India is a critical market for Zoom, says Velchamy Sankaralingam, President, Product and Engineering

The US-based Zoom has been one of the biggest gainers during the coronavirus pandemic—from office meetings, weddings to reunions, the video-conferencing application has seen it all as the country restricted the movement of people to break the chain of infection.

Founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, Zoom downloads spiked as it saw wide adoption across the world. Its revenues increased 88 percent to $623 million in FY20. The company also opened a technology centre in Bengaluru and is hiring aggressively for various roles such as DevOps and security software engineer for its Bengaluru and Mumbai offices.

In an interview to Moneycontrol, Velchamy Sankaralingam, President, Product and Engineering at Zoom, talks about why India is a key market for the firm, hiring, new growth areas and future of work. Edited excerpts:

When the pandemic struck in 2020, Zoom saw downloads spike putting it in the spotlight. Can you take us through how the year has been since April 2020?

Zoom was a fast-growing company even before the pandemic. We always plan for capacity because you don't know how many people are going to be using the service. So, there is always contingency planning—how do we grow like twice or thrice. But with the pandemic, what happened was in a period of like a few weeks, we grew like 30 times in terms of the usage.

Our CEO Eric (Yuan), decided that we will give (Zoom) free to all the schools, remove all the limits even though that means we had to build even higher capacity to address that. And the other thing was all enterprises shifted to work from. Then we just needed to make sure of two things.

One, we have to make sure the capacity is good and at the same time, (we need to ensure) scale and performance because it became a much more critical service. Normally, if you are in the office, and then one person is on Zoom, I think if the person has a problem, or with any video-conferencing it was not that relevant. But then with everybody working, this became the most critical service for enterprise as well. So, we needed to make sure that the high availability, scalability, performance, everything is taken care of as well.

Coming back to India, could you share some numbers on the growth and investments? In a LinkedIn post, shortly after you joined, you spoke about how important India market is.

I don't think publicly we announced anything India-specific. I think, on the free user side, we grew about 60 odd times in India, compared to 30 times worldwide. So, India's growth has been much higher than the rest of the world.

What drove the huge spike in India vis-à-vis global numbers?

I think one is Zoom always had a free version available and it is so easy to use. So they have physical restrictions on travel, they became innovative about how to virtually do a lot of the things that we would never have thought to have done virtually before. For me personally, if you look at India, I had so many reunions. I think I had more reunions in 2020 than the rest of the years that I've been to. All of those are happening because people find that, unlike a regular reunion, there is so much logistics and finding time for everybody.

We are seeing many use cases. I’ve seen weddings, church (sermons) happening. Even on the business side, there are a lot of meetings that people used to travel to before and then it all moved completely virtual.

Clearly, India has grown much faster than the global figures. Can you share more on the investments you will make here in terms of hiring or probably creating more centres back in the country?

We have a centre in Mumbai and also data centres in India. We have been growing the data centre in the cloud. Last year, we announced the tech centre in Bangalore, which is basically virtual right now. We are hiring more and more people in the tech centre for different roles.

Can you share a bit more on how many people you have in India or anything specific on the hiring perspective?

I don't have the exact numbers but in terms of the hiring, we don't have any limits on how much we can grow in India. So, it's not like we are saying this is the number. I think its sort of like the target is as many good people that we can find in India for multiple roles today.

We're at a growth stage, so there are no limits on what we can do. One of the challenges that we have is that innovation needs to keep growing like we do now because we are entering a lot of areas. For that we need the best-of-the-best from all the places. And that is why we opened the Singapore Tech Center; we opened the India Tech Center.

Enterprise clients have been one of the key focus areas for Zoom. Are you seeing new areas of growth in India?

There are these other markets like education, healthcare, and government and we are actually putting a lot of effort on those because all of these sectors went through a huge transformation. If you look at education, pretty much all schools went remote during this period. Maybe the schools will go back to classrooms but there are a lot of use cases for remote learning. For example, if you're in Bangalore, and you want to take a class in IIM or IISc, depending on where you are, you may not have been able to take it before at all.

So, some of these changes, I believe will become more permanent. People would find a way to offer classes remotely. In healthcare, like visiting your doctor on a video serves really well in most cases. So, we are actually focusing on those markets but the other part we're also looking at is events-type business is basically going virtual. So that's another area that we are looking at.

Zoom is a global company, with operations across the world. So how do you position India?

I think India is very critical from a Zoom standpoint, for a few reasons. One is the Indian market. I think there are a lot of customers that we have from the Indian market, like government organisations, local businesses. But we also have a lot of multinationals, and they have a huge presence in India as well. So, we have a lot of those employees of multinationals in India actually using Zoom as well.

With vaccination gaining pace and people go back to physical meetings eventually, do you see the numbers decline for Zoom?

I think the way we are looking at this is, in the future, you just need to make sure that you have all the things that are needed from a customer standpoint. The focus is actually how to keep the customers happy, work with them and then be there where they need it. Then the part is if you look at the pandemic, there are certain things that may go back and some may never go back as well. So, the hybrid world is something that we believe is going to be there. And then the best thing we can do is be ready to meet our customer needs and keep them happy. So, that's basically our focus.

Zoom’s ended FY20 with 88 percent year-on-year increase in revenues at $623 million in revenues. Do you see that repeating in 2021 and sustaining in coming years?

So all of us know that nobody expected the world to change, the way it changed. Zoom had a very usable product that everybody liked at the right time. And then, people started using it not just for business meetings, they started using it for every other purpose.

So, what we are doing is, okay the world is going into a hybrid for a while and then how do we make sure that we make life easy on the hybrid? How do we make people more productive, whether it is business or whether it's consumer? So, that is what we can do. There are some things that are not under our control, the best thing is to make sure we build the best product and then focus on how we keep our customers happy. So that's basically our focus. I think everything else we feel is secondary.

So, does that mean yes or no? Is that sustainable?

I think only time will tell.

For most firms, Zoom is probably a permanent feature of their future of work. What is Zoom’s idea of the future of work?

I think, right now, we feel the current way of working is very, very, very productive. Not only that, the number of employees that we had when the pandemic started and now, I don’t think we’ll be able to fit into the same office because of the number of people that we have hired. At the same time, we used this opportunity to hire people in all parts of the world. So, we are looking at our own hybrid. But we believe that the current mode is good but then we will also settle on some hybrid model that works for us, depending on the different countries as well.

This is something I had to ask because your CEO Eric Yuan also talked about it. It is about Zoom fatigue. You are on Zoom meetings throughout the day, sometimes back to back. What are your thoughts on it?

My behaviour is normally I go to the office early in the morning and then I come back late. When I joined Zoom one of the concerns that I had was it's a new company. I know like Eric, and a few people, but then I don't know the whole team. It was all remote at the time. How do I actually get this thing to work? So, I had my concerns.

But then what I realised is that going through this process, if I had gone to the office, I would have known a set of people very well. And then the rest of the people will be like another level of exposure. But now, I know like hundreds of people at Zoom. I know all of them very well. And I have no idea where they are.

So, that was really surprising for me. The other part of this is also that look when people have physical meetings, there are natural breaks, okay. So the tendency with Zoom Meetings is—there is no need for a break because you don't need to go anywhere. So, one of the things that we do is either end the meeting 10 minutes before the end of the hour. So that way there is like a break between the meetings. It's more like how do you manage in a virtual environment, right.