The Information is reporting that Zoom may be previewing a new product early next year (2021) that would take it into the email & calendar application space. I do not subscribe to The Information - if you do here is the link.
If you want to read a Motley Fool article on the topic that came out today - here you go:
According to digital news site The Information, Zoom is looking to disrupt business emails just like it disrupted business meetings. When the company filed to go public, it talked about how its video platform was just one part of the overall communications and collaboration market. By experimenting with email, and reportedly also with calendar software, Zoom appears to be setting its sights on expanding its focus to the entire communications and collaboration market it operates in.
I am long Zoom and have been since before the pandemic - the founder Eric Yuan’s focus on the customer reminds me a lot of Jack Ma. My plan is to hold my position for many years as I see this company’s TAM much larger than most of the B2B customers many of us hold who frequent this board.
I live in a rural area and getting sufficient bandwidth to run Zoom has been a problem for a lot of people. That is starting to change rapidly due to government funding for rural broadband in the Covid bills. This most recent one has 7 billion dollars in it for broadband. As that all gets installed there will be whole new market of Zoom users.
I think you are underestimating what this means. They are looking to offer a similar offering to Teams. Zoom will integrate into an outlook type of product which is designed to target enterprise customers.
The ability to integrate email, calendar and zoom video makes total sense and imo something which was differentiating google/Microsoft for businesses. Let’s see how they execute but for any businesses that were concerned that zoom isn’t offering a one stop solution and is only video this addresses that concern.
I don’t think the aim is necessarily to go after regular consumers (that’s a hard switch and no real reason for consumers to shift their email).
I personally like the idea in principle after reflecting on it more. The more complimentary services that Zoom can offer in addition to web conferencing will significantly increase their TAM. No reason to doubt management yet.
I agree that having an integrated solution along the lines of MS Teams / Outlook makes good sense in terms of expanding TAM. And I know there are some here who might discount these concerns, but the reputational damage that Zoom inflicted on themselves by misrepresenting the encryption and security features they were using is important here. Investors may dismiss it as growing pains, but it merits attention. My sense is that a lot of senior decisionmakers still think of video as less critical from a security standpoint than email. They may be OK with employees using Zoom for the things we use Zoom for now, but it will get a much harder look when it tries to do things involving written communication, accessing and attaching files from secure locations, etc.
I also think it would be prudent to be thinking about where AI fits in all of this, including for espionage and corporate espionage, law enforcement, terrorism, etc. From an investment standpoint, it is tempting to think only about the service Zoom provides to its customers, but it is also important to recognize that everything done on Zoom – every connection between parties, every conversation, every participation in events, every chat sent between participants, every screen shared, etc. is DATA that is valuable and potentially dangerous in the wrong hands. The company (and other companies such as Google and MSFT) may look for and find ways to monetize that data, which will be good for the bottom line, but it opens a huge can of worms that we should be paying attention to. The companies that understand and can address those concerns, possibly third party companies (CRWD?) also stand to benefit greatly.
I believe Zoom has real opportunity to take on MS Teams.
With such great success on video conf, chat and phone are natural extensions. However, email, calendar and sharepoint like shared storage products will make their portfolio complete.
It is hard to win this type of markets starting from scratch… Google G Suite went that route… however, it is easier to build upon success / entry into the door with video conf…
real success of such strategy will take years to prove out… in the meanwhile, they may be able to at-least defend themselves against MS Teams where they need to.
Dont forget TWLO is on somewhat similar path… entered the market with text and voice and expanded into emails and video conf…
Will be interesting to see how it pans out but not so interesting to hold large % in ZM until there is proof of real success.
just thinking out loud here…
It makes sense that ZM is pursuing this integration of voice, text, data, and video collaboration together into a nice single pane of glass. In fact it is a necessary and natural extension of zooming even for the consumer market. And scheduling of events with zoom requires integration with your calendar. Competing with MS head to head will be tough because MS offers TEAMS pretty much free if you purchase their Outlook O365 mail service. MS TEAMS does a pretty good job of integrating these collaboration things into a single pane of glass.
The thing that throws me off a little is the ZM email strategy. I am trying to visualize its integration with the other forms of communication. In TEAMS, Outlook email/calendar is still a fairly separate application. This is probably due to the high volume of email as compared to the other forms of communication. There is just too much information for one window. Given that MS leads their sales with O365, perhaps ZM feels it needs to lead similarly for the enterprise market. Or perhaps the ZM major partners such as CRM and NOW, are requesting it as they are all competitors of MS.
Well at least ZM is staying in its lane and not trying to manufacture automobiles.
They may be OK with employees using Zoom for the things we use Zoom for now, but it will get a much harder look when it tries to do things involving written communication, accessing and attaching files from secure locations, etc.
Zoom chat already allows attaching and accessing files. Users are only beginning to discover how powerful it is. And the same UI / usability advantage that gives Zoom an advantage over Teams in videoconferencing carries through to chat. Zoom can become a one-stop place that, with email and calendar, can completely replace Microsoft within large organizations for collaboration. The reality is that the gold standard, Outlook, which is everyone’s first stop in the morning and throughout the day, is a mess. It has always been a mess. It is vulnerable.
This could be cool but it is a long road ahead. I am far more interested, and impacted on a day-to-day basis, in integrations that reduce the friction in creating and joining meetings. This is still the roughest part of the experience. At work we use GoogleChat (I would NOT recommend it) and the Zoom Bot is a game changer there! I just type “@Zoom start” and the bot adds a new meeting link to the chat right there for everyone to click on. The only annoying thing is it has the waiting room on by default, which is weird when starting from an already-secure chat group, but not so bad. Anyway this makes it more likely to be used over Hangouts, which has a built in button, due to the reduction in friction that little command provides. We need more of that.
There is a still a lot to be learned and done at Zoom when it comes to integration but they are figuring it out quickly. Another example: My mom connected her Google Calendar and became fixated that ALL of her calendar events now show up in the Zoom app. She didn’t want Zoom to “know” about those non-Zoom-related events. That should simply have been an option to “Show Events Without Zoom Meetings” and then default it to OFF. I showed her how to send a request via the Zoom feedback page filed under “Something I do not like”.
