ucaas
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RingCentral
The company that dragged the office phone into the cloud is now betting the whole switchboard on AI agents that answer, route, and read the room.
8x8
One company built its whole pitch on erasing the line between the phone on your desk and the call center that answers your customers. Here is how 8x8 turned four decades of telephony into an AI-driven customer-experience platform.
Nextiva
A phone company that decided phone calls were only the beginning. How Nextiva turned a VoIP line for small businesses into an AI platform that runs a billion customer conversations a year.
Mitel
For half a century Mitel has run the office phone. After a 2025 debt reset, the Canadian veteran is betting that hybrid - part on-premises, part cloud, part AI - is where enterprise communication actually lives.
GoTo
Powering a world of work without limits.
Dialpad
The company that turned every phone call into data is betting its future on AI agents that answer before you finish asking.
The Software War Behind Every 'Please Hold'
8x8, Aircall, CloudTalk, Cisco, Nextiva, UJET, Vocalcom and Broadvoice are all chasing the same few seconds before a human picks up. Here is how eight very different companies ended up fighting over the cloud behind your customer service line.
Broadvoice
CX Built For Where Your Business is Going Next. Broadvoice replaces overbuilt, underperforming communications platforms with cloud calling, contact-center, and AI tools built for small and mid-sized businesses.
Avaya
The 25-year-old telecom spinoff that answers the phones for most of the Fortune 100 is betting its second act on hybrid AI-powered customer experience - without asking anyone to rip out what already works.
Vonage
Vonage is a cloud communications company that lets businesses and developers add voice, video, SMS, messaging and network-based verification to their apps and customer operations. Once a pioneer of home internet phone service, it reinvented itself as a platform business built on APIs, unified communications and contact-center software, and is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Ericsson operating as its Global Communications Platform.
Intermedia Intelligent Communications
Intermedia Intelligent Communications is a Sunnyvale, California cloud communications company that bundles voice, video, chat, SMS, contact center, business email, file sharing and archiving into a single AI-powered platform. Founded in 1993 as a business email and web hosting provider, it now serves more than 130,000 businesses, largely through a channel of thousands of resellers and managed service providers. Its flagship Unite (UCaaS) and Intelligent Contact Center (CCaaS) products, layered with its SPARK AI suite, aim to replace a stack of separate communication vendors with one reliable, secure system aimed squarely at small and midsize organizations.
Mio
Mio is an Austin, Texas company that makes enterprise chat platforms talk to each other. Instead of forcing a whole organization onto a single tool, Mio sits in the middle and federates the public APIs of Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Chat, Zoom Team Chat and Cisco Webex so a message typed in one app lands natively in another. Founded in 2015 by Tom Hadfield and James Cundle and backed by Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Zoom and Cisco, Mio turns the messy reality of multi-platform companies (and the partners they work with) into a single, interoperable conversation.
Tom Hadfield
Tom Hadfield is the British entrepreneur and CEO of Mio, an Austin-based company that makes enterprise chat tools like Microsoft Teams, Slack and Google Chat talk to each other. He is the kid who built Soccernet with his dad at 12 and sold it to ESPN for $40 million at 17, attended Harvard, ran a biotech, then went through Y Combinator to attack the problem of messaging interoperability with backing from Khosla Ventures, Cisco and Zoom.
PanTerra Networks
PanTerra Networks is a San Jose-based UCaaS provider that bundles voice, video, messaging, file sharing and an AI contact center into one cloud platform called Streams.AI. Founded in 2001 by Silicon Valley engineer Arthur Chang, the company sells to mid-market businesses that want one vendor instead of five, and points to a 99.999% uptime record and HIPAA-compliant SmartBox file sharing as its main differentiators.
Cardi Prinzi
Cardi Prinzi is the Chief Executive Officer of Sail Internet, a Bay Area fiber and fixed-wireless ISP serving residential and business customers across Silicon Valley and San Francisco. With more than 30 years of senior leadership in telecommunications - spanning Sprint, MCI Worldcom, Equinix, TelePacific, New Edge Networks, EarthLink, Pacnet, Telstra, and Windstream Enterprise - Prinzi brings deep expertise in strategic vision, product development, and revenue growth to one of the region's most customer-focused internet providers. Since joining Sail Internet in 2024, she has overseen a period of significant expansion including the acquisitions of Paxio Residential, Paxio MDU, and Ether Web Network, plus a high-profile partnership with Twist Broadband.
Mike Promotico
Mike Promotico is the President and CEO of ProTelesis Corporation, a San Diego-based managed IT services provider he has helped build into a West Coast powerhouse over 37+ years in telecommunications. Starting as a principal at INet Corp in 1987 and helping grow it into one of North America's largest Mitel resellers, Promotico has spent three decades bridging the gap between traditional telecom and modern IT - co-founding Technology Assurance Group, leading Standard Tel Networks, and ultimately guiding ProTelesis through eight strategic acquisitions including the 2025 cyber-physical convergence play with Amer-X Security. Under his leadership, ProTelesis manages over 100,000 endpoints for more than 10,000 customers across the U.S.
Michael Gold
Michael Gold is the Chairman and CEO of Intermedia Intelligent Communications, a Sunnyvale-based AI-powered cloud communications company serving over 150,000 businesses through a network of 7,500 channel partners. Since co-leading Intermedia's acquisition in 2011, Gold has grown the company's revenues and profits more than 7x, transforming it from a hosted email provider into a comprehensive UCaaS and CCaaS platform. A Stanford MBA and electrical engineer by training, Gold is a veteran cloud services operator who previously founded Zlago, led Sphera (acquired by Parallels), and served as SVP at Qwest Communications. His signature strategy - selling through partners who resell under their own brands - has made Intermedia a quiet powerhouse behind some of the biggest names in business communications.
Arthur Chang
Arthur 'Artie' Chang is the CEO and founder of PanTerra Networks, a cloud-based unified communications company he has helmed since 2001. A serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur who started his career at Bell Laboratories and took SoloPoint Communications through an IPO, Chang brings together an engineering pedigree from Northwestern and UC Berkeley with a Stanford Executive MBA. At PanTerra, he has spent over two decades building a bootstrapped challenger to the telecom giants, competing on agility and innovation rather than scale, and now driving the company's AI-powered communications platform, Streams.AI.