On this episode of Decision Point, the Collab Collective’s Craig Durr brings together industry analysts Jon Arnold, Blair Pleasant, Chris Marron, Elka Popova, and Tom Wright to examine Wildix’s expanding role in unified communications, workflow optimization, and retail-focused solutions. They explore the company’s growth in North America, its distinctive single-instance architecture, and its emphasis on practical, outcome-driven innovation for SMBs.
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Craig Durr: Hi, everyone. This is Craig Durr, Chief Analyst and Founder of the Collab Collective, and I want to welcome you to another edition of Decision Point. This is not your typical webcast with PowerPoints and marketing fluff; this is where we try to ask the questions that IT administrators and IT decision makers have on top of mind as they're trying to make decisions about their deployment of technology in their ecosystem.
We're not going to be talking specifically to one vendor about one product and solution, but in fact, what we have today is something special. We have a panel of experts, analysts in the fields of unified communication and Customer Contact Center as a Service. And we're going to be talking about a recent event that we went to.
Recently, we had a chance to go to Venice, Italy, hosted by a company known as Wildix. Now Wildix might be that one unified communication platform that you never heard of, but we thought they were noteworthy enough that we wanted to talk about it.
What do you want to know about them? Well, let's say, for example, they're the only European vendor that made the Gartner Magic Quadrant for UCaaS vendors. They also had this really incredible ARR of about 45% in the last year too, especially in the North America market, where they're just beginning to kind of develop. And they have some really interesting vertical offerings as well. But instead of me going on and on about it, why don't I introduce our panelists, and we will go ahead and get their opinions about it. So I'm going to go round robin.
Jon Arnold, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself first? Tell us about yourself.
Jon Arnold: Great. Thank you, Craig. I think this is the first time I've been on anything of yours. We're all a very collegial bunch folks. For all the viewers out there, we're all independents. We all march to our own beat and to be together on one call, you're getting more than a two for you're getting a four for one here. This is pretty good.
So yes, I've been an independent analyst for 20-ish years now, I think Blair and I have lapped most of the field on this one, with maybe a few exceptions, like Sheila, but we've been doing this a long time, so we've seen the trends come and go in this market.
I'm based in Toronto. My company is called J Arnold & Associates, and UCaaS has become a core focus, but for a lot of us, it's kind of become part of a bigger story, mostly around CX and contact center and even CPaaS, all the cloud communications platforms, that's really where we mostly play.
And before I hand it off, I just want to say that you mentioned them being in that UCaaS Magic Quadrant for Gartner. In this day and age, it's kind of unusual to be talking about a company that is primarily focused UCaaS, that market has become very saturated, as we all know, so it's a little unusual, but they're focused on it for the right reasons, and we'll explore that in the next few minutes.
Craig Durr: Now let's go ahead and introduce someone else you already mentioned, Blair Pleasant.
Blair, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself?
Blair Pleasant: I’m Blair Pleasant, an independent analyst. My company is COMMfusion. And as Jon forgot to mention, we're both part of bcstrategies.com so be sure to visit it.
So I've been an independent analyst forever, covering unified communications, collaboration, contact center, CX, basically everything that falls under business communications.
I’ve seen a lot of trends come and go, and now it's all about AI. Unified communications or UCaaS was really hot for a while, and then it seemed like things kind of settled down for a bit. Now, more of the focus is on contact center and CX.
And one thing we'll be talking about with Wildix is that even though they don't tout their contact center product, they do have contact center light, which a lot of us wanted them to be a little more forceful about because they do have a good product.
Craig Durr: I think so. It's important to call out that this is a co-production with BC strategies. This is a great organization of independent analysts that actually put some really great content out. So we'll be sure to make sure that we cross-prone everything.
But we are all three US-based analysts. Oh, sorry, Toronto. We’re North America-based, but we have a special guest all the way across the pond from the United Kingdom—Chris Marron.
Chris, want to introduce yourself?
Chris Marron: Absolutely, and thank you very much. So my name is Chris Marron. I recently launched myself as a fully independent analyst. I run a company called CMA Intelligence. Prior to that I've been an analyst. Well, I was an analyst almost a decade ago, so I'm not quite as tenured as the rest of the call. But I've got a little bit of a background there to lean on as well.
My original background was contact center. That was my core focus, and I've expanded out from there to be all things communication and customer service. And I do very much see that convergence.
