Zoom selects Oracle Cloud to support its growth
Recent growth has put immense pressure on Zoom to increase its service capacity
Ignoring industry leaders including Amazon, Microsoft and Google, video conferencing company Zoom has picked Oracle for its latest cloud expansion.
In a press release, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan said that the firm recently explored multiple cloud platforms and found Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to be "instrumental" in enabling it to quickly scale Zoom's service capacity and to meet the needs of its expanding user base.
Yuan said that Zoom finally decided to go with Oracle's cloud platform because of its "industry-leading security, outstanding performance and unmatched level of support."
Notably, Oracle founder Larry Ellison had praised Zoom earlier this month, describing it an "essential service" during the COVID-19 outbreak.
Zoom has become the most preferred video conferencing service during coronavirus crisis as most countries have ordered lockdown, forcing people to stay indoors and do their work from home.
Earlier this month, Yuan revealed that their user base had grown from 10 million active users in December 2019 to 300 million in March 2020.
Zoom was not prepared for that kind of surge, as evidenced by various security issues reported in Zoom software recently. The growth also put immense pressure on Zoom's cloud infrastructure.
The firm was unable to deal with growing users alone. It urgently needed a cloud service provider, and it has now got one. The choice, however, has puzzled many experts in the industry. While Oracle is a "strong niche player" in the cloud market, according to a recent Synergy Research survey, it lags far behind industry leaders like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google.
CRM Essentials analyst Brent Leary says Zoom might have picked Oracle because of its expertise in creating mission-critical apps that are built on Oracle databases and run on Oracle hardware in the cloud.
"Zoom needs to prove to enterprises that they are able to handle scale and data security needed to beyond what SMBs typically require," Leary told TechCrunch.
Other analysts say Zoom selected Oracle because it likely wanted to keep it business away from potential rivals like Amazon, Google and Microsoft who all offer competing video-conferencing products to users.
According to Delta, Computing's market intelligence service, Oracle is the seventh most-trialled vendor in Europe when it comes to cloud services, behind Microsoft, Google, AWS, VMWare and IBM. More than half of the firms who trialled Oracle's cloud services subsequently took them into production, according to Delta's research.