Zoom Video Exec Talks Cloud Conferencing Company's Partnership Strategy, Hardware-As-A-Service

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to socially distance individuals and critically impact sectors like never before, Zoom Video Communications ZM has experienced dramatic growth from its public offering one year ago until now.

Its newest offering, the Zoom for Home - DTEN ME, is a hardware device built by enterprise solutions developer DTEN that aims to integrate the home office into a part of the corporate workplace.

Benzinga spoke with Jeffrey Smith, the head of Zoom Rooms, on the company’s growth and its development of remote work software and hardware going forward. 

Zoom Rooms is a software-based room system with integrated audio conferencing, wireless screen sharing and video conferencing. 

Benzinga: How do you plan on staying ahead of competitors like Facebook, Inc. FB, Alphabet Inc GOOGL GOOG, and Microsoft MSFT as they enter and develop in the virtual conferencing and remote workplace integration space?

Smith: We are going to focus on our core and enable workers to be productive, even as we begin to share space with different devices and services.

Partnerships have worked really well for us. We try to focus on what we do well and let our ecosystem of partners innovate. When we look at hardware especially, our partners want to help Zoom users be more effective, and as long as that ecosystem is vibrant, there is no need for us to expand our skill set.

BZ: How has Zoom and Zoom Rooms prepared throughout the year to scale in a way that caters to the growing demand for virtual conferencing?

Smith: The need for video conferencing has solidified in customers’ minds as business critical. It is important for the continuity of business to be able to communicate effectively, both in and out of the office.

The consistent themes that are coming to me from customers is: "how do I enable remote workers, but also how do I facilitate a return to work safely?”

In both a fully remote environment that really focuses on the home physical spaces, but also in a hybrid working environment, it is critical that customers are able to scale up their deployment of video conferencing.

From a Zoom Rooms perspective, one of the programs that we have implemented that helps customers to scale is addressing the challenges around budgeting and upfront capital.

So our hardware-as-a-service program enables customers to scale up the physical devices at a much higher rate to address some of these issues. And from a service perspective, I think the world has seen our ability to scale the high quality, consistent experience that customers are getting from Zoom, helping customers to access the equipment that they need at scale as well as the experience that they expect. This has been our focus.

BZ: How are you developing and validating new use cases for Zoom Rooms?

Smith: We have been able to address quarantine with dedicated hardware. We have also seen hospital systems that have engaged with Zoom Rooms to create virtual triage stations outside of their facilities where customers can walk up and interact with doctors to talk about their symptoms, protecting frontline workers from exposure.

At the same time, we are enabling much richer interactions with patients.

The fun part of what we get to do is get feedback from customers, sales and end users to work with our partners to develop hardware that addresses different use cases that constantly feed back to ecosystem stakeholders.

Photo courtesy of Zoom.