The Coronavirus pandemic has exposed some of the deepest of technology provider issues. This includes a company’s ability to scale up and down and to do so quickly. During the pandemic, some companies struggled with this notion. In a new multi-year agreement, Zoom Video Communications Inc. said it would further put its trust in Amazon Web Services, hoping to avoid outages and other security blunders moving forward. AWS is set to continue delivering services as Zooms preferred cloud provider under the terms of the agreement, and A spokesperson for AWS wrote in a statement:
“The agreement will extend our longstanding relationship and enable Zoom to scale its service to rise to the challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic”
Zoom said it plans to continue leveraging AWS’s global infrastructure and portfolio of services, which it has leaned on since 2011. This includes compute, storage, content distribution, and security infrastructure – to create what Zoom calls a ‘seamless and secure extension of its data centers.’ Over the past year, Zoom has relied on AWS to accommodate an increase from 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019 – to the more than 300 million it has supported since April 2020.
The hard work began in February 2020, according to the duo. I’m told both engineering teams from AWS and Zoom worked to add tens of thousands of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances. These virtual servers have boosted Zoom’s capacity and added thousands of instances in a day to address rising adoption. AWS and Zoom said they would also collaborate to develop new solutions for enterprise users, adding a statement:
“Leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS to integrate Zoom services with Amazon devices and capabilities to make it easier for organizations to run a hybrid office and remote work models”
So far, Zoom has used AWS technology to provide video conferencing technology to more than 130,000 schools across the globe, free of charge. This is plus the millions of families, individuals, and enterprise users it supports. Zoom’s customers span a wide array of verticals including other tech companies, governments, healthcare institutions, etc.
Zoom did not only have a lot of sudden growth – it faced a sharp increase in demand for customer service over the past nine months. AWS said it leaned heavily on its technology to give Zoom access to over 1,000 Amazon WorkSpaces – virtual desktops. AWS said in a statement that it provided extra cloud infrastructure and security monitoring support to help Zoom stream events w9th more security in addition.
And Zoom plans to integrate its video meeting service into select Amazon Echo Show devices (Amazon’s Alexa-enabled smart display). It will even incorporate Alexa for Business features, including voice control, into its Zoom Rooms service.
The pandemic has created the perfect conditions to make Zoom into a powerhouse. In its third-quarter, the company saw its total revenue of $777.2 million, up 367% year-over-year. As of this Q3 for the fiscal year 2021, Zoom said it had 433,700 customers with more than 10 employees, a number that rose 485 percent from the same quarter the previous fiscal year. Zoom now has 1,289 customers who pay more than $100,000 in trailing 12 months revenue, a number up by 136 percent from the same quarter last FY with over 3,800 employees worldwide.
