Zoom’s UCaaS offering, ‘Zoom Phone’ is now generally available in 11 additional countries in EMEA: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Today, the UCaaS giant announced its cloud phone system is now available in a total of 17 countries and one territory. Zoom Phone is also available via direct and premise peering for hybrid deployment so customers can leverage existing PSTN SIP trunks. Customers can optionally integrate the Zoom Phone with legacy PBX solutions.
The international implications of this are significant for Zoom, and very well could disrupt the UCaaS market, as UC Today Publisher, Rob Scott, predicted last year. Head of Zoom Phone, Graeme Geddes, told me, the company’s received ‘great’ feedback from Zoom Phone users in the eleven countries that recently completed beta programs, adding:
“We’re thrilled to offer the general availability of service throughout those countries. Today’s announcements signal our continued commitment to ensuring our customers are happy and to making Zoom Phone more widely available, accessible, and easy to use”
Geddes said the expansion of Zoom’s geographic coverage will make it ‘simpler’ for customers to migrate from on-premises legacy phone systems. Zoom Phone’s latest version will include multilingual prompts for multi-site admin, and you can customize your Zoom Phone’s prompt language from your softphone’s user interface. German, Danish, Japanese, Korean, Russian, Chinese Mandarin (simplified), and Chinese Mandarin (traditional) are now language options, joining American English, British English, Canadian English, French, as well as Spanish.
According to the company, Zoom Phone beta service will be available for 25 more countries including Argentina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Czech Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Mexico, Norway, Panama, Peru, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, and Turkey upon request for qualified Zoom customers starting March 9, 2020. New country general availability will be announced during the second half of 2020, Zoom shared.
Using Zoom Phone is simple, EMEA customers with Zoom Phone deployments can now click on the Zoom client and see Zoom Meetings, Chat, and Phone. Once you click on the Zoom Phone option, you see a dial pad that can use to access all your contacts.
“Our goal is to offer a simple, reliable, and innovative video-first unified communications platform, across desktop, mobile, phone and conference rooms”
As such, the Zoom Phone add-on integrates with contact centers, allowing for ease of management of call routing with some of the market’s top vendors. Zoom Phone’s general availability in the above EMEA countries. Zoom Phone launched in the United States and Canada in January 2019, with the company swiftly expanding service to Australia, the United Kingdom, Ireland, New Zealand, and Puerto Rico.
Zoom seems to have its finger on the pulse of the current enterprise landscape, and the move to make its softphone generally available in additional countries comes at a pivotal moment in the evolution of UCaaS. For companies that rely on Zoom as its primary communication platform, the Zoom Phone should provide a much-needed boost in terms of mobility, agility, and remote work.
