2004 Fierce15 - Where are they now?

Spotlight: 8x8

Huw Rees, vice president of business development for 8x8, said he's been with the company since 1999. When 8x8 received the Fierce15 award in 2004, the company had around 50 employees and was still iterating its hosted VoIP offering for SMBs. Five years later, the company has nearly quintupled its in-house staff to 241 and has an additional 100 call center employees off-site. It just opened a new headquarters and was profitable its last quarter.

He said the company's ability to respond quickly to issues with the underlying code helped it succeed where competitors failed, because customers stayed satisfied due to rapid response times. He also said the "plug-and-play" nature of the product contributed to its uptake.

Rees credited the firm's early move to Internet-based sales and marketing efforts as another reason 8x8 has been able to outlast some of its 2004 Fierce15 cohort.

Here is an update on the other 14 and a link to the original list [1], before we had separate pages for each winner:

Still-fierce

CosmoCon - still offering contact center [2] products

Edgewater Networks - has moved into SIP trunking [3], still offers hosted IP PBXs as well

Netcordia - still in business [4], monitors IP traffic 

Nuvio - Hosted business services [5] like IP PBXs 

Quintum Technologies - intelligent VoIP switches [6] for enterprise and service providers

Skype Technologies - Yea, I'd say 480 million users says something about the viability of your offering. The move into the business market [7] will be interesting to behold, as will the unfolding situation around the Joltid court cases.

Vonage Networks - Ok, this one is a stretch, but it hasn't failed yet....iPhone app [8] to be its savior?

The acquisitions 

BridgePort - bought by CounterPath in 2008 [9] 

Brix Networks - bought by EXFO in 2008 for $37.5 million [10] 

InfiniRoute Networks - bought by TNS in 2006 [11]

sentitO Networks - acquired by Verso Technologies in 2007 [12] for ~$10 million 

Ubiquity Technologies - bought by Avaya for $144 million in 2007 [13] 

The Flame-Outs 

Oovia, defunct, no website 

Natural Convergence, assets sold in a fire sale [14] to Broadview Networks in 2009