Zoom joined with videoconferencing equipment provider DTEN to provide equipment for its new Zoom for Home system.
Photo: Zoom Video CommunicationsThe global coronavirus pandemic turned Zoom into a presence in millions of households. Now the videoconferencing provider is betting it will stay there for the long-haul with remote work shifting to a more enduring setup.
Zoom Video Communications Inc. ZM -3.66% on Wednesday introduced Zoom for Home, a lineup of dedicated videoconferencing devices designed to make the use of its software easier for people working from home. The first product combines its video-call software with a 27-inch touch screen, featuring three wide-angle cameras and an array of eight microphones to provide clear video and audio connections. It is intended to give people a kind of videoconferencing setup that colleagues working in offices enjoy, the company said.
“Lots of people are sitting at home on Zoom meetings day-in and day-out. They’d prefer not to use a laptop for all these meetings,” Zoom Chief Product Officer Oded Gal said in an interview.
The device, made by a partner company, is the first new product that San Jose-based Zoom has unveiled to try to leverage its sudden popularity. In the past, Zoom was mainly used for office-based video meetings, but its use has skyrocketed in recent months for both remote work and staying in touch with friends and family. The number of average daily sessions soared to 300 million in April from 10 million at the end of last year.
Although designed for home use, the new equipment still targets principally business customers, Mr. Gal said. The first video screen the company is offering under the arrangement comes with a $599 price tag, which is likely too steep for the casual Zoom user.
Zoom first began work on its home-office offering before the pandemic struck, in an effort to satisfy requests from many of its business customers. When the Covid-19 disease drove people to work from home, the company fast-tracked the project, seeing potentially greater demand than first expected, Mr. Gal said. It briefly slowed work on the effort as it focused on fixing urgent security and safety flaws that came to light with its software amid its mass use during the pandemic.
Mr. Gal said the new product could also help people to teach using Zoom at a time when major school districts and universities are saying they will engage in remote-learning in the fall.
Zoom’s popularity during the pandemic has landed the nine-year old company in the middle of a heated corporate battle for customers among much larger rivals, including Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc. Microsoft has been aggressively pushing its Teams software and rolled out features to match Zoom, including custom virtual backgrounds and allowing more users to show up on screen at once. Cisco already has its own suite of videoconferencing hardware, along with a service called Webex.
Earlier this month, Zoom launched a hardware-subscription service to package third-party videoconferencing hardware with its software—initially in the U.S. and later overseas.
These initiatives still leave millions of people using Zoom for free. Facilitating all its users, including the millions who don’t pay, has come with a cost. Zoom’s cost of revenue—made up of what it spends to run its own data centers and pays to cloud providers like Amazon.com Inc. and Oracle Corp. for additional capacity—surged more than fourfold from a year earlier to $103.7 million in the last quarter as sales grew sharply to $328.2 million.
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Chief Executive Eric Yuan has said he wants to remain focused mostly on business users. When Zoom suffered criticism for its security and safety lapses during the pandemic, Mr. Yuan told The Wall Street Journal “hopefully we can go back to business customers after this.”
Zoom won’t be building the home hardware, but is working with third-party vendors. It co-developed the first screen with DTEN, a San Jose-based equipment company that makes the devices in China, Zoom said. Zoom’s own ties to China have come under scrutiny over concern that data may be shared with its government. The company has said Beijing has never asked for information on foreign users.
The first Zoom for Home device, available next month, is designed to sit on a desk next to the user’s laptop. The Zoom software that runs on the device will be integrated into a user’s calendar, so they can pull up meetings as they happen or take calls as they come in, not unlike a phone. Additional equipment that is being developed by other partners is in the pipeline, Mr. Gal said.
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Write to Aaron Tilley at aaron.tilley@wsj.com
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As Pandemic Drags On, Zoom Targets Prolonged Remote-Work Era - The Wall Street Journal
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