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. According to the company, IIT began as a chip designer. The company produced coprocessors for microprocessors as well as graphics accelerator chips for the personal computer market during the late 1980s. The company later changed its name to 8x8 and began producing products for the videoconferencing market. 8x8 went public on the NASDAQ market in 1997. The company moved their trading to NYSE in 2017, under the ticker symbol EGHT. In 1999, 8x8 acquired two companies, Odisei and U|Force, to acquire network and server VoIP technologies. In March 2000, 8X8 relaunched itself as a VoIP service provider under the name Netergy Networks. The company changed its name back to 8X8 in July 2001. 8x8 began trading on the Nasdaq SmallCap Market on 26 July 2002. In 2003, the company launched a videophone service. In July 2007, after startup SunRocket was liquidated, 8X8 entered an agreement to accept 200,000 of its customers. Gartner has listed 8x8 several times as a Leader for UCaaS within its Magic Quadrant, a series of technology market reports. 8x8 has been awarded 128 patents related to semiconductors, computer architecture, video processing algorithms, videophones and communications technologies and security.
Acquisitions
In May 2010, 8x8 acquired Central Host, a California-based managed hosting company. In June 2011, 8x8 announced the acquisition of Zerigo, a Colorado-based cloud services company. In September 2011, 8x8 acquired Contactual, a hosted contact center company. In 2013, 8x8 acquired UK-based Voicenet, a cloud services company. In May 2015 8x8 acquired privately held UK-based DXI Ltd., a cloud-based contact center solutions vendor for $26 million in cash and stock. The following month, the company acquired assets of the privately held Quality Software Corp. as well as two affiliated companies. In October 2018, 8x8 acquired Jitsi, an open source tool for chat and videoconferencing, from Atlassian. In July 2019, 8x8 acquired Wavecell, a CPaaS provider.
