Post-pandemic, hybrid working model here to stay: Zoom India Head

Collaboration and video-conferencing apps have seen wide adoption during the pandemic and anything related to digital has actually seen exponential growth. So, how was Zoom's India business in the last one year?

Collaboration tools and services on the cloud have seen wide adoption during the pandemic. The world went upside down one night and people started working from home, which was unprecedented. If you would have asked me the same question probably a year back or two years back, I would have said, this kind of growth is not possible, but we saw that transformation in people's behaviour in adoption of these tools, which fuelled the growth in the last one year.

In terms of growth, can you give some view on how many users are now there? What are the numbers in terms of laptop downloads or mobile downloads?

It has become really difficult for us to see the exact details in terms of growth or the number of mobile downloads or application downloads for laptops as with the second wave coming in, those numbers have gone out of the window again. However, there are certain reports which compiled those numbers.

Though work from home (WFH) has become an accepted operating model, there are indications from large companies like many IT services firms are likely to bring back their employees from October onwards. So, how sustainable these growth numbers are going forward?

In terms of people working remotely and people being in hometown and still being able to join their offices remotely, both employees and employers have seen the benefit of video in their daily communication during this pandemic. While the productivity has gone up, infrastructure costs have reduced, so the benefits have been observed on both sides. Though people are going to come back to office, hybrid working model is here to stay. Though nobody knows what will be the percentage between people working from home and working from office, hybrid working model is here to stay.

Secondly, even if people are going back to office that doesn't mean that they are going to stop using their phones or the video or the collaboration platforms. What has happened is that collaboration tools have gotten people closer as there is an element of video and also instant messaging. Video meetings from anywhere or any device have been widely adopted now. This is going to continue because people have seen the value. Instead of just speaking to people, it is so much better to have a face value to it. So, this change is not going away.

Has Zoom introduced new features to have a seamless experience in a hybrid work environment?

Yes, we have introduced couple of features for hybrid work environment. For hybrid environment, for example, you can check your body temperature when you're getting into and you can interact with a virtual receptionist and don't need a receptionist to interact with. Before getting into any room or even office apartment, you can decide whether you want to get into a room based on occupancy level to maintain the social distance. Similarly, the app can actually monitor the CO2 levels within a conference room. So, there are so many things that can be done in the collaboration platform and these new features, will continue to fuel the growth that that has happened in the last one year or so.

How was the enterprise side of business during the pandemic?

Enterprise segment continues to be one of the largest segments for us and we continue to grow massively. The second thing is what has happened last year is that a lot of organizations went ahead and took a decision in terms of (which platform to use). They didn't have much time to evaluate the platform that could really fulfil the business needs and they just went ahead, and deployed whatever they could think of. However, in this last one year when organisations were working from home, they realised that the solution was not catering to the requirements. Now, they are evaluating their strategies that they have deployed.

While SaaS (software as a service) businesses have seen rapid adoption during the pandemic, there is always a possibility of data breach in these cloud-based platforms. How Zoom is addressing these concerns?

What happened with Zoom (data breach in May 2020), that could happen with any organization. The growth was unprecedented and nobody had anticipated that so much growth would happen overnight. There were two aspects to it. Firstly, such growth was unprecedented and the second thing is that the kind of users that came on our platform during that period was very different. We were always a corporate platform and we had not anticipated normal consumers or people without an IT background will start using Zoom. We fixed it immediately. We are a very open and transparent company and that's our strength and we came out in the open and declared it that we fixed it.

Where do you store the consumer data given the concerns around data privacy these days?

Yes, we have two data centres in India, one is in Mumbai and another is in Hyderabad. We look forward to the finalisation of the Personal Data Protection Bill. We are more than compliant and we will definitely follow all the rules, which are coming for the Indian subscribers.