It was about a week ago that 8×8 announced the departure of CEO David Sipes. Now it seems the company is starting to sell off some of the assets they acquired to reshape the business and focus on what appears to be their telephony and call center operations.
The first asset jettisoned is Callstats to Spearline, an Irish testing and monitoring technology company according to The Fast Mode. Callstats helps companies understand WebRTC traffic. What 8×8 will sell of next is anyone’s guess, but it’s clear the company is paring down on it’s focus, so I don’t think we’ve seen the end of assets being moved out.
By selling off, or giving away what will be non-core elements, 8×8 reduces costs, staff and overhead and allows the company to focus on what makes it money.
Some of this is stock market driven. Other factors are what the board of directors thinks will get the stock price up, while another piece is to shed what can be gotten to make the company more attractive to an acquirer. Regardless of the reasons, it’s clear that there are major moves afoot at 8×8 and that we’ll keep seeing these types of announcements coming from one of VoIP’s longest running entities.
8×8 has a very rich patent portfolio, one that dates back to the earliest days of VoIP. While they have sold some of the patents off over the years, there are some core assets there that make the company attractive so don’t be surprised if they sell of the patents as they have not been very public about protecting them.
As some like to say–“Watch this space”