8×8 Inc. said today it’s acquiring Wavecell Co. Ltd., which sells a Communications Platform-as-a-Service offering, for about $125 million.

8×8 sells a variety of chat, contact center, voice and video communications tools to enterprises, with more than a million worldwide users.

Wavecell, on the other hand, sells what it calls a “cloud-first” application programming interface platform that provides access to various SMS, chat apps, video interaction and voice services. Its APIs are designed to help enterprises deploy services such as application-to-person messaging, omnichannel customer communications and multifactor authentication at scale.

8×8 said the acquisition will give it a stronger foothold in the growing Communications Platform-as-a-Service or CPaaS market, as Wavecell has relationships with 192 network operators and business partners across 190 countries.

The acquisition shows that 8×8 is looking to take on Twilio Inc., which is the most dominant player in CPaaS. Other players include Nexmo Inc. and Vonage Holdings Corp.

“The market opportunity in CPaaS is growing rapidly, and this acquisition enables us to quickly provide these services to our customers around the world,” 8×8 Chief Executive Officer Vik Verma said in a statement. “8×8 is now the only cloud provider that owns the full, global-scale, cloud-native technology stack offering voice, video, messaging, and contact center delivered both as pre-packaged applications and as enterprise-class APIs.”

Wavecell, which is based in Singapore, will also help 8×8 expand its presence into the rapidly growing Southeast Asian market, including countries such as Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand and Hong Kong.

Photo: 8×8/Facebook