CoreDial Layoffs to Impact More Than One-Third of Staff

CoreDial layoffs are coming.

Later this month, the cloud communications provider will shed more than one-third of its workforce.

In December, CoreDial, now owned by BCM One, filed a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) letter with the state of Pennsylvania, where it is based. In the notice, CoreDial said permanent layoffs will impact 62 people on Jan. 28. The Philadelphia Inquirer said last June that CoreDial had 165 employees. Based on that number, the recently announced cuts represent nearly a 38% reduction in staff.

Channel Futures reached out to BCM One on Jan. 5 to ask which roles the CoreDial layoffs will affect, as well as the rationale for them. We did not receive an immediate response.

BCM One, a channel-centric UCaaS vendor, bought CoreDial just two months ago for an undisclosed amount. The deal brought together two companies to go head-to-head against RingCentral, Vonage and 8×8. The greatest appeal, as analyst Jon Arnold told Channel Futures, lay in the ability for partners to white-label the combined BCM One and CoreDial platforms and therefore own their customers.

J Arnold & Associates’ Jon Arnold

“That’s not so easy to do if you go with RingCentral, 8×8 or Vonage,” he said in November. “You don’t own the customer in the same way.”

CoreDial also gave BCM One attractive advanced video collaboration capabilities that stand up well in a hybrid-work world.

It’s unclear how the CoreDial layoffs might affect channel partners. BCM One planned to combine CoreDial’s partner program with its own starting in 2022. That no doubt will continue, it’s simply a question of whether anyone on the CoreDial side integral to the partner strategy will be hit by the layoffs.

CoreDial marked BCM One’s seventh acquisition. The one before that, in July, was longtime network operator Wholesale Carrier Services. Given that activity, and given that BCM One is privately owned, the situation could be one of investors wanting a quick return. Or – and this could also be an “and” circumstance – there could be too much overlap between BCM One and CoreDial staff, especially on the operations side.

Whatever the reason, Arnold told Channel Futures on Wednesday, consolidation, especially among Tier 2 and Tier 3 players, comes down to economies of scale.

“They have to keep their costs down and keep the business running efficiently,” he said. “I would think that the scale of that layoff is an example of how they’re trying to rationalize the value of these companies. … And when you have a number of companies in similar lines of business, obviously you can’t keep everybody.