I think the contact center light that you were referring to, Blair, is absolutely a thing. Wildix has some very solid capabilities, but they also lean into workflow. It's become a very trendy term recently, but it's actually one that Wildix have a good claim to, in that the first time they mentioned workflow was in a blog in Italian in November of 2013. And they've been talking about it as communications enabled business processes initially, and then they started talking about it in English in 2015 so they've been in that work for quite some time.
So yes, it's a contact center light, but it's a workflow.
Craig Durr: Chris, let's go and level set. So being in the EMEA market, you might know Wildix a little bit longer than maybe the most, the typical North American analyst or even vendor. Tell us about Wildix, who they are from your point of view, what you see them doing here in this last year or two, and how they've been reaching out to other analysts like us to help that effort.
Chris Marron: Absolutely. So Wildix is an entirely partner led UCaaS provider. They nominally focused purely on unified communications, and I'm saying nominally because they do have that customer service workflow piece to the portfolio.
But they are very specific and focused on what they do, and they only sell through partners. They originated in Italy and they tend to grow from Italy to have a worldwide network of partners not only across Europe but also into the U.S., in the central Latin America, and into EMEA and APAC as well.
Craig Durr: And one of their core focuses is SMB. And that, I think, is one of their distinguishing factors that they want to make sure they wear very proudly. They say they serve the other 90% of the businesses along the way.
Is that true, Jon? Is that how you see them mostly as an SMB-focused solution?
Jon Arnold: Always. I know, Blair, both of us go back quite a ways with them before they got on the radar for most everybody else, and they've always had that focus.
And one thing about them that I really like is the fact that they themselves are a small company—they are probably the ideal customer that they would have for themselves. You know they run it very much as a family business—it's two brothers, Steve and Dimitri, and flying under the radar in Italy where no one's paying any attention to them.
Outside of Italy, they've kind of been able to do everything, make their mistakes, fine tune their approaches. And I've certainly seen this from tracking earlier partner events of theirs where their messaging was pretty, you know, not as refined as it is now. So they've come a long way.
They're running like a small business, right? They work remotely. They put a lot of trust in their culture and their employees to kind of pull along, just do the work, not worry about where you are. And that's exactly what their customers are like.
Also, this is not the most sophisticated leading technology and doesn't have to be. It's plenty good enough for what SMBs do. So they really understand that, you know, the needs of an SMB and of course the needs of the channel who have to sell out to these guys and support it properly.
So they're living it, which is what I think makes it a very authentic feeling offering and the messaging coming from them.
The new stuff we're all getting a handle on is how do we engage between analysts and this organization? Because we're new to each other, largely, and I'm sure they were wondering how much to share with us. We didn't get a lot of NDAs, like “Oh, don't share this. Don't share that.” kind of thing. So they're learning how to engage with us, and we're learning how to, kind of like, speak their language, right?
Blair Pleasant: They talk about drinking their own Prosecco, you know, because they're Italian. But they really do use their own technology, and they try things out first and learn along the way.
But their culture is really, really important in that everybody we met came from a different region or a different country, and they're all very collaborative. You know, the camaraderie was amazing. So they really do use their technology and talk the talk, walk the walk and all that.
One thing I wanted to add on top of the SMB is that they've also got these really impressive—they call it vertical, but they're really more horizontal—capabilities and offerings. So they've got x-bees, which is designed for sales and service teams. And that's kind of where some of the contact center light or call center light stuff comes in because it's got digital channels and some of the workflow things, queues, dashboards, NVR, and IVR, but it's really designed for those sales and service teams.
But then they also called x-hoppers which is aimed at retail frontline workers, and what's really impressive about x-hoppers is that it ties in with tech, with hardware that Wildix provides. So they've got their own headsets and push-to-talk capabilities.
So a frontline worker at a store can communicate with other people—people in the inventory, the back shelf to see what's there and pull out a size. They use it for theft control and for giving them guidance, so if a customer has a question, they can do a push to talk and get the information that they need and bring in AI to help them get the information and guidance.
So even though they're small, they've got these really impressive specific vertical capabilities that they're really leaning into also.
Craig Durr: Yeah, the thing that I also like is that they leaned into this idea of the European roots, and I was talking to Jason, like what does that mean? Jason Uslan is their Chief Commercial Officer, and he said, “In Europe, for example, we need to understand data sovereignty, we have to understand regulatory environments as well. We really need to understand the nuances of what we're selling into.”
