There’s no ignoring the success of Zoom in recent years. Despite launching almost a decade ago, it’s only since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic that the platform has excelled.
Simple to operate, Zoom captured the video conferencing market and saw the value of the company increase by 383 percent from January 2020 to Q2 2021. However, despite this meteoric success, the company refuses to rest on its laurels and has committed $100 million to a dedicated app fund.
This article will explain the Zoom Apps Fund, which app developers benefit from it, and how the model might drive success. We’ll also take a look at Zoho, a predecessor with an equally impressive app portfolio, and ask whether Zoom may have found the upper hand.
Nurturing Future Collaborative Partnerships
The Zoom Apps Fund launched in April 2021. It is a $100 million venture fund, and the initiative aims to grow Zoom by expanding the platform’s ecosystem. Along with Zoom Apps, the ecosystem consists of integrations, a dedicated developer platform, and hardware tools.
Beyond this, organizations that contribute to Zoom’s innovations are due to receive a further stimulus of between $250,000 and $2.5 million. The aim is to develop a suite of solutions that improve and expand the Zoom experience. Ultimately, this collaborative approach will enable Zoom to offer customers many more options and use cases.
Eventually, the hope is that Zoom becomes a one-stop shop for businesses to operate.
Who’s On Board?
To date, over 25 companies have received funding to build integrations and apps for the Zoom platform. In December 2021, Zoom released a list of the second batch of partner organizations, 13 companies in total.
To understand the direction and intentions of Zoom’s business strategy, we’ll examine a few of these latest recruits. Ultimately, the focus is on the following use cases: collaboration and productivity; DE&I (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and PeopleOps; gaming and entertainment; health and wellness; and meeting intelligence and sales enablement.
Some of the most exciting partners include the following:
- Mio is an interoperability tool that enables Zoom users to collaborate with colleagues over external platforms like Microsoft Teams and Slack.
- Clovers is a hiring platform that uses cutting-edge conversational intelligence to eliminate bias and speed up the recruitment process.
- Dive provides a tool for interactive meetings from the gaming and entertainment side.
- Health app Moxie provides users with an easy way to facilitate home fitness.
Post-Zoho: What’s New About Zoom’s Approach?
The closest platform to compare Zoom’s model is Zoho. The India-based company provides users with a complete software suite. Within the Zoho ecosystem are multiple business apps that enable users to manage projects, communicate, conduct analytics, manage finances, IT, HR, customer relationships, and more.
Zoho has become a go-to solution for many organizations and has been well-established since 1996. However, there are some fundamental differences between Zoho and Zoom.
Both organizations aim to provide a single space for business operations. However, the Zoho core team designed and developed Zoho’s apps. The model revolves around developing solutions to problems using existing resources and talent. What’s more, Zoho was launched primarily as a CRM. And, although it now provides tools for remote teams, it wasn’t established under the premise. Instead, Zoho has adapted to it.
Built for the New World of Work
Alternatively, despite not being developed in response to an increase in remote work, Zoom’s core communication features are a fundamental part of the distributed team toolkit. Furthermore, distributed teams relied heavily on the platform during the pandemic, and continue to do so. Why is this important? Because this new way of working is arguably the most significant shift in business habits since the advent of the digital age.
Beyond this, instead of developing integrations and apps solely in-house, Zoom is turning to collaboration to expand its offerings. Collaboration is key to the acceleration economy, and the companies Zoom has chosen so far to partner with are fully embracing the new world of work. And the solutions they provide are directly supporting it.
This dedication to embracing the new and taking a punt with relatively unknown organizations should give Zoom the competitive edge. That, and the simple fact that “to Zoom” has effectively become a verb in its own right.
