I'm amused to see VoIP-based companies such as 8x8 and Vonage continue to thrive these days since VoIP was deemed “dead” almost a year ago and Skype (News - Alert) called VoIP dead way back in 2008.

Last week, 8x8 announced its first quarter 2012 revenues. The company racked up a “record” of $18.5 million in revenue for the quarter, a 10 percent increase year over year for the same period of FY 2011.   In addition, the company's business customer churn rate decreased to a record low of 2.1 percent.   8x8 (News - Alert) ended the first quarter of 2012 with 25,455 business customers.

Some might argue 8x8 is no longer a VoIP pure play, and they would be correct. The company has made several acquisitions to flesh out its “cloud” portfolio, including Central Host in May 2010 and Zerigo in June 2011. But anyone offering a hosted service – such as VoIP – should be stocking up on cloud pieces so it can easily add on more services and offer them to its existing customer base.  

Among the new cloud-services 8x8 is offering is a Polycom (News - Alert)-based flat-rate virtual room service to enable UC and web collaboration services, including video, for the SMB market. I'm not a big rah-rah guy on video and I see multi-party video collaboration as a slower-growth play, but it's better to have it and be able to slowly grow it, than to have to play catch up later on.

Three other interesting points out of 8x8's Q1 FY 2012 announcement are a stock buyback of over 300,000 shares, inclusion of 8x8 on the Russell 3000 stock index, and an increase on the average number of lines and services per new business customer to around 12.6 compared to an average of 11.7 in the prior quarter. The last data point indicates 8x8 is signing up larger new customers, on average, than smaller ones.

Vonage (News - Alert) is another interesting story. Back in May, its first quarter 2011 results included a record high adjusted EBIDTA of $43 million, net income (yes, Vonage and income can now be used together in a sentence) of $21 million or $0.10 a share on revenues of $220 million, and debt reduced by $25 million, including $20 million of prepayments. You need good strong cash flow to prepay $20 million in debt.

It's interesting to watch Vonage come out of its defensive shell with new features and products to link its VoIP-based backbone to mobile phones.   I believe it is only a matter of time before Vonage starts to get more aggressive in the business space – where the money is – to offer SIP trunking and savings on international mobile calls.

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