With much of the world working from home, meetings have moved online, increasing the use of video conferencing platforms to a great extent. But one video conferencing and collaboration platform that has seen exceptional growth during pandemic is Zoom.
From about 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019, Zoom saw a massive growth to 300 million by April 2020. But its growth has not been without issues.
Globally, several security and data privacy issues have been flagged by security experts about Zoom. From initial claims of data being shared with Facebook to reports of people breaking into meetings, the company’s security issues have even invited lawsuits in some cases.
In India, the Union government issued an advisory on April 16, stating that Zoom is not a safe platform and directed government officials not to use it for official purposes. It further issued guidelines to safeguard private individuals who would still like to use the platform for private purposes.
Despite this, Zoom has grown, prompting big tech to stand up and take notice. Not surprisingly, Facebook, Google, Microsoft ramped up their video conferencing tools.
In a conversation with TNM, Sameer Raje, India Head, Zoom Video Communications, talks about India’s growth, the platform’s security issues and how he sees the competitive landscape.
Edited excerpts of the interview:
How has your growth in India been since the COVID-19 situation began? Could you give us an idea of your user base before March and what growth you’ve seen in the last two months?
When we started our operations in September last year, the first set of customers we had were global customers, already there in our services from the US, Europe, etc. Then, we first started seeing growth in the country from small to medium enterprises to the largest of the large enterprise organisations. That was the normal, expected growth line. But the COVID-19 situation broke all the records and the usage started climbing up drastically. It would have taken probably two years (for us) to reach the numbers that we achieved within less than 12 weeks.
Where is India placed as a market for you globally? Do you see its share growing?
While we may have stepped into India a little late in September 2019, we took some time to be absolutely sure of whether we can cater to the Indian market in terms of the demand, products and pricing of services. India is an extremely critical market for us and with this COVID-19 situation, I think it's going to be even more critical. We will continue to focus on it.
As a business, what's your presence like in India?
Globally, we are bullish in terms of our growth and recruitment and India is no different. We will continue to focus on India and hiring will continue in line with our global plan. I cannot give you the exact specifics of the numbers, but this growth will continue.
Within India, what user segments are seeing the most growth? Any interesting observations you'd like to share?
Growth has been across different sectors and verticals. From large companies looking for business continuity processes to let their employees work from home, to the small organisations looking to go virtual for the first time.
Zoom has always been an enterprise platform. It was designed for organisations to use it for their employees. And that is our primary target audience.
With COVID-19, we also saw a different set of users, which were individual users who were using this service for socialising. We had not anticipated this kind of usage where people would be having family get-togethers, reunions or getting married on our platform. So that was something unexpected which happened during the COVID-19 situation.
What appeals to people is the ease of use. The second aspect is reliability— every time you click on it, it works irrespective of the fluctuating line or bandwidth. A person really doesn't need to be very technology savvy or a geek to use it.
We've seen a lot of senior citizens starting to use Zoom during this period. It's because of the simplicity of our platform. On the other extreme, it is the large enterprise organisations who have a very large IT department, or a very large administration department. We meet their requirements also in terms of security, administration, managing the users in terms of dashboards, features and control.
IIM Ahmedabad is launching their full time MBA courses online using Zoom as a platform. We're glad that we are playing such an important role in this particular segment of education and helping students, teachers, professors and faculties connect.
The Union Home Ministry has flagged Zoom as unsafe. How are you viewing this? Is that a major setback for Zoom?
While I don't want to get into the details of the advisories, the security issues which were flagged off globally or in the country— you need to understand what exactly those security issues are. Does any article anywhere say Zoom is not secure? It has been secure always and it continues to be secure and robust.
The point is, there was certain usage, and yes, there were certain mistakes on our part. Now when a company grows from 10 million to 300 million in a span of 12 weeks, there are certain mistakes and we made some mistakes, but we were quick to respond to it in less than 24 hours to fix them.
Then there was an absolutely new set of users coming on board, who had never used a collaboration platform. And when they do not use the collaboration tools the way it is supposed to be, do not adhere to the best practices, it is going to cause some problems. Features like locking the room, not publishing meeting details on social media, these are all best practices. We strongly recommend using them.
Now, the second aspect was about mistakes on our part, as I said, we fixed them in less than a 24-hour time frame. We also launched more robust features and functionalities in a period of 15 days, and released more than four upgrades to our platform, which takes care of almost everything. And not only that, we brought in more features and functionality. For example, the meetings were already encrypted, and we've enhanced it to the latest and greatest which is a 256-bit GCM encryption. So those are the kind of features we are bringing in more and more.
Apart from the government, there have been red flags raised across the globe about privacy issues with Zoom and that it was sharing data with third parties. So how safe is Zoom in terms of privacy?
We need to understand what was being shared and what happened. The particular aspect you're referring to— it is called the Facebook SDK (software development kit) issue. In this, no user data was shared with Facebook or any other third party service or application. The Facebook SDK was capturing the metadata. What it means is: this is your device operating system, your device location for Facebook, this was being sent and the moment it was brought to our notice, we stopped it and no user data was compromised anywhere, nor was it sent to Facebook.
Have issues of end-to-end encryption been resolved?
Encryption sounds very complicated. But basically, if I am using a Zoom app on my laptop at home and you're using the same, then the meeting is encrypted to 256-bit encryption.
Zoom meetings have always been encrypted. The question is what kind of communication is coming in— if you are joining via mobile phone on voice only, not using Zoom client, then that is not encrypted. If you are using your mobile phone through Zoom client and then logging into a Zoom meeting, it is encrypted. Till the time you're using Zoom client on any device and logging into our meeting, it is encrypted. There is a lot of misinformation out there. We have the largest of the large organisations using our services, large banks using our services. They have done their evaluation. Is it possible that they will use a platform which does not have encryption? I don't think so.
There is fast growing competition from Google, Facebook, WhatsApp and many new players too, even in India. How do you view the competitive landscape? What is Zoom's value add over other rivals?
This space of collaboration has always been competitive. There have always been many players. And we take pride to be on top of this pyramid where everybody is trying to follow what Zoom is doing.
Our strength is we are close to our customers. We listen and give them what they want. Our whole culture is keeping our customers happy, not only in product, but also in terms of our interactions. If a senior citizen can use a platform without hand holding or training, that is kudos to our engineering team, the way they have designed it. That's our strength.
And the more players come into this market, I think it will make us even stronger, help us stay on our toes, listen to our customers more and give them what they want.
How do you see the video conferencing market grow over all and what role do you say Zoom will play here?
While most of the people say that Zoom is a video conferencing platform, we are a collaboration platform. We've got a whole lot of services beyond video conferencing, which are embedded in our platform. We also have the real estate space where we have Zoom rooms, huddle rooms, and software to control your meeting rooms, etc. There is such a huge chunk. We also offer integrations into third party applications like if you're a customer and you have your own application, you can actually integrate Zoom into your application itself.
If you asked me about the collaboration markets, I think yes, it is poised to grow. And it has grown significantly and with COVID-19, the space for this growth has increased drastically.
Note: Interview edited for clarity