/PSTN gateway and other manufacturers of VoIP equipment. 8x8 acquired two companies (Odisei and U|Force), to acquire network/server VoIP technologies, and began selling an end-to-end VoIP services technology solution to service providers in 1999.

In 2002, the company relaunched itself as a VoIP service provider under the Packet8 brand. In 2003, it launched its first consumer videophone services on the Packet8 network. In 2004, the company became the first VoIP service provider to offer replacement, E-911 services to its subscribers. It also launched a suite of business services called Packet8 Virtual Office. In July 2007, 8x8 "entered an agreement … to accept" the 200,000 customers who abruptly lost phone service when VoIP startup SunRocket was liquidated. At the time, the Washington Post described Packet8 as "the third-largest independent Internet-phone service provider with 181,000 customers."