The future of collaboration: Zoom in the new era of digital communications

By May 2020, 43% of U.S. employees were working from home exclusively, according to Gallup. Many of them turned to one program – Zoom – to stay connected to colleagues, clients, and suppliers. The videoconferencing platform saw daily meeting participants skyrocket from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million in June 2020.

Three years later, that runaway growth has subsided, as companies compel workers to return to the office, and hybrid work makes organizational connections more complex. At the 18th Annual Emerging Technology Summit, Tom Blakey, Senior Equity Research Analyst with KeyBanc Capital Markets, talked with Zoom Video Communications CFO Kelly Steckelberg about what the future of collaboration looks like for Zoom, its customers and the digital communications segment.

Blakey and Steckelberg started with a look back at Zoom’s roots and recent performance.

When is a decade-old company also an overnight success?

Zoom was launched by the current CEO, Eric Yuan, in 2013. Yuan had helped create the teleconferencing platform WebEx in the late 1990s and stayed on after it was acquired by Cisco in 2007. But as he surveyed the competitive landscape, he became convinced that he could build a better solution.

Within a few months of launching, Zoom had a million users. By early 2015, that number had ballooned to 40 million. Steckelberg led the company through a successful IPO in April 2019, and Zoom reported $330 million in revenue that fiscal year. It wasn’t long after that that Zoom became the tech darling of the pandemic. “I think we can all agree that we could not have survived without Zoom over the last few years,” said KeyBanc Capital Markets’ Blakey.

Though growth has slowed in 2022, the company still delivered more than $4.4 billion in revenue in fiscal 2023, representing 90% CAGR over the past four years. As the pandemic fades into the rearview mirror, Zoom is looking to evolve from its time in the spotlight.

“It’s true, we became the company that transformed the meeting experience and that everybody knows and loves for meetings,” said Zoom’s Steckelberg. “But we are so much more than that.”

An “operating system for how you work”

Meetings, Steckelberg explained, still sit at the core of Zoom’s platform. But the company is focused on expanding its offerings beyond that. For example, Zoom has sold over 5.5 million seats of their cloud PBX Zoom Phone product, while Zoom Rooms bring the old conference room concept into the digital age. And it has invested in new products, like Zoom Contact Center, the company’s cloud contact center solution, and Zoom IQ for Sales, which marries the power of the platform with data and analytics to train sales organizations. Finally, Zoom continues to develop its persistent chat product, email and calendar overlays for third-party apps.

“We aspire to be the collaboration platform where you spend your day – really, the operating system for how you work,” added Steckelberg.

Facilitating more than just “an event in time”

As Steckelberg describes it, the future of collaboration will involve multiple online functions beyond videoconferencing. “A meeting is an event in time. You do it and then you go away from it,” said Steckelberg. “We will extend beyond that by making Zoom meetings better than in-person meetings, by providing things like transcriptions, translations and recordings. We’re enabling all of those things, and that’s how Zoom becomes not just a meeting platform, but a tool to get work done.”

Soon the platform will allow users to move effortlessly between video, voice and chat. “You can be exchanging information with someone on a chat, then decide to one-click launch a phone call or Zoom meeting. You can be in a meeting with a chat product running, then have that save into a persistent chat channel that's created with that group,” Steckelberg elaborated. “It’s the seamless ability to have all of your communications and collaboration in one place and have it persist if you choose. That's the killer app.”

The importance of integration

Zoom aims for its platform to do more – but not everything. Interoperability with other systems will continue to be essential. “When Zoom first launched, lots of companies had these big conference rooms equipped with thousands of dollars of hardware,” Steckelberg explained. “So, we created Connector so that you could walk into this big, beautiful room full of expensive equipment and leverage the efficiency and ease of use of Zoom.”

Today, interoperability means being able to one-click launch a Zoom meeting or call directly from within Microsoft Teams, Slack or Salesforce. “It’s all about meeting our customers where they are and helping them leverage whatever works best for them,” said Steckelberg.

That integration is becoming a two-way street. While users have long been able to access Zoom products from within third-party platforms, Zoom is now overlaying third-party email and calendar solutions in the Zoom client, to reduce customer email volume and eliminate the hassle of switching applications.

Work has come home, but the future of collaboration is making people feel at home in their work

To prepare for the future of digital communication, Zoom is evolving into an operating system for collaboration. But that entails more than just adding new products and features. It requires enabling users to easily capture information exchanged at one point in time and make it effortlessly usable across a variety of different applications. Knocking down those walls between chat, voice, video and other means of communication has two aims – to make employees more efficient and productive, and to help bridge the distances inherent in remote working.

"It’s about bringing people together as we’ve all taken up multitasking. We’re joining a meeting in our car while dropping off our kids, then we’re on your way to the office, and we want to be able to do all that seamlessly. That's the balance that we're trying to strike here for everybody, so that it works in the way that you're living your life. How do you do that and make people still feel connected? Those are the types of ongoing innovations that you're going to see."

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