Zoom Finds Its Voice as It Expands Into UCC

by Jim Lundy

I attended Zoomtopia, Zoom’s second annual customer conference in San Jose, last week. The event had a lot of buzz surrounding it and attracted some notable attendees. One that struck me was Peter Gassner, the CEO of Veeva Systems, who spoke about how Zoom has helped Veeva Systems grow (Veeva is one of the fastest growing firms in Silicon Valley). This blog discusses some of the things we saw at Zoomtopia.

Zoom Announces Zoom Voice, Its 2019 UCaas Offering

In the race to what Aragon calls people-centric collaboration, Zoom is adding a cloud voice solution that is currently in beta. This will be a nice complement to its current web and video conferencing platform. The unified communications (UC) market is large and growing, in part due to the demand for UCaaS-based (cloud telephony) offerings. Aragon feels that many Zoom buyers may opt to add Zoom Voice as an add-on.

The market is competitive and not for the feint of heart. In its quest to be a more complete UCC offering, Zoom Voice puts Zoom on a collision course with RingCentral and all of the other UCC players including Avaya, Cisco, Fuze, LogmeIn, Google, Microsoft, Mitel, Vonage and Unify (see the Aragon Research Globe™ for UCC).

Zoom Partners with Dropbox: The Race to the Digital Work Hub

Zoom and Dropbox announced a strategic partnership that will enable functionality of both products in each of their respective environments. Zoom users will be able to look at and share files from Dropbox and Dropbox users will be able to jump into a Zoom meeting seamlessly.

Our take is that while this is great for both firms, it’s also a necessary move. Users want a seamless work experience and digital work hubs are enabling that. Just as Google and Microsoft are making their work suites more integrated, best-of-breed providers are emerging to challenge that. Over time, Zoom and Dropbox may need to do more together to counter the more integrated digital work hub offerings.

Zoom Challenges Cisco Webex and LogMeIn GotoMeeting

Zoom’s move into voice makes sense. As Zoom grows and takes share from incumbent Cisco Webex and LogMeIn GoToMeeting, customers will start to compare them to the larger portfolios of those providers. One of the reasons Zoom is challenging the incumbents is that is has made meetings and room systems integrated. Zoom Rooms is easy to deploy and it works well with Zoom Meetings. It is not a large expense, either.

ZiipRoom Challenges Zoom Rooms

While Zoom works well with other video conferencing providers such as Polycom, new providers, such as ZiipRoom are making it even more seamless to manage huddle rooms. The reality today is that most enterprises have two to five different collaboration offerings for meetings. ZiipRoom, a new provider based in Boston, is making it easy to manage multiple meetings from multiple providers.

Zoomtopia Wrap-up

Zoomtopia was a success and Zoom continues to grow. As we enter 2019, Aragon will be watching Zoom’s entry into the UCaaS market and how it will position itself in the broader digital work hub market.