Popular video conferencing app, Zoom which counts tech giants like Google, Microsoft and Jio as its rivals, will soon set up its first tech centre in Bengaluru to aid India and global operations, Velchamy Sankarlingam, President of Product and Engineering for Zoom said.
The video conferencing platform will immediately begin hiring DevOps engineers, IT, Security, and Business Operations for its Bengaluru tech centre the video conferencing service saw a 6700 per cent growth in the country from January to April, 2020 during the COVID pandemic.
"Paid user base has increased by 4 times in India from January-April," Sankarlingam added.
Zoom will also expand its existent Mumbai office, to almost triple its size, an official statement said. California headquartered firm has also data centres in Mumbai and Hyderabad. Without revealing the current employee strength, Zoom has in India, the company’s top management said that all the employees will continue to work from home.
"India is a strategically important country for Zoom and we expect to see continued growth and investment here. We are proud to provide our services for free to over 2,300 educational institutions in India during the COVID-19 pandemic, and look forward to continuing to work with the people and government of India hand-in-hand," Eric S. Yuan, CEO of Zoom said.
“We plan to hire key employees for the technology center over the next few years, pulling from India’s highly-educated engineering talent pool. This facility will play a critical role in Zoom’s continued growth,” he added.
Zoom to focus on safety/ privacy issues in India
Delving on the security concerns raised by Indian government and activist groups while using Zoom app, the company’s Chief Operating Officer (COO), Aparna Bawa said that the platform is working to ensure end-to-end encryption for all its users in India and that following the advisories issued by MHA and cybersecurity regulator, Computer Emergency Response Team of India( CERT_ on May 29, Zoom has enhanced its security features. “ We are providing the ‘control your own data routing’ features wherein all our paid customers have the option to completely safeguard the data.”
CERT had earlier pointed out that meeting apps like Zoom, Microsoft Team, Cisco Webex are vulnerable to cyber attacks which may allow criminals to have an easy acess to sensitive information shared on these platforms.
Zoom’s top executives said that the advisories are a routine feature in a COVID pandemic environment where work from home has become a norm and hence the governments are advising on enhanced security features.
Founded in 2011, in San Jose, California, Zoom has been able to scale up its services to overseas markets besides US. The company’s Q1 revenues for the quarter ended April 30, 2020 saw a growth by 169% at $328.2 million and the number of daily active users jumped to 300 million in April from 10 million in January.