India is a critical market for Zoom, says Velchamy Sankaralingam

Zoom has been one of the biggest gainers during the coronavirus pandemic-from office meetings, weddings to reunions, the video-conferencing application has seen it all as the country restricted the movement of people to break the chain of infection.

In an interview, Velchamy Sankaralingam, President, Product and Engineering at Zoom, talks about why India is a key market for the firm, hiring, new growth areas and future of work.

According to Velchamy, “Zoom was a fast-growing company even before the pandemic. We always plan for capacity because you don't know how many people are going to be using the service. So, there is always contingency planning-how do we grow like twice or thrice. But with the pandemic, what happened was in a period of like a few weeks, we grew like 30 times in terms of the usage. I think, on the free user side, we grew about 60 odd times in India, compared to 30 times worldwide. So, India's growth has been much higher than the rest of the world.”

He thinks Zoom always had a free version available and it is so easy to use. Because they have physical restrictions on travel, they became innovative about how to virtually do a lot of the things that they would never have thought to have done virtually before. If it is seen in India, he had so many reunions. Velchamy thinks he had more reunions in 2020 than the rest of the years that he has been to. All of those are happening because people find that, unlike a regular reunion, there is so much logistics and finding time for everybody.

Velchamy says, “We have a centre in Mumbai and also data centres in India. We have been growing the data centre in the cloud. Last year, we announced the tech centre in Bangalore, which is basically virtual right now. We are hiring more and more people in the tech centre for different roles. I think India is very critical from a Zoom standpoint, for a few reasons. One is the Indian market. I think there are a lot of customers that we have from the Indian market, like government organisations, local businesses. But we also have a lot of multinationals, and they have a huge presence in India as well. So, we have a lot of those employees of multinationals in India actually using Zoom as well.”