With the world in lockdown, people are turning to video conferencing to enable engagement within their workforce and with customers. One of the biggest benefactors of this surge in video conferencing is Zoom. So much so that it may yet become a dictionary word and not just a company name.
Zoom had a challenge. With rapidly expanding requirements, it needed to ensure that its infrastructure could cope with the massive increase in volume. After a rapid selection process, it selected Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
Eric S Yuan commented: “We recently experienced the most significant growth our business has ever seen, requiring massive increases in our service capacity. We explored multiple platforms, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was instrumental in helping us quickly scale our capacity and meet the needs of our new users. We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance and unmatched level of support.”
The platform was deployed in hours and now supports more than 300 million daily meeting participants. That Oracle has delivered a solution so quickly and on such a scale will make others sit up and notice. Oracle is now providing the scalability and elasticity that Zoom is likely to require in the coming weeks. It is already passing around seven petabytes of data through the platform.
Oracle CEO Safra Catz said: “Video communications has become an essential part of our professional and personal lives, and Zoom has led this industry’s innovation. We are proud to work with Zoom, as both their cloud infrastructure provider and as a customer, while they grow and continue to connect businesses, people and governments around the world.”
Education benefits
The power of the Oracle platform has also enabled Zoom to open up its platform as part of a CSR initiative. In the US, the new platform has enabled it to eliminate the 40-minute limit it imposes for those primary and secondary schools using basic accounts. Once this change was implemented, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure coped with this massive increase in demand.
What does this mean
It is a significant win for Oracle. It was no doubt helped, not just by the scalability of the platform but also by its rapid expansion overseas in recent years. Oracle now has a significant footprint across the globe with a presence on the major continents except Africa. It has plans to open a region there in South Africa soon.
Once the pandemic is over, demand for Zoom conferencing will likely diminish, though this may take some time. When that happens, expect to hear more information about how Oracle deployed and helped with this impressive project. Oracle will also have learnt some lessons from what was undoubtedly at times a stress test of its infrastructure. Other customers will benefit from this in future months and years.
Clarification
While Oracle is providing Zoom with cloud infrastructure services it is not the only vendor doing so. The following was received from AWS:
“AWS provides the majority of Zoom’s cloud infrastructure and has for some time. Is it possible to update your story to clarify that AWS also provides Zoom with cloud services? While it was subtle in Oracle’s press release announcing the Zoom win, their headline correctly noted they were selected as “a cloud infrastructure provider,” one of a few (also Microsoft Azure).”
