Dive Brief:
- Zoom will use Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to help support "massive increases" in service capacity, Oracle announced Tuesday. The companies began working together about six weeks ago, according to Reuters.
- After reaching "full production" with Oracle, Zoom runs more than seven petabytes through Oracle's cloud infrastructure servers every day, according to the announcement.
- The partnership with Oracle (also a Zoom customer) comes after the platform's daily meeting participants hit 300 million, up 50% from the 200 million daily participants it hosted in March. In December, Zoom was only hosting 10 million daily participants.
Dive Insight:
Zoom started carving out shares of the collaboration market long before the coronavirus forced employees around the world to work from home. Now the company is a center stage technology during the pandemic — for better and for worse.
CEO Eric Yuan admitted Zoom made "missteps" following weeks of critical reviews of the platform for security and privacy. Because nearly everyone adopted Zoom, the company was slow to adjust its use cases outside of its typical customer: enterprises with IT teams.
While Yuan said the platform already has "all the security features built in," they weren't reinforced to their maximum capacity. His admission came just before a Zoom shareholder filed a class action lawsuit against the company, for misrepresenting its level of end-to-end encryption.
Zoom's unrelenting momentum during the pandemic led its quickly-formed partnership with another cloud provider. The company already relied on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services, according to Zoom's financial filings.
A heavyweight customer like Zoom could propel Oracle's cloud toward a greater market share. Oracle has historically struggled to make headway in the cloud market, since launching its public cloud infrastructure in 2015. Still, the company's expansion is underway, as it works to make 36 cloud regions available this year.
Correction: This article has been updated to clarify Zoom had 200 million daily meeting participants, not "users," on April 1.
