Zoom Case Study
Cloud-based video conferencing company Zoom was founded in 2011 by former Cisco and WebEx engineers headquartered in San Jose, California. In February 2013, they quickly attracted over 20,000 businesses and 1,400 educational institutions globally. The platform became a household name, especially during the global pandemic of 2020. Let’s explore the amazing journey of Zoom and how it upended the conventional video conferencing market to become a must-have tool for distant communication.
The goal of Zoom Video Communications, also commonly known as Zoom, was to establish a video communication platform that was free of obstacles. Eric Yuan, a former Cisco executive, saw the need for a more dependable and user-friendly video conferencing solution that put the needs of both individuals and enterprises first and offered a seamless virtual conference environment.
Key Phases
Early Traction: Offering a product that was free for brief sessions and very reasonably priced for longer ones helped Zoom gain popularity.
Quick Action: The COVID-19 pandemic caused a sharp increase in distant work, which is why Zoom is a vital tool for virtual communication between companies and individuals. Zoom reacted promptly, improving security protections and expanding to handle the massive surge in users.
Diverse Use Cases: Zoom was able to support a wide range of use cases, including webinars, online events, and virtual meetings, thanks to its flexibility and platform integrations. It evolved to become a vital tool for healthcare, education, remote work, and other fields. As a result, Zoom grew from just over 2400 employees in January 2020 to more than 5700 global employees as of June 2021 and the Business Services & IT department keeps them all connected.
Current Scenario( June 2024): As of June 12, 2024, Zoom Video Communications’ net worth, or market cap, was $19.44 billion. This makes Zoom the 965th most valuable company in the world by market cap.
Zoom Freemium Business Model
Zoom’s business model charges for more sophisticated system capabilities while providing free access to fundamental services, ie., the “freemium model”. This model is extremely widespread among software applications since it has the advantage of having a huge segment of early users, making it easy for the firm to attract potential customers and study their user behavior. Most people are willing to check out a new app or service for free.
Why zoom is more popular than its competitors?
Maintain high-quality video and audio,
Give more security control rights to admin,
User-friendly Interface,
Give more chat privacy and chat view control.
Zoom Architecture
Zoom’s architecture consists of server-side infrastructure and client-side applications. The program that customers install on their PCs or other devices in order to connect to the servers is called Zoom Client. The conference rooms, traffic routing, and related services are all provided by the servers, which are hardware and software. Zoom servers can be found in corporate networks, public clouds, and data centers.
The key components are Zoom client, Data Centers, Public Cloud, and Web infrastructure.
The computer and mobile software that allows access to the Zoom servers is called the Zoom Client. It processes, encodes, and decodes video content. Moreover, network Quality of Service (QoS) is offered.
The Zoom servers, which are virtual machines, host meetings in the data centers. Meeting Zones are where the servers are arranged. Multimedia routers (MMR) are used within for stream traffic routing and dynamic optimization. Zone controllers (ZC) are responsible for overseeing and coordinating every activity that takes place inside a certain meeting zone. Additionally, it notifies the Global Cloud Controller of their status.
Web applications and notification services are offered via the public cloud. Meeting synchronization between the public cloud and the data center is handled by the cloud controllers located within the public cloud.
The web infrastructure houses several components, the SDK for outside developers wishing to create systems based on Zoom, and the zoom.us website.
For anyone interested in digital business, the Zoom case study is a great resource as it emphasizes the importance of user-centric product design, quick scaling, and flexibility in response to shifting market conditions. It exemplifies how a product may become an indispensable aspect of work and daily life, having a significant impact on society and the ways in which people interact and cooperate.
