Zoom turns to Oracle for cloud support as it hits 300 million daily users
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Cloud video conferencing company Zoom has seen a huge surge in demand since COVID-19 took hold and more people continue work from home.
One of the companies that has become synonymous with the global lockdown restrictions put in place and the continuing COVID-19 health pandemic is cloud video conferencing tool, Zoom. The company has seen a jump from 10 million daily users up to 300 million daily users in just a matter of weeks, as it becomes a popular tool amongst those in isolation for business collaboration and social use alike.
However, the surge in popularity has also resulted in unprecedented scrutiny on the company’s security practices and complaints about bandwidth and quality in some areas. For example, the company is in the middle of a 90 day feature freeze to prioritise resources on ensuring privacy and security capabilities are sufficient.
As such, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the company is seeking out technology vendors to support its growth, its changing needs and help it alleviate increased pressures as more and more people continue to work from home. With this in mind, it has been revealed today that Zoom has selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to help with its (according to the press release) “performance, scalability, reliability and superior cloud security”.
In just a matter of weeks, Zoom is transferring upwards of seven petabytes through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure servers each day, roughly equivalent to 93 years of HD video. Zoom also uses AWS and Azure as part of a multi-cloud environment.
The deal is a big boost for Oracle, which has been pushing its enterprise cloud infrastructure offering in recent years - hoping to gain market share from the likes of AWS and Azure. Oracle’s key selling points to the enterprise have been its autonomous features and advanced security, where it claims that infrastructure and data protection requirements are effectively managed autonomously.
Whilst Zoom’s initial requirements in working with Oracle focus on scale and capacity, in a briefing earlier today with Clay Magouyrk, executive VP of engineering for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, it was hinted that discussions on how Zoom could take advantage of such autonomous features may be happening down the line. Magouyrk said:
We are in conversations with Zoom about ways in which they can take more and more advantage of Oracle technology. What I can tell you right now is that Zoom is very focused on currently meeting their massive business growth. So now is not the right time to create the plans, but that’s something that we will be working with them over the next few months.
Oracle’s take on the deal
As noted above, winning Zoom as a customer is a big deal for Oracle, which has been touting its enterprise cloud 2.0 capabilities for the past couple of years. Magouyrk said that for Oracle, Zoom is a “significantly large customer and they’re growing very quickly” and that they are using “very large amounts of computer, storage and bandwidth”. Unsurprisingly, Oracle wouldn’t be drawn on the size of the deal in terms of revenue.
On how the deal played out, Magouyrk said:
About six weeks ago - in the middle of Zoom experiencing this usage growth and its business growing very quickly - they reached out to us to see if we could help meet some of their scaling demands. They had not been an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customer up until that point. So we mobilised the team across our engineering organisation, their organisation, had daily meetings, and within a couple of days we had their application up and running on top of our infrastructure. Then within a week or so they were moving significant production loads over to it. Since then we’ve steadily ramped that over the course of the past 6 weeks.
It was a significant amount of capacity that Zoom needed built in terms of the overall network transit and then of course the overall compute that they needed to be able to push all that traffic through the system.
Oracle said that they will continue to scale Zoom on its cloud platform, both in terms of overall capacity and expanding to new regions globally. Providing some detail on why Magouyrk believes Zoom looked to Oracle during this time of unprecedented growth, he said:
When Zoom needed us, we showed up. My team and their team had daily meetings. Whenever they had any kind of capacity problems or capacity projections we worked with them. Whenever they had any kind of issues with their application, saw a slowdown or something, I had my direct engineering team engage with them.
Oracle has been a long standing enterprise technology provider and a huge part of what we do is we know that customers run their business critical stuff on us, and we have to offer them that high level of support that makes them able to run their businesses. And so that was a big part of why zoom was able to, you know, grow so quickly on us and I think a big part of why they're so happy with our platform.
We at diginomica have been closely following the impact of COVID-19 on the enterprise, both in terms of the changing requirements placed on vendors, but also the shifting nature of work. It’s worth checking out our newly created dedicated COVID-19 resource page with all our in-depth analysis, as well as my colleague Dennis Howlett’s latest podcast, where he speaks to Ben Haines about the future of work.