Item 1. Business
Item 1. BUSINESS
Overview
Our mission is to make video communications frictionless and secure.
Zoom enables users to connect to others, share ideas, make plans, and build toward a future limited only by their imagination. Our frictionless communications platform started with video as its foundation, and we have set the standard for innovation ever since. That is why Zoom is an intuitive, scalable, and secure choice for large enterprises, small businesses, and individuals alike. We connect people through our core unified communications offering, which frictionlessly brings together video, phone, chat, and webinars, and enables meaningful experiences across disparate devices and locations. Our Developer Platform enables customers, developers, and service providers to easily build apps and integrations on top of Zoom’s industry-leading video communications platform, with opportunities for global discovery and distribution. Our virtual and hybrid event solutions allow users to seamlessly create and manage engaging events.
Our cloud-native platform delivers reliable, high-quality video and voice solutions that are easy to use, manage, and deploy; provides an attractive return on investment; and is scalable and easily integrates with physical spaces and applications. As businesses around the world navigate a period of significant work transformation, Zoom’s ability to enable meaningful connections whether teams are in the office, at home, on-the-go, or in other locations such as a retail or manufacturing setting, is a critical differentiator. We believe that rich and reliable communications lead to interactions that build greater empathy and trust. We strive to live up to the trust our customers place in us by delivering a communications solution that is secure, reliable, and “just works.”
A cornerstone of our platform is Zoom Meetings, around which we provide a full suite of products and features designed to give users an easy, reliable, and innovative unified communications experience. Users comprise both hosts, who organize video meetings, and individual attendees, who participate in those video meetings. In 2019, we launched Zoom Phone, a cloud-based PBX system, creating a unique unified communications platform. Many customers also choose to implement Zoom Rooms, our software-based conference room system, which enables users to easily experience Zoom Meetings in their physical meeting spaces. In February 2022, we announced Zoom Contact Center, an omnichannel contact center solution that is optimized for video and integrated right into the same Zoom experience.
The happiness we bring is recognized by customers. Zoom has consistently high scores across customer review sites, including Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius, and G2 Crowd, including being recognized as a 2021 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for Meeting Solutions and a TrustRadius Top Rated Web Conferencing Software. Industry analysts also recognize our market leadership: Gartner has named Zoom a leader in its Magic Quadrant for Meeting Solutions for the sixth consecutive year, and a leader in the Magic Quadrant for UCaaS for a second year. Frost & Sullivan recognized Zoom with its 2021 Global Webinars and Virtual Events Market Leadership Award. In 2021, we were also recognized as a leader in IDC’s MarketScapes for UCaaS Service Providers (Small- and Medium-sized Businesses and Worldwide Enterprise) and for Worldwide Unified Communications and Collaboration, by Omdia Universe for Collaborative Meeting Services, and by Aragon Research Globes for Unified Communications and Collaboration and Video Conferencing. We also received Aragon’s Innovation Award for Video Conferencing in both 2020 and 2021. Zoom was also named to Fortune’s 2021 Future 50 list, which recognized innovative companies with high-growth potential who are creating meaningful value for their customers.
We have a unique model that combines viral enthusiasm for our platform with a multipronged go-to-market strategy for optimal efficiency. Viral enthusiasm begins with our users as they experience the simplicity and reliability of our platform – it “gets out of the way” so they can focus on what they need to get done together. This enthusiasm continues as meeting participants become paid hosts and as businesses of all sizes become our customers. Our sales efforts funnel this viral demand into routes-to-market that are optimized for each customer opportunity, which can include our direct sales force, online channel, resellers, and strategic partners.
Our Growth Strategy
We focus on the following elements of our strategy to drive our growth:
• Keep our existing customers happy. We provide happiness to our customers by giving them an experience that delights them. We respond to customer needs with action to drive positive user experiences. We believe these practices result in our high scores across customer review sites and will continue to generate referrals from our existing customers, providing meaningful viral adoption for the foreseeable future.
• Drive new customer acquisition. Our platform is designed to make it easy to host meetings. By attracting free hosts to use our platform, we promote usage that allows hosts and their meeting attendees to experience the
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Zoom difference. We complement this lead-generation model with our multipronged go-to-market strategy that integrates the viral enthusiasm for our platform with optimal routes-to-market, including direct sales representatives, online channel, resellers, and strategic partners. This approach allows us to cost-effectively drive upgrades to our paid offering and expansion within organizations of all sizes and verticals.
• Expand within existing customers. As organizations experience our platform and become familiar with its benefits, more teams and departments within these organizations adopt Zoom. Our platform may begin in a line of business and then organically expand across departments. This “land and expand” model has led to some of our largest deployments. Customers are also purchasing services for webinars, room solutions, and phone for the full Zoom Unified Communications as a Service (“UCaaS”) experience.
• Innovate our platform continuously. Our engineers aim to stay on the cutting edge of communication and collaboration technologies. We strive to deliver the best experience to our users by dedicating a portion of engineering capacity to developing on-demand, customer-requested features that would be valuable across our customer base.
• Accelerate international expansion. With users, offices, and data centers strategically located around the world, we are poised to reach new customers globally. Our platform is intuitively designed such that localization requirements are minimal. For example, our platform works without intensive translation requirements with only a few language adjustments to our user interface and support systems.
