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“We have IoT interfaces built into our Zoom Room systems"

Zoom is a byword, almost a generic term for online, video-based meetings, conferences, classes, get-togethers, and parties with friends scattered.

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VoicenData Bureau
New Update
Sameer Raje2

Zoom is a byword, almost a generic term for online, video-based meetings, conferences, classes, get-togethers, parties with friends scattered in distant places, family get-togethers, marriages, break-ups, and live shows. Its Q1 revenues globally, announced in May, touched over $1 billion, a growth of 12% over the previous year.

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It launched the Zoom Contact Center, a large part of which is supported by its technology center in Chennai – set up recently.

India is one of the critical markets for Zoom. Growth over the last two years has been strong with an increasing number of Indian Startups integrating Zoom as a default Collaboration platform into their applications. With the option of payment gateways APIs and SDKs, Zoom is set to open up new vistas for its channels and partners in India.

In an interesting and open conversation with Voice&Data, Editor, Gajendra Upadhyay, Sameer Raje, General Manager, and Head, India & SAARC Region shares insights into this market – the new realities of the remote workplace, the changing landscape of Generation Z, and data privacy laws and his own experiences in the Collaboration industry over the last two decades. Excerpts:

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Zoom is synonymous with Work from Home. What do you see as the trend, with the hybrid work environment? People are back in offices. Is it impacting Zoom?

Well, thank you for asking that question. My view is a bit different. Let me elaborate. I have been working in the collaboration industry for almost two decades. I have seen this industry transformed. There was a time when we used to go and talk about audio conferencing. This was the early 2000s. People asked: Why do I need audio conferencing? Then came a phase where people asked, why do I need to share my screen? Then came a phase, “why do I need a video on this”?

I have been through those levels of transformation where users felt they didn’t need technology. Some felt it was better to travel. Might as well make one to one phone call. Today, we are still in the collaboration industry but in a different phase. I’m one of the few lucky ones to be in the right place at the right time.

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Data privacy is not something any organisation can afford to ignore. It is always dynamic and keeps on evolving. Cybercrime has gone up to a massive extent. As collaboration and cloud services went through the roof so did hacking worldwide.

We are witnessing another transformation that got fast-tracked due to COVID. The video collaboration suite of services was adopted very fast, as there was no option. People got used to it. Even traditional organisations with doubts about working from home were forced into it and they saw the benefits.

On the other side, the adoption of digital tools by companies shot up because they wanted to reach customers during the lockdown. There was no other touch point. Customers also preferred to purchase using digital tools like apps and social media. They wanted customer support online. We chose to go to social media (Twitter, Facebook, or Linkedin) rather than make a toll-free call. Overlapping all of this, is the completely new generation of kids, children who missed school for two years in a row. The New Age generation didn’t even use notebooks. Laptops, iPads, tablets, and mobile were used for education.

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Collaboration is in the middle of all of this – each and every workflow within the organization or outside. It is getting integrated with every format – from factories to e-commerce – into various dimensions of business.

For things like shopping online and activities that you mentioned, is Zoom now also pre-integrated directly with payment gateways to facilitate easier commerce?

So, that is what we are empowering. We are not integrated with a payment gateway, but we are offering you the ability to integrate zoom into a payment gateway of your choice or application of your choice and take it forward from there.

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How this works is: that we offer our platform in the format of APIs or SDKs. It gives you the ability to integrate Zoom into your applications.

You can also import an application (that is yours) into the Zoom platform. Both options are available. More than 1000 plus apps are listed on our marketplace, which are readily downloadable applications.

Let’s say industry-standard applications such as mailbox or Okta or Salesforce for CRM. Zoom integrations with these are available. Those are industry standards.

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But beyond that, one might have a custom Learning Management System or some attendance management system, or even customized tools. We have the ability to bring Zoom into these or you can do it yourself.

What is the response from India specifically on this? We see so many startups in e-commerce, social commerce, etc.

Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head. India is a huge startup ecosystem and that is one of our key focus areas. The digital-native organisations, the Gen Z organisations are coming up. You’d be surprised at the kind of requests we get, and the integrations they are looking for. They don’t even want to fire up multiple applications for different uses. Their demand is to have applications within applications.

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I was just talking to a CIO yesterday, in one of the roundtable conversations. He shared how his employees want everything automated. The entire dashboard should be ready as soon as they start their laptops. It should throw up reports and flag the big items for attention for the day.

I’m trying to develop something like that and it is really futuristic. Our younger generation is already there in many ways. They’re firing up applications after applications on their digital devices – such that we get flummoxed sometimes.

The Government’s push toward the startup ecosystem is also helping. With digital payments, far-off remote locations and cities are now connected and online.

Are there any specific programs you have for startups in India?

We have dedicated teams who work with digital native organisations, we have a dedicated team focused purely on New Age organizations. Be it, Edutech, Pharmatech, or other startups. We understand their challenges. This team is sensitized about, how we can grow with these organisations rather than selling them something.

So, we look at investing in forms of growing with them, allowing them that space where they can leverage our services for an initial period and then build on it. Not only that, but we also have our investment programs, which are global again. We have a global investment program where we invest in companies and organisations which are focused on collaboration.

You can read more about that on our website. And that’s definitely available here. In that global program, we definitely get a lot of interest from India. But we don’t divide that into country-specific applications. We select based on the selection criteria.

What is Zoom’s channel strategy for India to grow your integrations and new applications?

We have multiple options. Our first team is the direct team that goes to the market. Then we keep on advocating in various marketing channels about what we do on the API.

Recently, we concluded a developer forum interaction where we addressed close to 170 odd developers on what APIs and SDKs do.

We hosted a forum for one of the media houses and we continue to do such education programs about our solutions and SDKs. Of course, we have an entire partner ecosystem. For this, we got strong partners, we got a distributor called Savex, which has a huge number of partners. We got partnerships with Tata Teleservices (TTSL), they are again one of the large partners for us with their core strength in the small and medium enterprises (SME) segment.

TTSL offers a lot of bundled solutions along with their fiber. We also got multiple options for payments. And of course, our online engine is very powerful as well. These are our core go-to-market strategies in the country.

With the launch of 5G networks in the future, are there any new or specific areas that Zoom could foray into?

Well, I think 5G is going to boost video consumption even further.

We spoke about learning management systems for schools and colleges, IITs, and IIMs. I’m sure you must have read recently about our Education Minister speaking about the need for hybrid learning in higher education. A lot of higher education institutes are working on it.

On the other end, I think even our Health Minister recently spoke about the need for a hybrid healthcare environment. Just imagine being able to provide health care to remote villages where connectivity is an issue. Integration of primary healthcare workers like anganwadis on the ground, enabling them to be in touch with doctors and experts far away, capturing information into hospital management systems, and providing a diagnosis. That is the future. 5G is just going to push this even further. I see Zoom playing a big role and doing excellent in that area.

Zoom is ideally placed for the Metaverse and the IoT world.

Well on AR / VR and IoT, we have some form of it already. I’ll give you some examples of IoT in our Zoom Room systems -- where you can post conferencing or you can collaborate from large video meeting rooms or huddle rooms. We have IoT bundled into it. You can monitor the carbon dioxide levels in the room, you can monitor or check the air conditioner temperatures, and you can even manage the blinds of the conference room, using the zoom interface itself, you don’t have to log into multiple applications.

That is a format of IoT that we’re bringing in. Similarly, we have a format of AR. And this is working excellently in the small startup segment, the question which you had asked me before.

In the startup environment, the CEO or the founder usually starts operations from probably his own bedroom or a small room somewhere. We’ve seen three founding members sitting side by side, rubbing their elbows and presenting to a VC or investor, pitching their product. Just imagine one camera picking up that feed of three people in one room and splitting it into three different screens.

