Zoom extends partnership with Amazon Web Services

Video conferencing services provider Zoom has chosen Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred cloud service provider, extending the years-long partnership between the two companies.  

As part of the multi-year agreement, Zoom will utilise AWS infrastructure and portfolio of services, including capabilities in compute, storage, content distribution and security, a statement said. It will also help securely extend Zoom data centres, given the increasing demand for organisations to run hybrid office and remote work models.

The San Jose, California-based company saw its daily meeting participants number grow 30-fold over the past year since the Covid-19 outbreak. The platform, which had 10 million daily meeting participants in December 2019, saw the number increase to more than 300 million a day since April 2020.

Since February this year, both firms have been closely working across remote locations to meet the needs of the globally dispersed user community, adding tens of thousands of Amazon Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2) instances (virtual servers) to Zoom’s overall capacity.

“Covid-19 changed everything for Zoom, putting demands on the company to meet the video conferencing needs of hundreds of millions of new participants around the globe, and AWS was there from the beginning to ensure Zoom could scale to meet these new requirements virtually overnight,” Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, said.

Along with its growth, Zoom’s customer service requests have also increased sharply over the past nine months. AWS provided the company with over 1,000 Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops to help it manage the unprecedented increase, the statement said.

In a synergic play, Zoom is also set to integrate Amazon’s features into its hybrid workplace model solutions. This includes incorporating its video meeting service into select Amazon Echo Show devices (Amazon’s Alexa-enabled smart display), and Alexa for Business features, such as voice control, into its Zoom Rooms service.

Eric S Yuan, CEO of Zoom, said, “Faced with unprecedented global demand this past year, we’ve been able to handle it in significant part by running the substantial majority of our cloud-based workloads on our preferred cloud provider, AWS, and relying on AWS’s performance and scalability.”