Online learning application Zoom is concerned about infrastructure spending as more and more people use it

The complicated situation of the Covid-19 pandemic has caused many countries to close a series of schools, companies and businesses also gradually shift to remote working methods to ensure the health of their employees. In that context, Zoom emerged as a perfect choice, with many useful features to make the process of studying and working online easier than ever before (readers can learn more about the platform. here).

For this reason, in recent weeks, Zoom has received a huge number of users and achieved miraculous growth. However, on Friday (March 20), the company's report warned investors that the situation could be a double-edged sword: more and more individuals and businesses. Using Zoom means that they will have to invest a large amount of money to build additional infrastructure, while maintaining the initial quality and prestige that they built during the epidemic.

Specifically, Zoom's report reads: ' We think the company's investment costs, including cash and a percentage of sales, will definitely increase in the near future. The reason is because we intend to expand our data center and third-party cloud servers to ensure quality for users during the booming Covid-19 . '

The 'third party' that Zoom refers to here includes many big names like Amazon Web Services. The cloud computing service of this e-commerce giant has been a big hit in the market for many years, and is also providing many server clusters for IT infrastructure for Zoom.

Zoom's report also emphasized that without investing in upgrading the infrastructure, they will hardly be able to compete with many large video-chatting platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts or Cisco WebEx: ' Just a little difficult as congestion will also cause Zoom to lose points in the user's eyes, and of course they will no longer trust us like the past few weeks. In addition, the degradation of quality will turn our network providers and technology partners against us, negatively affect our reputation and make it harder for us to find more. cooperation in the future '.

Increasing investment costs is always an extremely important decision in the business. However, with Zoom, this problem becomes even more complicated when they can not calculate how many free users are willing to spend money to buy their premium service packages: ' It is true that the number of people Zoom usage has been rising worldwide, but there's no guarantee the number of paid users will grow. In addition, we cannot confirm that they will continue to select their applications after the pandemic ends or weakens . '

We only know that Zoom's user base has skyrocketed recently, but the company has never given a specific number. In early March, their board of directors also said that it is still too early to confirm the economic influence of Zoom. CEO Eric Yuan said that currently, he only focuses on providing the best product quality to customers and helping them work effectively during the epidemic season.

In China, which recorded the first cases of Covid-19 in the world, Zoom decided to release a free app completely instead of just giving users a free experience within the first 40 minutes. They also apply similar policies to the education sector in many countries. CEO Eric himself also shared that he has personally set up many classrooms for a series of universities and high schools around the world.

In its report, Zoom places special emphasis on upgrading infrastructure, because otherwise, users may underestimate the quality of their services. For businesses, if reputation is negatively affected, it will be difficult to revive, especially in the context of the field of online work is becoming more competitive than ever.

Previously, Zoom also faced many problems when unable to control the sudden increase in users such as sharing sensitive photos in online classrooms. In addition, students who do not want to study during the holidays are also rated 1 star, writing extremely negative reviews about this application in the hope that Apple will remove Zoom from the App Store.

The above incidents will make the process of maintaining Zoom's reputation more difficult, and of course, more expensive. It is also the opportunity for a series of competitors such as Microsoft Teams, WebEx or even Slack to take advantage and develop and kick the Zoom out of this lucrative market.

Zoom's report stated: ' With the rapid development of new technologies, the network we use may no longer be effective enough to meet the quality of our services and our customer base. Frequent interruption in use will lead potential users to underestimate the quality of Zoom and lead them to find rival applications. This can have a long-term negative impact on our company . '

According to BusinessInsider