So that’s the beauty that we are building into the platform. This gets more empowering as we progress. As far as meta is concerned, we already have launched our avatars. I can change my Avatar, you can tell you will be speaking to probably a cat head or a dog head. We invest a lot into research and development. We try to remain close to our customers from different segments, and we hear them.

What we hear from them is what we incorporate into our product as much as possible. So, as far as Meta or something along those lines, I’m sure we will look into it, as time goes by, and when’s the right time to launch.

You have a Tech Centre in Chennai. Is this a global development center?

Yes, we have two tech centers. One in Bangalore and one in Chennai. Bangalore was announced in 2020-2021.

And the idea behind that was to be the engineering or the support to basically keep the zoom platform running for the global network. That was the theme behind the Bangalore tech center.

We already have two data centres in India, Mumbai and Hyderabad. Those data centres cater to all the users of India who are paid subscribers of Zoom.

Whereas the one in Chennai is research and development. And it is, again, global, and it’s focused on new products and technologies. The recent announcement is more focused on the new product that was recently announced in the US, which is the contact center. And, they’re starting up from there. And then, of course, they will take on more and more for the global R&D.

There is one major issue on the Regulatory side that is occupying mind space, that’s data privacy. In the initial days, if you remember, there was a lot of talk about how data was not inside the country? How are you tackling this now?

Well, there are a couple of things, that happened in the past. There was a lot of misinformation in the media and wrong information being circulated. Because in the early days, the way the platform was being utilized was opening it up for all. For example, if I want to host a meeting and post that on social media saying, come and join my meeting I am going to invite anyone and everyone.

But Zoom was never meant for that. Zoom was always developed for corporate usage, where you have an IT team to set up your security parameters and tell you how to do stuff. We’d never developed it for consumers to use it on a daily basis. But the pandemic really made the consumers start using Zoom.

There were some mistakes from our side that exposed our platform, but then we fixed that. Data privacy is not something any organisation can afford to ignore. It is always dynamic and keeps on evolving. Cybercrime has gone up to a massive extent. As collaboration and cloud services went through the roof so did hacking worldwide. What we do know is involve CIOs from various sectors. From pharma, banking, retail, etc. We get them together. We brainstorm, about what is good, what is bad, and what should we improve. We also bring in bug bounty programs. We work closely with government agencies like CERT-IN and MEITY to understand their challenges and their initiatives and work with them in terms of the rules, and regulations and how we can abide by them.

Our top priority is to ensure that we not only comply with the Indian rules and regulations but any rules and regulations of any country. We ensure that we share the right information with the agencies.

We work on multiple fronts. And we keep on developing our platform. We have now introduced a proactive monitoring system with tools that can detect if any Zoom meeting URL is published in the public domain and is getting unwanted attention. We flag this to the host. Either they change the URL or change the password or take it down from the public domain.

There was this recent circular just a few days ago from CERT-IN, which adds a couple of extra requirements from all intermediaries and data handlers, do you see that adding an extra layer of compliances and efforts?

We are evaluating that right now, the CERT-IN circular. We will work through whatever is required in terms of what is necessary to comply. At this stage, it is a little bit early for me to comment on how far we are there. But, one thing is there definitely we will comply with whatever the guidelines from the Government of India, because in the past also industry has been compliant, and rightfully, CERT-IN or any other agency is bringing in new rules and regulations for requisite checks and balances.

Connected to this, is one other question about data localization. There are requirements to have local data centers or store all interactions in a local cloud. How are you tackling this?

So, there are two things we already have two data centers in India, Mumbai, and Hyderabad. Those data centers cater to all the users of India who are paid subscribers of Zoom.

And not only that, but we have a function where you can select a data center or deselect a data center where you don’t want your data to move. So we are ahead in that from a customer’s perspective and have introduced that.

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