Video communication platform Zoom is looking to expand its data centre capacity in the country, in a bid to address the increasing demand of its clo ud-based phone system Zoom Phone, the company’s president of product and engineering, Velchamy Sankarlingam.
The company, which had two data centres in the country in Mumbai and Hyderabad, has now added six more data centres to manage Zoom Phone in circles – Pune, Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, and Delhi. Once there is a demand for Zoom Phone in other circles, Zoom will look at expanding its data centre capacity.
As more businesses and individuals adopt Zoom Phone, the demand for servers and storage increases. This growth requires more data centers to ensure Zoom can handle the expanding user base without compromising service quality.
Currently live in Pune and Chennai, Zoom Phone is a cloud business communications platform, which helps businesses make and receive calls over WiFi, cellular data, with options to switch from video to voice call, from desktop to handphone, with various other chat and call management tools. It replaces traditional phone lines with a more flexible, internet-powered solution, allowing employees to communicate from anywhere—whether they are at the office, at home, or on the go.
“It (expansion of Zoom Phone) depends on where we see the demand. In these six circles, we have our own customers who have their employees in these locations. And if the customers have employees in other circles, we could expand the services,” Sankarlingam said, adding that besides Pune and Chennai, in all other circles Zoom Phone is being tested.
Zoom Phone operates on a seat-based model, which means you pay for each ‘seat’ or user that will have access to the phone service. Each seat, typically, includes one phone number and allows the user to make and receive calls through Zoom Phone.
In India, Zoom had launched its Zoom Phone service in October last year, after getting a licence from the department of telecommunications (DoT). With the launch, the company marked its entry into the cloud telephony sector, challenging the likes of call-centre solution providers, like Exotel, Ozonetel, Knowlarity, Twilio, and Zoom’s peers such as Cisco WebEx, Microsoft, etc. However, Zoom has an edge as it provides video, audio, chat, customer management, all at one-place.
According to Sankarlingam, Zoom Phone is getting good traction in Pune and Chennai, especially from multinational companies (MNCs). The same is because in India, most companies still use traditional systems such as private branch exchange (PBX), and would require cloud-based internet solutions.
When asked about the quantum of investments Zoom is looking at in India, Sankarlingam said, “There is a lot of equipment that we needed to invest in. So, it’s a combination of hardware, software, people, and resources, etc.”
Zoom, whose video conferencing solutions skyrocketed during the Covid-19 pandemic, has lately seen a slowdown in growth rate.
“Our growth slowed because pre-pandemic, we were like a $300 million company and then post-pandemic, we were like $4 billion. We grew 10 times during the time, which no other company has grown this fast. When you grow that much, your growth rate slows down,” Sankarlingam said, adding that Zoom’s revenue never declined.
Lately, Zoom has been banking on its AI offerings such as Zoom AI companion — its generative AI assistant that helps businesses summarise customer and team chats and gives meeting transcripts, language translations, compose emails, send calendar invites, generate post-call tasks for follow-up, among other things.
“AI is top of mind for everybody. And if you look at AI, most of the vendors in the market charge a premium for AI. They charge like $30, but Zoom subscription is somewhere in the teen dollars per month, but that includes all the AI capabilities,” Sankarlingam said, adding that the company has over 4 million customers who have adopted AI.
At the end of October, Zoom had 192,400 enterprise customers. For the full FY25, Zoom guided for a total revenue between $4.656 billion and $4.661 billion. Financial Express