Eric Yuan (Zoom)
Zoom has partnered with Oracle Cloud to support infrastructure capabilities following a surge in user demand in response to new remote working measures.
The video conferencing specialist - which has been plagued with security concerns - has reported a services spike to 300 million daily meeting participants, requiring immediate and additional cloud capacity in the process.
In response, the vendor aligned with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure due to “performance, scalability, reliability and superior cloud security”, with the platform supporting “hundreds of thousands” of concurrent Zoom meetings within hours of deployment.
“We recently experienced the most significant growth our business has ever seen, requiring massive increases in our service capacity,” said Eric Yuan, CEO of Zoom.
“We explored multiple platforms, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was instrumental in helping us quickly scale our capacity and meet the needs of our new users. We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance, and unmatched level of support.”
Following deployment, Yuan said Zoom is now enabling millions of simultaneous meeting participants on the Oracle platform, with plans in place to scale further as demand increases.
“Video communication has become an essential part of our professional and personal lives, and Zoom has led this industry’s innovation,” added Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle. “We are proud to work with Zoom, as both their cloud infrastructure provider and as a customer, while they grow and continue to connect businesses, people and governments around the world.”
According to Catz, Oracle is “uniquely positioned" to enable Zoom’s expansion due to its “network architecture, capacity and data centre locations” across the world. Currently, the vendor is transferring upwards of seven petabytes through Oracle servers each day, roughly equivalent to 93 years of HD video.
Zoom has faced numerous criticisms during the past month, ranging from accusations of Zoom-bombing to a bug that enabled hackers to steal Windows passwords to a Californian lawsuit in which the company was accused of sharing data with Facebook – a claim Zoom denies.
As revealed by sister publication Network World in March, Alex Guerrero - senior manager of software-as-a-service operations at Zoom - claimed that the company was in a strong position to deliver on increased demand before the outbreak began.
"Luckily, we were kind of ahead of the curve, as we had probably 50 per cent more capacity than we needed at our maximum usage to begin with," said Guerrero, speaking in late March. "So we try to keep that [buffer] in place. The last couple of weeks, we've been all-hands-on-deck to keep that standard."
So far, the general philosophy has been to procure as much bandwidth as needed while trying to think strategically about how to scale over the long-term. For example, Zoom uses Equinix's network-interconnection platform to establish private connections to its technology partners and service provider customers.
According to Network World, Guerrero is looking at ways to improve its proximity to end users by augmenting Zoom's peering relationships, ordering more transit, and increasing bandwidth on existing interconnections.
"Our product can handle a lot of latency, but the closer you are to the eyeballs, the better performance you're going to get across the board. So that's mainly what I'm looking at," Guerrero said.
Zoom uses 19 data centres globally, where it's connected to the biggest exchange points in each market. "But now we're looking at the second-biggest, and maybe the third-biggest" to move even closer to more end users, he added.
Additional reporting by Ann Bednarz of Network World
