Even as the global use of virtual technology interface platforms for smooth business connectivity continue to swell, the video teleconferencing software giant Zoom seems to have missed its direction.
The company is witnessing a slide in revenues with shrinking growth as the economy across the globe slowly reopens. Also, users have complained of ‘Zoom-fatigue’ and as more and more vaccinated people return to school and offices.
The quarterly results to be announced are likely to define the future of the company on Wall Street. The global markets are also keenly observing how the video conferencing platform plans to attract more users.
Wall Street analysts expect Zoom revenue to grow only 49% in the to-be-reported quarter, compared with multiple-fold growth rates in the past year. Zoom raked in millions of new users as the pandemic forced more people to work, study and communicate with friends and family remotely.
The company is now looking to win bigger contracts from businesses, an area dominated by rivals like Cisco’s Webex, Microsoft’s Teams and Salesforce‘s Slack. The company’s ‘Act 2.0’ is Zoom Phone is seeing a massive acceleration in on-premise to cloud-based voice solutions.
Zoom Phone is a cloud-based phone system, which allows users to make calls across devices and help businesses manage activities like queuing and recording calls in-house. It has more than 400,000 customers.
Over the last two months, Zoom has said it would buy Kites GmbH, a firm that helps in real-time language translation and announced its largest deal — a $14.7 billion buyout of cloud-based call-centre software provider Five9 to double down on the service.
Zoom faces a two-pronged challenge with fierce competition from Cisco, Microsoft and Salesforce and the post-pandemic weakening in user traffic growth, although a hybrid working world is likely to keep demand up.