And part of what they said was a combination of those two previous items, the SMB approach and the partner led motion that allow them to really customize their interactions with their customers to be appropriate for that region.
So I thought it was a pretty powerful way they were differentiating from it, channel-led, SMB, and kind of really understanding the nuances of those markets that are going into it. I mean, that was impressive to me.
Jon Arnold: I thought too, that they didn't really talk that much about technology, right? Their messaging for us was really more, and they said it over and over correctly on business outcomes. And again, they speak the language of the SMB, who generally aren't the most sophisticated tech users.
They know what their limitations are, and I think they could have made every topic about AI, but they didn't. They really got into what the challenges are of the businesses. And with the RoboReception example, for the healthcare clinic thing, I thought that was another great example of how they identified a problem set and translated into business impact, right? They talk about the cost of all these missed calls and appointments, and if you're running a clinic, that's revenue for you, so they're tying it.
They talked very early on. It might have been Emiliano talking about ROI, right? That's what they lead with. ROI of the solution, not this wonderful technology is going to do all these wonderful things.
Lastly, Blair, you mentioned about the hardware with the headsets, but they also make their own phones. I think it's a really cool story again, which is very channel friendly because they love to sell hardware—that's money in the bank for them. So again, I think everything they're doing supports the channel in a really nice way.
Craig Durr: Yeah, they are vertically integrated. They actually also produce under their own brand video bars as well for their conferencing solutions. Now it's through third-party ODM's, but the point is they have insights and control from the hardware to the software, to the go-to-market route.
But here's the thing. They were positioning this as "mask comes off." What did that mean to you?
Chris Marron: I think, to me, part of it is a little bit of a coming of age, a little bit of an acceptance that actually now they have reached the size and the scale of which they are highly influential in certain markets and able to influence even markets where they are starting to enter.
So they're recognizing that they're moving from a niche, relatively small vendor, where they sell very well, they grow very well, to being a major market player. And I think that was an unveiling of them to the market—them providing a full view of, “Hey, here is who we are. Here is what we do. Here is why we do. And here's why you should listen. This is how we're doing things differently.”
The x-hoppers example is to me quite a good one where they're using AI in natural language as an interface instead of the screen. So they're allowing their partners and their solutions to target a set of employees who previously would not have been addressed with technology and to bring them into part of the business workflow in a way that makes them more efficient and effective.
I do see them as increasingly influencing the overall UC discussion, influencing the direction of the market.
Craig Durr: I mean, their footprint is impressive. For a company that has about 1.5 million end users… and I was surprised they shared that number with us, which I appreciate them doing. They're in 145 countries, and their product is localized in 108 languages, I think they said.
So, I mean, they are really built for those niche markets, those niche use cases and that point to me, “mask comes off” means it's a lot to do with what's taking place in North America. Their corporate headquarters is in Cincinnati, Ohio, I think. It developed out of a partnership. Do you guys know any more about that?
Blair Pleasant: No, they had one partner who was there, I believe, or maybe their first one in North America, so they're like, "Okay, we're sitting up here." But I mean, really, they're based in Estonia.
But to that point, I think they're really taking their learnings from their European DNA and what they've learned. The European market is tougher than the North American one in many cases when it comes to privacy, security, GDP, sovereignty, and localization. The whole idea that for each country that they're in, they have to really know the language, know the culture, know what people are looking for and have the right partners.
So they're bringing all that experience to North America. Well, they've been in North America, but they're really expanding here now.
I want to mention one thing about privacy, security, and sovereignty because they underplayed that a little bit in one way because their architecture, you know, Jon said they didn't talk about technology too much, but we did get into their architecture a little bit.
Most of the companies that we deal with, the UCaaS and CCaaS vendors, they're all public cloud with multi-tenant. But Wildix has a single tenant or a single instance architecture, and it has a lot of benefits, which include more security, more privacy, more customization.
The only downside is that it often costs more, but Wildix was saying that it doesn't cost more and they're able to offer it for the same price as you would get for a multi-tenant. So for me, that's a real win-win because they're offering this enhanced sovereignty, security, reliability, all that for the same price.
So a lot of us were like, you need to focus on this a bit more because it really is a big benefit for them. And I think, you know, coming from their European roots, for them it’s just natural. And for us, it’s like, “You need to tout this.”
