Zoom becoming ‘Google of videoconferencing’

“Are you free to Zoom later?”

It is a question millions of people have been asking during the lockdown.

The video conferencing app has achieved every marketer’s dream, rapidly entering common parlance like “Google it”.

The company, founded by Eric Yuan, who is also its CEO, has soared in value in a short space of time during the lockdown, its share price trebling since the start of the year to $210 (R3,500).

Its valuation now sits at $61bn (R1-trillion).

As Microsoft, Google and Cisco battled it out for the crown of the expensive and cumbersome option, Zoom covertly scaled up its offering without alerting rivals.

“I think Zoom is on the track of becoming the Google of videoconferencing,” David Madden, an analyst at UKbased share-trading company CMC Markets, said.

“The way technologies seem to go is there is one player that crushes it, as Google did with search engines. In my view it’s Zoom’s crown to lose.”

Zoom joined Netflix in making a mockery of analyst expectations.

Revenue for the three months to the end of April climbed to $328.2m (R5.5bn), a 169% increase on the same period last year.

Much of that growth was driven by a surge in big paying customers.

User numbers have surged from 10-million at the start of the year, with the app hosting 300-million daily participants.

Business customers with more than 10 employees surged 354% to 265,400 during the quarter.

Yuan said he was humbled by the increased adoption for his service, which was founded a decade ago.

But the growth brought with it teething problems.

He said dealing with the incredible increase in traffic was a tremendous undertaking.

“When the crisis started, our own data centres could not scale fast enough to handle the unprecedented traffic.

“Fortunately, some of the top public cloud providers were there to help,” Yuan told investors on Tuesday.

Zoom relied heavily on Amazon Web Services (AWS) to provide the infrastructure to host its platform.

Yuan said AWS provided the majority of new servers, “sometimes adding several thousands a day for several days in a row”.

Its growth has been hit by repeated reports of security issues, some companies advising employees against using it, and experts questioning the strength of its encryption.

It was plagued by reports of “Zoombombing”, where uninvited guests crashed meetings and, in some cases, broadcast hate-filled or pornographic content.

Yuan introduced measures to address the problem, including the introduction of “waiting rooms”, where hosts would approve guests before they entered and automatically placing passwords on meetings. — The Telegraph