Zoom made a lot of progress in May. With its 90-day plan now more than half-way over, Zoom Founder and CEO, Eric Yuan, shed some light on how it did last month, as well as what we can expect from the video conferencing company in the future. I’ve detailed all of those updates in a separate post. Today, I want to talk about what Zoom’s product pipeline looks like and what it plans to do once it reaches its 90-day deadline. Yuan said the company’s cooking up several useful features for users, including the ability for admins to manage virtual backgrounds, adding:
“Account admins asked for more control over what their users can upload as virtual backgrounds, so we’re working to offer the ability for admins to upload a set of pre-approved backgrounds”
Hosts will soon be able to delete in-meeting chat questions, answers, comments, as well as unmute all participants. There are more enhancements to Zoom’s waiting room feature expected, too, Zoom said in a statement. As of May, Zoom is GCM encrypted, one of the most useful upgrades in Zoom version 5.0., and one of the safest forms of encryption used today.
Starting May 30, 2020, all paid/free users gained access to the new feature, along with those on Zoom’s webinar solution. Zoom has further plans to beef up security because most of its enterprise customers use some form of multi-factor authentication through single sign-on (SSO) providers to access Zoom. “We plan to add MFA options for free and pro users in the future,” commented Yuan.
Answering perhaps the most pivotal question of the session, Yuan said for the last thirty days of Zoom’s 90-day plan, the company will continue raising the bar on security, privacy, and safety. He said some of the company’s short-term goals include using feedback to build its end-to-end encryption offering, additional password enhancements, more user interface updates, and continued efforts to address meeting disruptions aka Zoombombing.
The end of Zoom’s 90-day cleanup period, Yuan added, will not signify the end of the company’s efforts to tighten the security of its video conferencing platform. Yuan said that couldn’t be farther from the truth, and that user privacy along with security will remain Zoom’s focus going forward. “Zoom will continue developing the most secure and frictionless video communication solution for our customers,” he said in a statement.
The Keybase acquisition played a key role in Zoom one day developing an end-to-end encrypted video conferencing platform. Addressing the impacts of the novel Coronavirus, Yuan recently told investors, Zoom had a great first quarter, earned $328.2 million in revenue. If it sounds high, then it is, and Zoom’s revenue grew 169 percent when compared on a year-over-year basis. Zoom also saw an increase in the number of customers contributing more than $100,000, a number that’s risen 90 percent year-over-year.
It’s been a fruitful time for companies in the UC and collaboration industry, and Zoom’s soaring on many fronts. Controversies aside, the company seems to take user security seriously, and that’s clear with all it’s done thus far. In terms of corporate social responsibility, Zoom’s played things by the book, owning up to its shortcomings and subsequently rectifying them.
