Remote work here to stay, says Zoom

Australia is undergoing a shift to remote studying and working, that will last well beyond the COVID-19 crisis, Zoom says.

Zoom CEO Eric Yuan

Australia is undergoing a permanent, widespread shift to remote studying and working that will last well beyond the COVID-19 crisis, according to the local boss of video-conferencing specialist Zoom, which has defied the market bloodbath to be one of the few stocks to gain steam in the past month.

Michael Chetner said video-conferencing had gone from a frustration to a workplace must-have in this new lockdown reality.

Zoom has been one of the few tech companies to thrive recently, with its share price hitting an all-time high of $US159.56 this month and the company becoming the go-to software for video calls, used throughout the crisis by everyone from New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern to the Brazilian parliament for its votes.

“The perception has changed,” he said.

“Enterprises in particular had been burned badly by their experiences with video. Companies made it harder than what it needed to be, the video and audio was choppy, it was really hard to use, and there was always an excuse not to. It was the industry’s fault for not delivering. That excuse is now gone.”

According to Mr Chetner, who has led Zoom in Australia for three years and was previously an executive at Cisco, workplaces would be forced to bring in work-from-home plans after the coronavirus epidemic, given workers now know they can work just as effectively from home as in the office.

“We’ve seen an exponential increase in usage of our software, and just a sheer uptick in individuals relying on us to maintain connectivity,” he said. “Zoom is the app of choice and we have 17 data centres around the world to help spread the load and provide a global service that is consistent, reliable and scales accordingly.”

Zoom global CEO and founder Eric Yuan first came up with the idea at college in China, where he’d regularly take 10-hour train rides to visit his girlfriend, who is now his wife.

It was during those trips that he decided to help build video-chat software.

“The reason there are so many different solutions out there, and the reason a customer generally hears about them, is ­because they’re so hard to use,” Mr Yuan said in an interview last year.

“It’s hard to make it work, and the quality is bad. We focus on ease of use, quality, security, and it just works anytime and anywhere.

“A customer can count on us for their mission-critical calls. They might have a very important meeting with a customer or partner and they know it just works.”

They’re comments echoed by Mr Chetner, who said Zoom had become the go-to conferencing software during the COVID-19 epidemic because it “just works”.

“At the end of the day if the video doesn’t work, or the quality is crappy, you’ll know about it,” he said.

“That’s the thing about any industry, there will be lots of providers but people gravitate to whatever works.

“We work in India, we work in Australia, if you have an app it should just be resilient no matter your internet connection.”

As for tips for people using Zoom for the first time, Mr Chetner said workers — or their bosses — should spend $100 to get a decent quality webcam, which would result in vast improvement over in-built hardware.