Amazon Web Services (AWS) has ‘extended its strategic relationship’ with videoconferencing provider Zoom, casting doubt on the latter’s dealings with Oracle.
Amid the plethora of announcements which have come out of re:Invent, AWS’ major annual event, this week, the news that Zoom is using AWS as its preferred cloud provider flew somewhat under the radar.
AWS made the point that Zoom had been a customer since 2011, with the companies ‘collaborating to develop new solutions for Zoom’s enterprise users, leveraging the breadth and depth of AWS to integrate Zoom services with Amazon devices and capabilities to make it easier for organisations to run hybrid office and remote work models’, in the words of the press materials.
One of the biggest tech stories around the Covid-19 pandemic was how Zoom had seized the zeitgeist and become the de facto conferencing platform. In June, Synergy Research found that the company had caused a spike in the wider conferencing software as a service (SaaS) market virtually on its own.
To accommodate the anticipated uptake as lockdowns hit, the two companies’ engineers added ‘tens of thousands’ of EC2 instances, according to AWS. Alongside this, the company has used Amazon WorkSpaces virtual desktops to help with the increased demand for helpdesk support, as well as integrating Zoom video meetings into Amazon Alexa-enabled smart displays to aim for more seamless integration between home and office working.
“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,” said Andy Jassy, AWS CEO in a statement.
This news comes as something of a contrast with an announcement made by Oracle Cloud in April. Seen at the time as a major coup, the company said Zoom had selected it for requiring immediate additional cloud capacity with Oracle’s second-generation infrastructure ‘helping Zoom scale to continue to deliver flawless service to its customer base.’
CloudTech understands that Zoom continues to use Oracle as a cloud provider.
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