COVID-19 aside, 2020 was the year of the platform for cloud communications and collaboration vendors. The year’s biggest moves—Salesforce’s Slack acquisition, the raft of CCaaS/UCaaS mergers and the launch of the 8x8 Open Communications Platform™—foreshadowed 2021’s rise of the cloud platform approach to telephony, contact center and workforce collaboration.

To help our customers better understand these platform trends, particularly how Microsoft Teams can impact their organization, 8x8 commissioned Hanover Research to study how IT decision makers feel about Microsoft Teams direct routing solutions, sometimes called bring-your-own-carrier (BYOC) solutions, both for office workers and in contact centers.