Based on its recent analysis of the global video conferencing industry, Frost & Sullivan has recognized Zoom Video Communications with the 2017 Global Company of the Year Award. The advent of a new breed of cloud services is uprooting established business models and prompting businesses to view video conferencing as a key part of their digital transformation strategy. Zoom has led the cloud video services revolution and is disrupting the industry.

Zoom is a leading market vendor that has successfully transformed the audio, video, and web meeting experience, opening up the world of next-gen communications to the masses. Since entering the market in 2011, Zoom has seen rapid-fire growth to reach an impressive $1 billion valuation by January 2017. Its industry-leading technology and innovative go-to-market strategy pose a threat to established conferencing and collaboration vendors that have dominated the industry for decades.

“Zoom unifies cloud video communications, chat, and a software-based conference room solution into one platform,” said Roopam Jain, Industry Director, Enterprise Communications & Collaboration at Frost & Sullivan. “This single platform approach offers a simple and consistent user experience across all meeting spaces – desktops, executive offices, open spaces, huddle rooms, and large conference rooms, as well as includes top-notch mobile experiences.”

Zoom has led with an open platform built from the ground up that allows developers the customization flexibility needed to meet their needs and integrate Zoom into their existing workflows. The platform contains leading-edge features and functionality. Recent enhancements include:

• Conference Rooms Plus – Zoom has extended their already popular software-based conference room solution Zoom Rooms. First, they added Scheduling Display functionality, which resides on a tablet outside a meeting space to show upcoming meetings and allow users to quickly reserve the room on-the-fly. Zoom also announced Digital Signage (available later this year) as a feature of Zoom Rooms, allowing customers to display images, videos, or websites in their lobbies, elevator banks, cafeterias, gyms, hallways, and other locations.
• Enhanced Enterprise Management – With many customers having hundreds or thousands of Zoom Rooms deployed, this saves the account administrator time by configuring all their rooms group-by-group instead of one-by- one. Zoom’s Tiered Settings also allows admins to set defaults or lock their users’ settings for meetings, webinars, and audio conferences.
• Recording Transcripts (Limited Availability) – Converts all speech from a cloud recording into text and even identifies each speaker. It allows users to search the resulting transcript for keywords, then jump to that keyword in the video playback. Ideal for training, content creation, legal depositions, sales calls, shareholder meetings, and more.

“Zoom’s mission to change the video communications industry has caught the attention of high-profile investors leading to impressive funding,” noted Jain. “In January 2017, Zoom raised $100 million in Series D funding from Sequoia, which brought its total funding to $145.5 million and put its valuation over the $1 billion mark. Zoom also plans to aggressively expand its international presence with the new funding.”

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