Jon Arnold: And tying to the mask coming off will be real quick here, Chris, but we are the reason… the mask is for us, right? They invited a small group of analysts and a small group of media to help take the masks off for us in this private setting so we can help tell that story.
And I think that's kind of a big part of why we're doing this. Also, just the last point there on that, Blair, in that session, it wasn't apparent to them that this was a differentiator, right? But in our discussions with them, they started to see what we were saying.
And I think they came around to what we were seeing is that—no, this is a differentiator, and this is part of the mask coming off really from both sides. They have to learn. They're learning how to engage with analysts and get that feedback, we're learning more about the business and the opportunity.
Craig Durr: I would lean in that it's almost even a double-edged sword. It is probably their superpower as well as maybe their weakness that they weren't speaking traditional CCaaS language. They weren't speaking traditional UCaaS language.
Chris, I think you had some questions about containment and other concerns and measurements of typical CCaaS environments. And although they could talk about them, they weren't using that same language. So it was a bit refreshing.
It was kind of saying I'm coming at it from a different point of view more from that ROI problem-centric idea as opposed to maybe being an industry hardliner. But part of their coming out challenge, I think, they're going to have to do is they're going to have to adjust some of that language and some of those points to some of what that broader market might be expecting to hear along the way for apples to apples measurements.
Blair Pleasant: Not necessarily containment, but they definitely were talking about business outcomes, which I was happy to hear. It wasn't a “Here's 10 slides on our market texture,” but it really was about, again, ROI and business outcomes.
And I think Dr. Grant Marie from RoboReception gave a great presentation, and I had some time to talk to him and some of his team about what they’re doing with RoboReception, and it was really built on… he saw this problem as a practicing dentist. He saw that calls were being missed because he was busy with patients and they weren’t going to voicemail, so he was essentially not getting the business that he could have.
He saw a problem, and then working with Wildix and their channel partner focus group, they were really able to come up with a solution that now they're expanding tremendously. So, it started with some dental practices, and now, they're going to be expanding to general practitioners and even the legal field.
So again, it's finding those market challenges and then finding a solution and then expanding from there. And I think Wildix is in a great position to be doing that.
Craig Durr: Okay, let's pause here for a moment. I want to bring on some insights for some special guests. Now, we weren't the only analysts that were at this event. In fact, there was a neighborhood—about 12 analysts or so. And I took the liberty of recording some insights from two of them.
So let's go ahead and hear from Elka Popova from Paulson Sullivan and Tom Wright from Cavell. Both of these analysts had some good insights and wanted to share with us as an audience.
Alright, what is your impression of Wildix?
Elka Popova: Well, I've known them for a while, but it's really different when you get to meet the team in person and you get to experience the company culture. I'm kind of impressed by how many amazing things they're doing. And at the same time, staying so humble and entrepreneurial and listening to clients and partners and innovating based on feedback.
Unlike many of their competitors who are following the same path looking to impress everyone with their AI. And here we have this company that has some amazing solutions, including some powered by AI.
And one of the most, I would say differentiated things about Wild Day is their retail solution, X hoppers. We actually recognized it a few years back. We gave them one of our best practices awards.
But now I can tell that it's really practical. It does solve real problems for retail organizations. And that's definitely one of the underserved segments or verticals.
Craig Durr: Tom, I want to understand, in a sense, what is your takeaway from this?
Tom Wright: So my takeaway, firstly, it's quite nice. There's a great American contingent here, yourself included. It's nice that Wildix are introducing themselves a bit more formally. I think it's nice that they've really reaffirmed their commitment to the channel, their European base.
They typically had a retail model. I know they are looking at the agent model now, but it's just nice that they're really trying to empower partners. They're leaving space for partners to add value to retain margin.
I just think it's nice that they're looking to introduce themselves to the world.
Craig Durr: All right, so it sounds like we were all intrigued by Wildix, and I think the mask came off and to Jon's point it was actually to show us who they are, and it was insightful.
But let's do this. There's still a long path. It's new to me. The three of you have known for a while, but I would love to hear your closing thoughts. What would be a key takeaway that you had from this event? What you learned from Wildix? And secondly, what would be one of those things you're going to keep an eye on in this next year based upon what you heard from Wildix and what you hope to see them do or maybe it might be a trap you want them to be cautious of.
Jon, why don't you go first.
