Zoom launches tech centre in B'luru, ramps up India hiring

San Jose, California headquartered communications technology company Zoom Video Communications on Tuesday announced the opening of a new technology centre in Bengaluru.

The centre will support the Nasdaq listed company’s research and development operations as well as engineering and business operations such as legal and human resource capabilities.

During a virtual conference, president for product and engineering for Zoom, Velchamy Sankarlingam said that the company has started hiring engineering talent in India across DevOps, operations engineers, database engineers as well as information technology security roles for infrastructure, applications and desktop management.

The spokesperson did not divulge the exact numbers on current employee strength in India or the number of new employees it plans to hire. However, he added that Zoom in India might look at adding new data centres to existing ones in Mumbai and Hyderabad.

Sankarlingam joined Zoom in May and was previously the senior vice president of cloud services, development and operations at VMware.

Read: Misconceptions about Zoom being Chinese disheartening, says top exec Sankarlingam

Zoom has seen a 67 time rise in the number of free user sign ups from January 2020 to April 2020 in India, while the number of paid users has grown by four times.

Commenting on the number of ‘similar’ apps in India and the similarity of the Jio Meet user interface with Zoom, Aparna Bawa, COO of Zoom said that the company has been competing with larger competitors since launch. “Beyond the UI the competitive advantage for Zoom is the backend infrastructure and architecture. We also reserve 20% of our engineering capacity to work on feedback provided by customers,” Bawa said during the call.

She further added that the company was ‘optimistic’ of its discussions with the Indian government.

Government body Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) had issued an advisory against use of Zoom’s application citing vulnerabilities in April. Zoom launched its 90-day programme for Zoom 5.0 upgrade to address security concerns.

The Supreme Court also asked the central government to respond to a writ petition filed in May with the apex court seeking a ban on the app citing security concerns and personal data of users being compromised.

Zoom did not respond to specific questions on end to end encryption for individual users and other queries on revenue share of India in its Q1 results. The company in June said that it had clocked total revenue of $328.2 million during the quarter ending April 30, 2020, up 169% year-on-year.