Zoom Video Communications said on Tuesday it has started using Oracle cloud service to handle the surge in online video call volumes brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Earlier this week Zoom CEO Eric Yuan announced that the company’s daily users grew 50 percent in the past month to 300 million from 200 million. The company had about 10 million daily users in December.
But it has also experienced a backlash as the increased use exposed privacy and security flaws. Zoom set out a 90-day plan to fix the security issues, but in the meantime, the thirty-fold jump in traffic has required more computing power.
The deal is a big win for Oracle, which wants to catch up with rivals such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) Microsoft and Google Cloud that have greater market share, and is selling a new generation of cloud technology after its first generation efforts failed to gain traction, media reports said.
Zoom and Oracle did not disclose the size of the deal, but said traffic for “millions” of meeting participants is being handled by Oracle’s cloud service and about 7 million gigabytes of Zoom data per day is flowing through Oracle servers.
“It’s exciting to be able to come on to a platform and scale very rapidly,” Zoom’s Chief Technology Officer Brendan Ittelson told Reuters in an interview.
Zoom’s service ran on a mixture of its own data center gear and cloud computing services from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure, but it began working with Oracle about six weeks ago.
Zoom and Oracle executives said their engineering teams worked together on a daily basis to get up and running systems that now handle a significant portion of Zoom’s traffic.
Jean Atelsek, an analyst with 451 Research, said 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.
