I have on a few occasions been referring to Zoom as the runaway train in the collaboration as a service market. Judging by two stories in UCToday this week surrounding the layoffs at BlueJeans and Fuze, the Zoom effect is clearly obvious. While the BlueJeans layoffs were not as expected, Fuze has been very hit or miss in the UCaaS battleground, with lots of turnover the past few years in key roles, starting on the sales side.
BlueJeans was not as expected. As one of the collaboration industry darlings, embracing the cloud just after Vidtel moved first in that direction, under the aegis of Scott Wharton, who now guides video at Logitech post exit, BlueJeans originally was driven by a direct sales model for their CaaS model. At some point BlueJeans pivoted into a channel play and kept their direct play too. Their early strength was interoperability with enterprise gear, plus Skype, and the arrival of the "huddle" room. But as Zoom has been steadily grabbing that market share, and now with the number of other options on the market due to WebRTC, faster connectivity, better low latency video codecs, BlueJeans early mover advantage, and their high quality lead has waned.
Fuze has been one of the UCaaS industry's constant makeovers. Leadership changes. Too much me too. Not any me different, has plagued their business for years. Now it seems those problems have led to their needing to downsize.
I don't think these layoffs are the end. They foreshadow what may be an industry trend as more of what people have been doing moves to automated solutions and of course the steady outsourcing and offshoring of tasks not needed to be done in-house.