Work dynamics are changing with focus on flexibility, productivity: Zoom official

Hyderabad: Zoom. It was the ubiquitous app on most mobiles phones and personal computers during the Covid period. It ensured continuity of businesses, schools, offices, IT establishments and a whole lot of others. It also played a key role in many players offering telemedicine in many remote places.  More importantly, the video-interface tool has been a strong proponent of work from home and hybrid work models.

With the Covid impact returning to near normalcy, many are back at offices, schools, colleges, hospitals. In this milieu, is Zoom and its likes still relevant?

“Whether a pandemic or not, a video-based integrated communication platform is not going out of fashion. It will only further evolve in view of the changing work dynamics, work structures. They will also evolve as employees  are seeking newer options for data presentation, storage, transmission and archiving,” says  Sameer Raje, general manager and head, India and SAARC, Zoom, who showcased the Zoom capabilities in  Hyderabad.

The collaboration  platform integrated solutions like team chat, meetings, contact center, smart recordings, whiteboard, and more. It is also using AI  in solutions like Zoom IQ, chat thread summaries, and email and content drafting.

On data residency, he says the platform does not share any user data. The data  in transit is encrypted.  Should the users choose to record it on the Zoom platform, they have an option to store it on their PC. “The  recent Digital Personal Data Protection ACT, 2023  rightfully protects the Indian consumers. It guides where the data needs to be stored,” he says.

“In our case, we already have two data centers.We are very much compliant with the current norms and as and when new rules evolve, we would be more than happy to comply with those guidelines as well,” he says.

It currently has two technology centres in Bengaluru and Chennai.  The first  one is a technology centre that supports the global platform and the second is more into research and development.  India employment numbers are significant. 

“We are looking to tap into the potential of Indian businesses as well as the knowledge base in terms of hiring engineers who are in the support work. India is known for that. We are looking to bring in more and as India engine is an important market,” says Raje.

How are the work dynamics changing?  “ Work is becoming collaborative and flexible.  There was a time when a big conference room in a large enterprise organisation would be reserved for the CEO or the chairman  and would be used only for those 8 or ten people or for the board meeting or a few visitors. Things have changed. Now, the room/space  utilisation is going higher. Several small spaces are being created instead of one large conference hall.  People from all segments are using those facilities.  Conference rooms are now hurdle rooms,” he says.

“Enterprises are reinventing the office. They are recreating the entire layout. Now, there are 100 rooms instead of huge conference spaces. The new spaces sometimes have just  two people ideating and sharing something on a whiteboard. That is also a form of collaboration. Zoom is helping them do that. It has a whiteboard, you can just write something on it and you can bring it into chat. You can save it, and share it with a wider group of  people. If you walk into any large enterprises, you see people are coming to offices and doing zoom meetings. The way people are communicating with each other is changing right,” he says.

On the lighter vein,  he says, people are not even travelling from the second floor to the ground floor. They are avoiding this by doing a zoom meeting.  That's how the working style is changing.  is titting in favour of having a virtual layer.  “It is all about employees. They are changing and demanding new communication tools and greater flexibility. We are adopting newer technologies in our lives and our way of working is constantly changing. Office and enterprise communication is undergoing significant changes driven by technology and evolving work patterns. Remote work, collaboration tools, and communication platforms have all played a role in shaping these trends,” he says.

What Zoom has:

 Zoom IQ:  A  smart companion for summarising chat threads, organising ideas, drafting content for chats, emails, and whiteboard sessions, creating meeting agendas.

Zoom Whiteboard: Provides tools to collaborate to capture ideas, processes, and concepts.

Zoom Scheduler: Makes it easier for users to share their availability and book appointments with people outside their organisations. It works with Zoom Meetings and Zoom Mail and Calendar, and integrates with Gmail and Microsoft 365.

 Zoom Contact Centre: Cloud contact centre platform that is optimised for video and intentionally supports  voice and video, SMS, and webchat.

Zoom Virtual Agent: Conversational AI and chatbot solution that uses natural language processing and machine learning to understand and instantly resolve issues for customers.

Zoom Phone: Global cloud PBX application service that enables businesses to have a single communication platform for the global workforce.

Translated Captions: Zoom-translated captions enable users to have the speech in a meeting or webinar automatically translated to another language and transcribed into captions in real time.