8×8, provider of the world’s first Communications Cloud, has announced the evolution of the company’s next generation engineering initiative bolstered by recent high-calibre hires from some of the most respected technology companies in Silicon Valley. With these additional resources and expertise, 8×8 is accelerating its strategy to dominate the industry with the most advanced enterprise cloud communications solutions available.
“8×8 is clearly becoming the engineering destination to develop cutting-edge technology, and this is enabling us to increase our velocity of development and innovation,” said Dejan Deklich, Senior Vice President of global research and development (R&D) at 8×8.
“Our team is attracting top engineers across the globe that are bringing years of industry expertise building leading cloud and mobile platforms and apps from companies like Amazon Web Services, Oracle, VMWare and Cisco. They’re joining 8×8 ready to solve some of the biggest business communications and collaboration problems that midmarket and enterprise companies face today.”
Recognised as an industry leader, 8×8 has been awarded 137 patents in the United States and United Kingdom, covering a variety of voice and video communications, signaling, processing, contact center and storage technologies. The 8×8 engineering organisation has been at the forefront of innovation and development for the company’s products and services, such as 8×8 Virtual Office, 8×8 Virtual Contact Centre, 8×8 ContactNow and the superior voice quality delivered by the 8×8 Communications Cloud cited recently by the Tolly Group. By incorporating leading-edge technologies into 8×8’s industry-leading product portfolio, such as big data, microservices, machine learning, artificial intelligence, SD-WAN, and WebRTC, the company is well-positioned for continued growth and success driving global midmarket and enterprise adoption for its solutions.
The engineering team, under the leadership of Dejan Deklich, who has vast experience overseeing engineering efforts to develop next-generation microservices architectures, big data computational platforms and large scale systems, is scaling globally to meet the challenging business requirements of the company’s growing midmarket and enterprise customer base. Recent enhancements to the 8×8 engineering organisation include:
- Boris Strongin, VP of Platform Engineering: Boris Strongin is a seasoned technologist, executive, entrepreneur, leader and mentor with more than 20 years of experience working with big data, microservices and machine learning technologies, while building cutting-edge, game-changing products and leading global engineering teams at companies such as Amazon Web Services, VMWare, Oracle and HyTrust. At 8×8, he oversees global and analytics platform engineering, in addition to the move to microservices, APIs, Script8 and other core services at scale. He holds a doctorate in Physics from MIT
- Jared Smith-Mickelson, VP of Applications: Jared Smith-Mickelson has nearly 20 years of experience in enterprise software, overseeing API, mobile, integration, and big-data teams. He previously held executive engineering positions at Jive Software and Cisco Systems. At 8×8, he runs all global application development, which includes support for 8×8’s contact center solutions, mobile and desktop clients. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in computer science and electrical engineering from MIT
- Ramana Sampangi, Senior Director of Global Quality Effort: Ramana Sampangi is an accomplished business executive with experience in core technologies such as LAN, storage, virtualisation, security and cloud. Prior to joining 8×8, he held senior-level engineering roles at Riverbed Technology, Cisco, IBM, Hewlett Packard and others. At 8×8, Sampangi oversees all quality efforts worldwide for the 8×8 platform, apps and analytics. Sampangi has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and engineering from University of Mysore
- Edgar Nidome, Principal Architect: Edgar Nidome is a talented engineering architect with years of experience working with large, distributed systems, microservices, machine learning and big data technologies for enterprise customers at companies such as Marketo, Merced Systems, CollabNet, IBM and others. At 8×8, he is responsible for developing and refining 8×8’s robust product offering
- Haim Tebeka, Director of Mobile Engineering: Haim Tebeka is a seasoned software engineer and leader with more than 30 years of experience in mobile and embedded software development at companies including Microsoft, VMWare and Broadcom, among others. He’s passionate about delivering the best mobile user experience and created one of the first apps available in the App Store. At 8×8, Tebeka leads the development of mobile apps
In the past year, 8×8 has significantly grown its engineering organisation by approximately one-third to more than 200 full-time employees worldwide. This comes at the heels of 8×8’s announcement of the Cluj, Romania office last year, which has quickly become an incubator for specialised engineering and programming talent from local universities in the region.
About 8×8, Inc.
8×8, Inc. (NASDAQ:EGHT) is the provider of the world’s first Communications Cloud that combines unified communications, team collaboration, contact center, and analytics in a single, open and real-time platform. 8×8 eliminates information silos to expose vital, real-time intelligence across multiple clouds, applications and devices to improve individual and team productivity, business performance and customer experience.
