Earlier in September, we introduced 8x8 Video Meetings, an HD video conferencing and collaboration service that integrates with Virtual Office.

Today’s news is that we are introducing a new standalone edition.

You can learn more about 8x8 Video Meetings on our video conferencing page or you can simply try it for yourself. You can literally start a meeting in seconds.

So why we are giving the standalone version of 8x8 Video Meetings away for free?

The short answer is that this is a bold, confident bet on our own single communications platform and affirmation of our focus on helping customers migrate their communications and collaboration to the cloud.

Champion UCaaS Migration

Transforming communications is central to 8x8’s mission. This means making it easy for customers to move telephony, chat, contact center and video conferencing to the cloud along with API’s and then run them inside one easy-to-use platform. I have said countless times that one of the biggest growth opportunities for 8x8 is to champion the migration of legacy systems to modern cloud apps.

The free standalone 8x8 Video Meetings is a means to illustrate the power of cloud-based communications to enterprises yet to make the move. It will enable us to have conversations with customers about telephony and chat and the aggregated value a business can receive when they combine the three in the cloud.

Champion Startups and SMBs

We understand that not every company might be ready, particularly startups and small organizations, for full unified communications capabilities. They still need video conferencing services though. How can we serve these organizations and others while also creating growth opportunities for 8x8? Free 8x8 Video Meetings offers these organizations a great service that will scale with them and help them achieve success. Our aim will be to continue to add value to them with other products in our portfolio as their workforce and collaboration requirements grow.

No Barrier to Entry, Earning Trust

Another benefit of making video meetings completely free with no required downloads is that the barrier to try it is nil. If you are an IT administrator currently paying for meetings, why wouldn’t you want to give 8x8 Video Meetings a shot? We know there is a lot of competition for these services. Even though 8x8 Video Meetings is built on rock-solid video technology complemented with 8x8’s patented audio quality, there are going to be lots of people who are not familiar with us or our products. Offering a video conferencing service that simple and without restrictions is a good way to introduce these folks to us.

What’s Next

It is not difficult to find study after study showing how video conferencing is quickly becoming a business essential for organizations of all sizes. You know all the reasons like remote workforce management, minimizing long commutes, etc. We are all in on video conferencing. We have a solid roadmap where we will be adding new capabilities and features in response to customer feedback. With our unified cloud technology and communications platform, we offer an upgrade path to 8x8, to X Series, standalone contact center or we may offer more advanced, paid standalone versions. It will largely depend on how we can best serve our customers.

With Video Meetings, 8x8 now has a leading portfolio in place including voice, video, chat, collaboration and API’s on one platform and all the pieces to be the leader in the global communications market. I could not be more excited by the opportunities we have in front of us to win by helping drive our customers’ success.

Try a free video meeting here and let us know what you think.