Zoom has seen 67X growth in free user signups & 4X growth in paid users: Derek Pando

Video calls have become a quintessential part of the new corporate life in the wake of the pandemic since March 2020. Technology and communication players like Zoom have become indispensable in staying connected with colleagues, clients and offices across cities and countries. What’s more, even family meetings and birthday parties are being celebrated using the Zoom technology.

Zoom Video Communications has been bringing teams together to get more done in a frictionless, seamless and secure video environment. Their easy, reliable, and innovative video-first unified communications platform provides video meetings, voice, webinars, and chat across desktops, phones, mobile devices, and conference room systems. Zoom helps enterprises create elevated experiences with leading business app integrations and developer tools.

Even though some offices and markets have opened up and people have started going back to office, Zoom hasn’t seen any dip in traffic. It has also developed and added new features keeping in mind the new requirements of the present times to delight their customers.

In this interaction with Adgully, Derek Pando, Head of International and Partner Marketing, Zoom, speaks about how Zoom emerged as the unified communications platform for corporate across the world, strategies to keep ahead of the competition, key features that differentiate Zoom’s back-end technology and cloud-native infrastructure and more. 

What got you inspired to bring in your virtual meeting technology when Zoom Video started in 2011? How has the journey been so far and what is the future looking like? Is there a road map drawn to meet the growing needs as virtual meetings are going to stay here?

Zoom was launched in 2011 by Eric S. Yuan, our CEO, with a sole aim of providing a unified communications platform that Zoom is today. We are more than just a video conferencing platform – Zoom is a single platform for all unified communications as a service (UCaaS) products that include video meetings, Zoom phone, chat, desktop/ mobile/ Zoom rooms (Hardware as a service - HaaS), webinars and a seamless interface that enables you to easily switch between video/ phone/ chat in a single interface. All of these integrate seamlessly with existing IT systems and ensure a more collaborative and productive work environment.

Zoom was originally developed for businesses, however, due to the pandemic, we saw a massive growth in our user base that consists of governments, businesses, schools, hospitals, standalone users, etc. To put in numbers, from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019, we saw 300 million daily meeting participants as recorded in April 2020.

For us, the future is hybrid. We will see continued usage across sectors and industries. Employers have realised that employees are more productive and motivated. There is a clear visible trend of frequent events being held on digital platforms. The virtual world and its possibilities have now become embedded into our ecosystem, and they will continue to be a major part of business and IT strategies and daily business operations. 

The pandemic has disrupted the world and everyone right from kids studying in schools are virtually collaborating. The sudden demand for virtual meetings must have taken you by surprise, so how has Zoom Video managed the situation and delivered customer expectations?

We have felt the weight of the responsibility now that the world is running on Zoom. Helping as many people as we can with our technology in this challenging time has motivated us as a company to do our very best. It keeps us going. Luckily, our architecture has been optimised to handle video’s demanding requirements. We are built to scale. There are four key features that differentiate our back-end technology and cloud-native infrastructure:

• Distributed architecture: Instead of a centralised approach, we’ve built an architecture that enables meetings to be distributed across our data center network, seamlessly allowing users to join meetings via private connection to the closest data center.
• Result: Scalability, so we can provide a reliable video experience for up to thousands of people in a single meeting.
• Multimedia routing: Multimedia routing delivers multiple video streams from other meeting participants to the client’s device, reducing computing power requirements and ensuring a highly scalable system.
• Result: Multimedia routing can support 15x more participants than a standard MCU, which generally supports fewer than 100 participants.
• Multi-bitrate encoding: In addition to stream routing, each stream by itself can adjust to multiple resolutions.
• Result: This eliminates the need to encode and decode the streams for each endpoint, optimising performance and scalability.
• This also enables Zoom to provide different levels of video quality based on the device and network capabilities.
• Application layer quality of service: Our proactive quality-of-service application layer optimizes the video, audio, and screen-sharing experience specifically for each device and the available bandwidth.
• Result: The best possible user experience across any network. 

There are other companies in the competition also offering virtual technology. How are you different and what differentiation are you bringing to the table which is helping you to stay head of the competition?

Zoom has experienced intense competition since it was established in 2011, and yet we have become the platform of choice for millions of participants around the world. The strongest advantage Zoom has over other products is it is simple and easy to use. Even a layman can start using Zoom in a few clicks and that is what makes it easy to adopt. The interface is user-friendly for different users of all age-groups.  

We had recently concluded our annual flagship conference, Zoomtopia, which saw more than 50K participants. During the 2-day event we have announced new range of features and services that take the platform to a new improved level. Those are:  

• End-to-end encryption (E2EE) — Starting next week, we’ll roll out end-to-end encryption for free and paid Zoom users around the world. 
• OnZoom — We’ve introduced our public beta for OnZoom, an online events platform and marketplace for paid Zoom users who want to create, host, and monetize classes, concerts, or fundraisers via the Zoom Meetings platform. 
• Zoom Apps — With Zoom Apps, you’ll be able to use your favourite apps like Atlassian, Asana, Box, Dropbox, PagerDuty, and Slack directly within the Zoom platform. 
• UCaaS enhancements: New and enhanced features across our platform Zoom Meetings, Zoom Phone, and Zoom Video Webinars. 
• Customizable SDK — Developers can use our new customizable SDK to bring high-quality video, audio, chat, and other Zoom features directly into their custom-built apps for Android, iOS, and web. 
• Zoom Cares — Our new philanthropic entity, Zoom Cares, builds on our culture of caring with a commitment to making an impact on education, social equity, and climate change. 

We know what it takes to become the unified communications platform we are today, including the immense amount of work and focus required to create our frictionless user experience, sophisticated security, and scalable architecture. 

Technology is a great enabler and the dynamics of technology are changing fast. How has Zoom as a company been reinventing and bringing in fresh ideas and innovation in technology?

Zoom has always prided itself on its customer-first focus and we closely listen to their feedback to bring in new features that can make their experience on the platform more seamless and secure. Our engineering and leadership team consisting of Aparna Bawa – COO, Velchamy Sankarlingam, President – Product & Engineering, Harry Moseley – Global CIO, and other leaders, under the leadership of Eric Yuan have brought in their industry expertise and lead this platform to a new and exciting level which reaches new heights every day. 

What kind of pricing strategy have you applied during these times? How do you manage your pricing in different geographies?

We had recently announced the support of INR on our platform. Our pricing and plans are segregated as per requirements and not geographies. For more information, visit here: https://zoom.us/pricing 

What has been your marketing strategy to promote your technology globally? How have you positioned the brand? Overall, what is your market share globally and how has been your growth in various geographies?

With the onset of the pandemic, our physical events teams under B2B activities, who educated people about the application in person, were now responsible for creating quick YouTube videos in many different languages. We shifted more of our resources into educating and really making sure customers have a positive experience in this difficult time. On the B2C side, our marketing efforts focused on highlighting and showing examples of how people are adapting our services to encourage and inspire others.

‘Word-of-mouth’ has been the key driving factor for our brand that now has become a genetic part of our daily lives. With this, we have seen wide adoption by not only governments and businesses, but also schools – we are supporting nearly 125,000 schools across 25 countries free of cost – hospitals and even standalone users. We have seen phenomenal growth across regions and specific to India, we have seen a 67X growth in free user signups and 4X growth in paid users with 10 (or more) employees in April, compared to January this year.