Zoom seeking to expand far beyond videoconferencing india chief raje

Zoom seeking to expand far beyond videoconferencing india chief raje

Zoom Communications, Inc. has left the pandemic firmly behind, and is leaning to a pivot to court more enterprise customers in markets like India.

In an interview with The Hindu, Sameer Raje, who has led the firm’s India operations since 2019, said the firm has made inroads into the Communications Platform as a Service (CPaaS) and Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) industry, with enterprise services that span from its existing meeting product to a comprehensive collaboration suite.

In the pandemic years, Zoom faced extensive scrutiny on its privacy record, a natural outcome of a firm that went from being a niche video conferencing tool to a critical piece of digital infrastructure in a locked down world.

A Ministry of Home Affairs cybersecurity arm even put out a circular warning government official against using Zoom.

Those days are gone now. “We are now licensed by the Department of Telecommunication to provide Zoom Phone services,” Mr. Raje said, adding the service was used by a wide range of public sector entities; several courts also use Zoom to allow virtual hearings. DoT licenses for services straddling traditional and Voice-over-Internet-Protocol (VoIP) telephony like Zoom are rare, with other major licensee in the space being Cisco’s WebEx.

“Zoom has transitioned completely from a meeting-based application to a complete [enterprise collaboration] platform,” Mr. Raje said, adding that the app was now being integrated with hospital management systems and some customers were even using its tools to manage things like meeting room reservations and vehicle parking. As is the custom now, the firm also offers an AI companion to transcribe and synthesise meetings, a feature whose uptake Zoom’s latest earnings report said was growing at 39% quarter-over-quarter.

Mr. Raje declined to disclose India revenue. Zoom doesn’t report country-wise revenue, a common practice among publicly listed tech firms trading in U.S. exchanges. But overall Asia-Pacific revenue stayed at $144 million in the last two quarters, something the firm attributes to foreign exchange headwinds

Education sector

One surprising sector that continues to rely on Zoom has been the education sector. “Online learning has not gone down,” Mr. Raje said. “In fact, even this year, the number of students in Kota” — the coaching hotspot in Rajasthan — “has declined. Now, one of the reasons is because of the lot of suicides that happened last year of IIT aspirant students. But another reason is also that all these institutes which were in Kota, have now established themselves in Mumbai, Bangalore, Delhi, and a lot of these courses are happening online.”

While the service is used by schools that are shut down for pollution or natural disasters, Mr. Raje said, “Even the K-12 schools have now established some different business models where they have online learning courses as a part of their curriculum.”

Phone service

Mr. Raje was particularly excited by the Zoom Phone service, which he said was a common category abroad, but not here. Corporate telephony as a service that stays with employees wherever they are, integrates into firms’ internal systems and lets employees transition ongoing calls from device to device on the go which is not common, he said. “In India, we have been deprived of this till now and Zoom is going to change that,” he said.

Regulatory provisions — which have been “rightfully” put in place due to “whatever is happening across the borders,” he stressed — have made such a product like Zoom Phone or WebEx Phone rare, Mr. Raje said, hoping the firm’s existing integration with many firms popularise the service.

India has also been a talent source for the firm. “We have two technology centres,” Mr. Raje said.

“One in Bangalore is the global support centre and the other one in Chennai is the research and development center.” While Zoom was only offering dollar payments in India a few years ago, it now offers a completely rupee-based solution, Mr. Raje said, with hundreds of resellers.

Mr. Raje shrugged off competition in the videoconferencing space, which is still what the company is known for. “Market peers, industry peers, their CXOs and CIOs still use Zoom,” Mr. Raje claimed, adding that even firms with existing contracts with other services relied on the service for meetings with external organisations.