There’s no denying the incredible growth of Zoom in the last year.
The company has accomplished some phenomenal things in a time when other brands were struggling through the complications of quarantines and lockdowns. In an age where physical interactions aren’t always possible, Zoom promises a way for people to continue connecting face-to-face.
Though there are many other video conferencing tools out there, Zoom caught the hearts and minds of the pandemic community with its ease of use, a vast collection of fun features, and flexibility. The video conferencing platform became the breakout service of 2020, earning around 355% growth from the growing need to work remotely.
However, despite all this evolution, Zoom isn’t done growing.
Recently, the company raised $2bn in funding during a short round of investment. So, where is this new money going to go?
Support for Strategic Acquisitions
The primary assumption right now is that at least a portion of Zoom’s new funds will go towards strategic acquisitions. When filing details of the funding round with the SEC, Zoom noted that it may use a portion of the capital for Merger and Acquisition opportunities.
The filing said that a “portion of the net proceeds” may go towards complementary technologies, services, and products. However, Zoom hasn’t dropped any hints on what it might be buying yet. Unfortunately, the historical information we have on Zoom makes it difficult to make any significant predictions. The most recent purchase of Keybase for security support has been the only major purchase from the video conferencing brand.
So, if Zoom does decide to go on a spending spree, where will it be focusing its efforts? Following the Zoombombing fiasco of 2020, the company might decide to invest even more cash into security, so it can further reassure enterprise customers that may be concerned about breach issues.
Alternatively, to further compete against market leaders like Microsoft Teams, Zoom may decide that it’s time to spend some extra cash on innovation within the meeting space. Perhaps we’ll see a future where Zoom has its own investments in VR and AR technology, like Microsoft with its HoloLens technology. Or perhaps Zoom will invest more aggressively into WebRTC solutions, so people can communicate in-browser without an app.
Building Out the Zoom Experience
Zoom is already a feature-rich and immersive solution for video communications. However, it could still take steps to differentiate itself even further in the UCaaS landscape. One option might be to invest more money into building the extra components of Zoom that go alongside video meetings. Zoom Chat and Zoom Phone are two major components of what the company can offer. Yet, for some reason, many people don’t know much about what Zoom Chat can do.
Zoom could further strengthen its security, privacy, and compliance offerings by investing in new tools that allow for things like secure recordings that suit the latest regulations for video and audio meetings. This would help Zoom to appeal to a wider range of customers that have more complex demands about how and where they store information.
Further investment into AI and virtual assistants could be an option too. Google has connections to Google Home, while Microsoft has Cortana. Zoom being able to implement its own artificial intelligence assistant into the mix could make life a lot easier for business users in the years to come.
Perhaps, since Zoom already leverages the AWS cloud, Zoom could continue to build on the connections it has with Amazon Alexa. Zoom for home is already supported via the Amazon Echo Show Smart display.
