What Does Zoom Really Think About the Future of Corporate Travel?
Skift Take
Even for the likes of Zoom, corporate travel is perceived as important to connect with people. What's reassuring to see is that the company is trying to work out the best ways on its own platform to keep that team spirit alive in these challenging times.
A lot of debate is going about what impact the ongoing pivot to virtual will have on the future of corporate travel.
Video conference companies, such as Zoom and GoToMeeting, are among very few organizations to have expanded since the pandemic began, and to some extent represent case studies that organizations can look to when it comes to perfecting the art of the virtual meeting.
Zoom grew from 10 million daily participants in December last year to 300 million in April this year, while GoTo's video conferencing and webinar products had peak increases of as much as tenfold since March compared with prior months.
They've leveraged their own platforms to scale their businesses, so looking behind the curtain — how did they do it? And are virtual meetings a sustainable substitute for corporate travel in the long term?
“We saw a 30 times increase, and we couldn’t have imagined that magnitude of growth,” Phil Perry, Zoom's head of UK and Ireland, told Skift. “But Zoom has been around for some time, we’re a nine year old company, with our focus being enterprise, selling to businesses.
"What’s made us successful in the first instance is the architecture. It’s in the cloud, and we have 17 data centers globally. We’ve been adding servers very regularly and instantaneously to support that growth."
Despite a headcount of 2,800 staff at Zoom, there’s no travel manager, or appointed corporate travel agency, but it does have a t
