Zoom Video Communications Inc said on Tuesday that it has started using Oracle Corp.’s cloud computing service to mitigate the increase in online video calls as a result of the new coronavirus pandemic. As businesses and schools shift to remote work and billions of people who need to keep looking for ways to stay connected at home, Zoom has seen daily meeting attendees rise from $ 10 million in December to $ 300 million. But it has also experienced a backlash as its increased use has exposed privacy and security flaws.
Zoom had prepared a 90-day plan to fix the security vulnerabilities, but in the meantime, the thirty-fold jump in traffic needed more processing power. The deal is a big win for Oracle, which aims to overtake rivals such as Amazon.com and Microsoft with a larger market share, and sell a new generation of cloud technology after the first-generation efforts failed to take hold.
Zoom and Oracle did not disclose the size of the deal, but said traffic for “millions” of meeting attendees is handled by Oracle’s cloud service and approximately 7 million gigabytes of Zoom data flows through Oracle servers per day. “It’s exciting to be able to get on a platform and scale up very quickly,” Brendan Ittelson, Zoom’s Chief Technology Officer, told Reuters in an interview.
Zoom’s service runs on a mix of its own data center equipment and cloud computing services from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure, but also started working with Oracle about six weeks ago. Zoom and Oracle executives said their engineering teams worked together daily to get systems up and running that now handle a significant portion of Zoom & # 39; s traffic.
Jean Atelsek, an analyst at 451 Research, said that if Zoom’s use of Oracle proves successful, it could give Oracle a high-profile customer to show that its new technology is competitive with larger rivals. “The special thing about this deal is only the speed at which it happened,” Atelesk said.
