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.