8x8 (News - Alert), Inc., a provider of business communications solutions, recently joined the Russell Microcap Index when Russell Investments reconstituted its family of U.S. indexes on June 25.

Membership in the Russell Microcap Index, which remains in place for one year, means automatic inclusion in the appropriate growth and value style indexes.

Russell determines membership for its equity indexes primarily by objective, market-capitalization rankings and style attributes.

"8x8's inclusion in the Russell Microcap Index increases our visibility in the investment community and is an achievement that reflects our solid fundamentals and demonstrates that we are successfully serving the needs of business customers," said 8x8 Chairman & CEO Bryan Martin (News - Alert).

Russell indexes are widely used by investment managers and institutional investors for index funds and as benchmarks for both passive and active investment strategies. An industry-leading $3.9 trillion in assets currently are benchmarked to them.

Annual reconstitution of Russell Indexes captures the 4,000 largest U.S. stocks as of the end of May, ranking them by total market capitalization to create the Russell 3000 Index and Russell Microcap. These investment tools originated from Russell's multi-manager investment business in the early 1980s when the company saw the need for a more objective, market-driven set of benchmarks in order to evaluate outside investment managers.

8x8, Inc. leverages its patented software technologies to deliver voice solutions and integrated messaging and video to businesses of any size with employees in any locations on a wide variety of business telephony, web and mobile platforms. 8x8 also offers managed hosting and cloud-based computing services.

In recent company news, Prometheus Real Estate Group, a real estate developer with a portfolio of more than 20,000 Bay Area, Seattle, Portland and Los Angeles metropolitan area apartments, has entrusted its business phone service needs for 16 San Francisco Bay Area locations to the 8x8 Virtual Office hosted VoIP phone solution.