Eric Yuan, founder and CEO of Zoom Video Communications Inc., reacts by ringing the opening bell during the company’s initial public offering (IPO) at the Nasdaq MarketSite in New York, USA, on Thursday, April 18, 2019. Zoom a reported net income of $ 7.6 million on revenue of $ 331 million for the year ended January and is now worth nine times the $ 1 billion valuation it secured after a round of funding two years ago.
Victor J. Blue | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Zoom said Tuesday it came up with a way to allow people visiting offices to register with a receptionist without physical contact. This naturally involves starting a Zoom call.
The development shows that Zoom recognizes that it needs to ensure that its products remain valuable after people return to the office after months of work from home during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The new feature, the Kiosk mode, is part of Zoom Rooms, one of the company’s offerings. Unlike the standard Zoom video calling service, which people use on their own PCs and mobile devices, Zoom Rooms is designed for meeting places, such as conference rooms, and starts at $ 499 per year per room.
Here’s how the system works: Once an office visitor enters a lobby, he goes to the touchscreen monitor with a camera and speaker and taps a button to start a call with a handset. The visitor speaks to the receptionist via Zoom, and the receptionist can allow the visitor to enter the office space, for example by unlocking a door remotely.
“The receiver doesn’t have to be in office,” Harry Moseley, Zoom’s chief intelligence officer, told CNBC in an interview Monday. “They can be at home. They can be anywhere. In fact, they can be in another country and they can support several buildings.”
Kiosk mode can also help companies reduce the number of receptionists they have on each floor of their buildings, Moseley said.
The pandemic has shown that employees can be efficient while working remotely, and Mosely expects companies to embrace a mix of remote and personal work, even after the pandemic ends. This scenario would benefit Zoom, which provides a popular means for colleagues to meet virtually, as well as for rivals such as Cisco, Google and Microsoft.
But analysts expect Zoom’s rise to be offset by the hypergrowth it saw in the early days of the pandemic. For the quarter ending January 31, analysts surveyed by Refinitiv predict an annual revenue growth of 331%. For the April quarter, they demand an increase of 153%, and for the year ending in January 2022, they expect an increase of only 38%.
So Zoom continues to build. In addition to Kiosk mode, it comes with a way for employees to connect their Android and iOS devices to Zoom Rooms, so employees don’t have to touch a common device in a conference room. Zoom also adds Amazon’s Amazon business service to Zoom Rooms, so answering a call is as easy as saying “Alexa, join my meeting.”
Zoom may add support for other voice assistants, Moseley said.
“This is the first iteration, if you will, of many of these things,” he said.
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