The US video conferencing platform Zoom wants to deal with the surge in usage figures through a deal with Oracle. A significant proportion of daily data traffic now runs on Oracle servers, as the company announced today.
The two companies did not announce the size of the deal, but data traffic for “millions” of meeting participants was processed by the Oracle cloud service, and around seven million gigabytes of zoom data would flow through Oracle servers per day, it said. “It’s exciting to be able to get on a platform very quickly and to grow rapidly,” said Brendan Ittelson, Zoom’s chief technology officer, in an interview with Reuters.
So far, the service has run on a mixture of its own data centers and cloud computing services from Amazon Web Services and Microsoft’s Azure. Oracle was brought on board to handle the computing power of the thirtyfold increase in traffic as a result of the coronavirus outbreak.
300 million video calls a day
Online video calls, according to the company, rose from ten million in December to currently 300 million a day. Measures to limit the spread of the coronavirus have switched companies, universities and schools to teleworking – people in isolation are also increasingly looking for ways to stay connected.
The deal is a huge win for Oracle, which wants to catch up with rivals like Amazon and Microsoft. Jean Atelsek, an analyst at 451 Research, said that if the collaboration worked, Zoom could be a high-profile customer for Oracle to demonstrate the competitiveness of cloud technology. “The remarkable thing about this deal is the speed with which it came about,” said Atelesk.
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