Larry Ellison Accelerates Zoom’s Boom with Huge Endorsement on YouTube

If you wanted more proof that today’s reality might be new but it sure isn’t normal, Oracle founder Larry Ellison has delivered a hugely positive 50-second YouTube review of Zoom stating that it has “allowed the economy to continue to function.”

While videos of Ellison’s keynote addresses at Oracle events have appeared all over YouTube for many years, I believe this is the first time Oracle’s legendary leader has created a public message purpose-built for YouTube.

In the 50-second clip—and I’ll share the verbatim transcript in a moment—Ellison makes it clear that Oracle is a big user of Zoom, but does not specifically say if Zoom is using any of Oracle’s vast array of cloud services. And a month ago in Oracle’s fiscal Q3 earnings call, Ellison cited many dozens of customers, but Zoom was not among them. So while Zoom could very well be an Oracle customer, I can’t find any mention of that.

The third remarkable element about this video is simply the effusive nature of Ellison’s endorsement. I mean, saying that any company has “allowed the economy to continue to function” is about as powerful an endorsement as you can get—and that’s exactly what Ellison said about Zoom.

The companies also had a brief exchange on Twitter about the Ellison video. Zoom graciously thanked Oracle and Ellison, and in return Oracle responded with, “And thank you @Zoom_us for helping us stay connected. You are changing the way we work!”

And thank you @Zoom_us for helping us stay connected. You are changing the way we work! https://t.co/tDpmhKRNCm

— Oracle (@Oracle) April 14, 2020

If you’re in the tech business and looking for a high-credibility testimonial, you can’t do much better than Larry Ellison.

So Zoom, congratulations on inspiring one of the business world’s most successful leaders to publicly state just how vital, strategic and indispensable your company and your video-conferencing services have been.

Here’s what Ellison said in the YouTube video:

Zoom has now become an essential service that allowed us to continue doing engineering, continue to do customer support, continue to do sales even though we’re still working at home. We’re looking forward to the economy being reopened, we’re looking forward to going back to work—but the way we work will never be the same. We will now meet not just face to face—we’ll meet sometimes face to face and sometimes digitally via Zoom. Zoom has become an essential service for Oracle, for companies in the United States, and for companies around the world. It’s allowed the economy to continue to function even though we’re facing a COVID-19 pandemic.

Disclosure: at the time of this writing, Oracle was among the many clients of Cloud Wars Media LLC and/or Evans Strategic Communications LLC.

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