Businessweek

8x8 Inc. announced the appointment of Ben Taft to the position of Vice President of Inside Sales, reporting to company's President Kim Niederman. As Vice President of Inside Sales, Taft will manage sales organization, building upon existing industry-defining programs, initiatives and practices while working in tandem with marketing, product development and customer support to maintain the company's market position in the hosted PBX and unified communications industry. An accomplished B2B technology sales, marketing and business development executive with over 15 years experience, Taft most recently served as Senior Director, Global Sales Strategy & Transformation at Brocade where he constructed and managed the strategy for sales and customer engagement employed by a worldwide sales organization.

8x8 Inc. announced the release of Virtual Contact Center 7.1, an upgraded version of its hosted call center software service with new features designed to improve the efficiency of agents and to facilitate the administration of larger contact centers. 8x8 Virtual Contact Center is a cloud-based call center solution that is offered as either a standalone service or an integrated component of the 8x8 Virtual Office hosted PBX business phone system. Ideal for small to mid-sized call center organizations or call center departments within larger enterprises, Virtual Contact Center offers rapid start-up and provisioning (hours or days versus weeks or months), ease of use (set-up and management by call center administration, not IT) and a patented Advanced Virtual Tenant Architecture (AVTA) designed to deliver industry-leading reliability. The Virtual Contact Center 7.1 release offers features and enhancements that impact all users of the Virtual Contact Center including Administrators, Supervisors and Agents. These include: New, out-of-the-box CRM support for Zoho (in addition to Microsoft Dynamics ZenDesk, Salesforce and NetSuite) plus enhanced CRM integration with NetSuite; Configuration Manager functionality now allows multiple administrators with customizable privileges offering better security and control; Configuration Manager presentation enhancements including sorting, filtering and grouping tenant data; Agent interaction refinements including shortcuts, forced transaction codes, and recording pause; Refined Caller ID controls to allow agent-by-agent selection of outgoing Caller ID; Roles-based management to add granular system security and control; Enhancements for creating and editing IVR scripts; Configuration user interface improvements increase presentation options to ease the management of larger contact centers; New support for Microsoft Dynamics authentication through Office 365, enabling single sign-on functionality; New scheduling options for IVR routing and services. Virtual Contact Center 7.1 is available now and has already been provided free of charge to existing customers of 8x8 Virtual Contact Center services. 8x8's cloud based infrastructure enables customers to receive the benefits of the upgrade process without any downtime, enabling complete business continuity.

8x8 Inc. Presents at Jefferies 2013 Global Technology, Media and Telecom Conference, May-07-2013 09:30 AM. Venue: The Westin New York, Times Square Hotel, New York, New York, United States. Speakers: Bryan R. Martin, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Dan Weirich, Chief Financial officer, Principal Accounting officer and Secretary.

8x8 Inc. (NasdaqGS:EGHT) is seeking acquisitions. 8x8 intends to use the net proceeds from sale of securities for working capital and other general corporate purposes, including expanding sales and marketing, research and development. 8x8 also might use a portion of the net proceeds for the acquisition of technologies, businesses or products that are complementary to our business, although no such acquisitions are subject to any plan or arrangement or being negotiated as of the date of this prospectus, and no portion of the net proceeds has been allocated for any specific acquisition.

8x8 Inc. introduced a new Virtual Office Desktop soft-phone application for its Virtual Office business VoIP and Virtual Office Pro unified communications solutions. Virtual Office Desktop provides all of the same functionality of the Virtual Office Online browser application in a more robust native Windows and Mac application. Integrating a business soft-phone with one-on-one video calling, web and video conferencing along with visual voicemail, the company's update to Virtual Office Desktop also includes enterprise grade IM (instant messaging) and presence along with fax, and social media feeds, all found in one easy to use application. Benefits of Virtual Office Desktop include: Better call and message notification: For web applications, users need to launch a browser and navigate to a web page that can get hidden behind other browser tabs, making it easy to miss calls and chats. As a native Windows and Mac app, Virtual Office Desktop automatically launches when the computer starts. The app shows system alerts or screen pops in the foreground when incoming calls, IM's and faxes are received. Calls can ring both a headset and the computer speakers in case the user has temporarily put down his or her headset. Simplified user interface and compact design: Saves screen space while providing quick access to a personal and corporate directory, soft phone, online meetings and faxes. The History tab provides an easily searchable archive of call logs, chats, meeting info, recordings and social media feeds. Improved call quality: Echo cancellation and native support for advanced speech codec's improve audio quality on Windows, even with low bandwidth connections.