Zoom chooses Oracle IaaS as core cloud infrastructure provider
Zoom has chosen Oracle Cloud Infrastructure to deliver its online video meetings service as usage has spiked due to the Covid-19 coronavirus public health crisis
Oracle has announced Zoom as a customer win for its cloud infrastructure service.
The online meetings software provider has experienced unexpected growth because of the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic, but it has also proved vulnerable to being hacked by cyber criminals and pranksters.
At the Oracle deal announcement, Eric S Yuan, chief executive officer at Zoom, said: “We recently experienced the most significant growth our business has ever seen, requiring massive increases in our service capacity. We explored multiple platforms, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was instrumental in helping us quickly scale our capacity and meet the needs of our new users.
“We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance, and unmatched level of support.”
Zoom usage has spiked to 300 million daily meeting participants, and so the service needed extra cloud capacity. The deal statement said: “Within hours of deployment, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure supported hundreds of thousands of concurrent Zoom meeting participants.”
Oracle has been seen as an also-ran in cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS), behind Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform. Larry Ellison, founder and chief technology officer at Oracle, has been on the warpath against AWS in recent years, contending that Oracle’s cloud infrastructure service – usually billed as “second generation” to define it against its main competitors in IaaS – is inherently more secure and performative than others.
The Zoom deal could be said to validate this, but other cloud infrastructure providers have also been prominent in stepping up services during the Covid-19 crisis.
In the US, CNBC reported that while Zoom already uses AWS and Microsoft cloud services, it opted to “bypass” them, as well as Google, in this latest use of cloud infrastructure to expand its activities. However, a Zoom company spokesperson confirmed to Computer Weekly today (29 April 2020) that "Zoom has not stopped working with AWS and Microsoft, but they are now also working with Oracle for this latest expansion to provide multi-cloud solutions to customers".
Read more about Oracle’s IaaS
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Oracle CEO Safra Catz said: “Video communications has become an essential part of our professional and personal lives, and Zoom has led this industry’s innovation. We are proud to work with Zoom, as both their cloud infrastructure provider and as a customer.”
Zoom is reportedly transferring upwards of seven petabytes through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure servers each day, roughly equivalent to 93 years of high-definition video.
In a blogpost, Barb Darrow, its senior director of communications, wrote: “In April, Zoom’s daily tally of meeting participants mushroomed to 300 million, up 50% from 200 million the previous month …. Oracle’s engineering team has worked quickly, deploying Zoom on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and ensuring Zoom had enough cloud capacity to serve the hundreds of thousands of new users flocking to its service.”