Jon Arnold: Sure, thanks Craig. Yeah, the big takeaway for me is that their story hangs together really well. That you know for us being for the first time, I don't think they held too much back on us. I think we heard most of what we needed to hear.
I might have wanted to understand some more about their channel programs, but they were very clear that they don't white label. You know, they know who their partners are. They know who their customers are.
And as I said before, you don't see too many companies that are leading with UCaaS in this market now. But they really believe in their vision. And I think they know there's a big enough market for what they're really good at to still play very well.
The North America market might be a tougher nut for them to crack. That's fair, but still, I didn't see any big holes in there.
And the second question, Craig?
Craig Durr: What are you going to look for in the future? Like, what might be a gotcha or something you just want to make sure you keep an eye on here over the next year, from what you heard with Wildix?
Jon Arnold: Yeah, I think that what's coming next would be innovation. You know, what's the next x product going to be? We saw the x-hopper, you know they'll come up with a few others.
It's that X that was the last letter of their name, and now the first letter lowercase of their vertical offering, so I'm keen to see what they come up with next.
Craig Durr: That's great. Blair, how about yourself? What's your key takeaway, and what's the one thing you're going to keep your eye on here in the future with them?
Blair Pleasant: Yeah, Jon said the key thing, what's the next vertical that they're going to go into? I think that really is a strength for them.
My key takeaway was that they're a bigger player than I thought, and they're doing a lot of really impressive things. They're doing a genetic AI. They've got Wilma, which is kind of their AI agent, so it does all the things that we've been talking about summarizing meetings, guiding retail associates, transcriptions, and doing all the things that we've been talking about.
I guess seeing what they're going to be doing next in terms of AI will be important. Is it going to be more autonomous, doing some of the real agentic AI autonomous tasks that we've been talking about. I know it can do some, but I'd like to see where they're going with that.
And then just how are they going to be getting the channel partners in North America? Because again, we mentioned they’re channel-first. So getting the right partners to help them really succeed here is going to be important. So it'll be interesting to see who they really work with to help them expand.
Craig Durr: How about it Chris? Let's bring us home. What do you think?
Chris Marron: To me, the thing that stands out most is that they build differently. So Dimitri, who's one of the brothers and the co-founder, he's very unassuming. He's a lovely gentleman, but he approaches the problems as, “Here is the problem that needs to be solved. How can I do that in the best ways?”
He's not thinking about trends, particularly, he's not thinking about the way the industry is going. He's looking at this as the core problem, and here's how I solve that in a very effective, capable, and profitable way. So they have a highly capable product that does a lot of things very well and in slightly different ways. And that was the key takeaway for me.
Then, the gotcha that I think I want to watch for is particularly where you have these solutions, where there's multiple instances that you're managing that version control and the complexity of the code base and managing those different instances can become a very major challenge for businesses.
Now, they've done a good job of making sure it's on a single, unified platform underneath, and that they've kept that up to date. But to me, that that gotcha to watch for is ensuring that they keep that code base tight, that they keep those updates rolling nicely, that they ensure that they don't fall foul of having too many bespoke different things here, there and everywhere, to manage, maintain and support.
Craig Durr: I agree. Here's what I think is my key takeaway. There's a phrase that I like, and I think they're making a great business off of it. Shavings make a pile.
These guys are finding those customers that are being overlooked by the larger vendors. And I think they have done a good job of enabling partners as kind of like this hub of actually helping to service an area.
So my key takeaway is that strategy—that shavings strategy—is actually working really well for them.
Here's the gotcha though I think about as they move into North America and become more visible, I'm actually hearing other vendors like Zoom, for example, is actually reigniting some of its thoughts through its partner channel. As well as what it's thinking about in terms of what a small business is or even solopreneurs where they can serve as well.
So what has served them really well, which is in those people that fall between the cracks of the larger vendors might become more challenging as they look for North America to be their expansion market. So that's the one we keep an eye on.
Well, I think we have some good takeaways. Overall, this is a good event. We learned a lot, ate well, walked away with some masks and some other ideas. All had jet lag, except for Chris, because he only needed to take a line in a back and forth.
We’re gonna go ahead and wrap up this episode again. This is Decision Point, and it was presented in cooperation with BC Strategies and CMA Intelligence. I want to appreciate our guest for being part of this and helping you with some workplace insights for IT leaders that are looking at different companies in particular here Wildix. Everyone, take care. Thank you.