Amazon rolled out Chime, a Webex and GoToMeeting knock-off with Vonage as its partner for consumers and small biz. It turns out that Level3 is the partner for enterprise.
At EC17, Amazon launched a self-serve cloud contact center. (Once again Amazon took software it created and used internally and made it a commercial product like S3 and AWS.) The partner for this was Twilio. This seems like a slight to Vonage, who owns Nexmo, a twilio competitor.
There is a rumor that Amazon is looking to buy Vonage. There was an offer from Oracle to buy 8x8, so there are folks outside of telecom looking to buy VoIP companies.
A couple of ITSPs, Skyswitch and RingByName, are offering integration with Alexa. Alexa makes a nice speakerphone. Again this is a nice marketing gimmick but it doesn't solve any real business problems.
Vonage's market cap this morning is $1.4B, the same as 8x8 whose stock price is more than twice Vonage's. I wonder how much longer these two companies can keep the machine of growth going. Keeping up 24%+ growth every quarter is a grind. It begs the question what happens when that slips to 19 or 20 percent? They probably won't be stand-alone companies at that point.
In some ways, Amazon is like Twilio; it doesn't want to be a phone company, but it wants to capture as much value in that space that it can without being one. It would be smarter for Amazon to buy Twilio, but the market cap is twice that of Vonage. What does that say about VoIP stocks?