• Grow our partnership ecosystem and continue to expand our platform. Our platform integrates easily with other systems and tools. We enable developers to embed our platform into their own offerings through open application program interfaces (“APIs”) and our cross-platform software development kits (“SDKs”). We have already partnered with several hardware video conferencing and peripheral providers and with software providers, including Atlassian and Dropbox. Third-party developers are able to engage with the Zoom App Marketplace and Zoom Developer Platform to extend the value and adoption of Zoom with our customers through the development of public and private apps and integrations.
Our Products
We provide a unified communications platform that delivers happiness and fundamentally changes how people interact, connecting them through frictionless and secure video, phone, chat, and content sharing. Our core products include Zoom Meetings, Zoom Phone, Zoom Chat, Zoom Rooms, Zoom Hardware-as-a-Service, Zoom Conference Room Connector, Zoom Events, Zoom Webinar, Zoom Developer Platform, Zoom App Marketplace, and Zoom Contact Center.
Zoom Meetings
Zoom Meetings provide HD video, voice, chat, and content sharing across mobile devices, desktops, laptops, telephones, and conference room systems. Our architecture can support up to 1,000 video participants in a single meeting. Conversations can be one to one, one to many, or many to many. Zoom Meetings feature 49-person video gallery view, virtual backgrounds, MP4/M4A cloud/local recording with transcripts, video breakout rooms, screen sharing with annotation, and integrations with other powerful business applications to help teams get more done together. Zoom Meetings integrate with tools created by companies such as Atlassian, Dropbox, Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Salesforce, and Slack. Our meetings are a flexible tool for on-the-go employees who rely on their mobile device or tablet throughout their business day.
An end-to-end encryption (“E2EE”) option is available to free and paid Zoom customers globally who host meetings with up to 200 participants. Zoom’s E2EE uses the same 256-bit AES GCM encryption that secures Zoom meetings by default, but with Zoom’s E2EE, the meeting host generates encryption keys and uses public key cryptography to distribute these keys to the other meeting participants.
Zoom Phone
Zoom Phone is an enterprise cloud phone system that provides powerful private branch exchange (“PBX”) features, such as secure call routing, call queuing, call detail reports, call recording, call quality monitoring, voicemail, switch to video, and much more. Available stand-alone, or as an optional add-on to Zoom Meetings, Zoom Phone is a core component of our modern UCaaS strategy that enables customers to replace their existing PBX solution and consolidate all of their business communications and collaboration requirements onto Zoom.
Zoom Phone provides inbound and outbound calling via its support for native connectivity to the public switched telephone network (“PSTN”). In the fiscal year ended January 31, 2022, Zoom Phone provided native PSTN connectivity in more than 45 countries and territories.
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Zoom Phone also supports Premise Peering and Cloud Peering, which provide customers with the flexibility to keep their current PSTN service providers by redirecting existing third-party voice circuits to the Zoom Phone cloud. Hybrid connectivity is also supported, allowing customers to mix native Zoom Phone calling plans and third-party voice circuits. This unique capability allows customers to enjoy all of the benefits and features of Zoom Phone while keeping their existing service provider contracts, phone numbers, and calling rates with their preferred carrier of record.
Zoom Chat
Zoom Chat, which is included in the Zoom client for meeting and phone customers, enables organizations and teams to communicate and collaborate in groups, channels, or 1-1s and to stay connected by instantly sharing messages, images, audio files, and other content across desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile devices. With Zoom Chat, users can easily invite people outside their organization to a chat conversation, and users can quickly switch from a chat to a phone call or video meeting during a conversation. Zoom Chat also features content storage for users who want discoverability and the ability to review their conversations or shared files. There are dozens of Zoom Chat compatible applications available in the Zoom App Marketplace that provide notifications and improved workflow for other enterprise systems.
Zoom Rooms
Zoom Rooms is our software-based conference room system that transforms every room – from executive offices, huddle rooms, training rooms, to broadcast studios – into a collaboration space that is easy to use, simple to deploy, and low-effort to manage. Designed to increase workforce collaboration across in-room and virtual participants, Zoom Rooms bring one-click to join meetings, wireless multi-sharing, interactive whiteboarding, and intuitive room controls for a frictionless and secure Zoom Meeting experience. Zoom Rooms can leverage purpose-built hardware, such as Zoom Rooms Appliances, for a turnkey deployment, or users can customize room builds with Zoom’s open hardware ecosystem and professional audio/visual equipment, enabling organizations to build video-enabled spaces for any use case.
Zoom Rooms Scheduling Display helps meet the needs of the agile office by delivering simple, on-the-fly room booking and room utilization management through a calendaring system. With a single Zoom Rooms license, customers get unlimited access to this service, requiring only an iOS or Android touch display outside their rooms.
Zoom Rooms Digital Signage leverages displays, in and out of conference rooms, to project image, video, and URL content playlists. Included as part of Zoom Rooms, role-based admins can easily manage unlimited Digital Signage content and displays through the Zoom Admin Portal and remotely control the content displayed across screens for corporate communications, internal marketing, branding, and more.
Zoom for Home is a personal home office solution designed to help remote workers connect and be more productive. The leading providers of Zoom for Home compatible devices include Amazon, DTEN, Facebook, Google, Neat, Poly, and others.
Zoom Hardware-as-a-Service
Our Zoom Hardware-as-a-Service offering allows customers to access the latest and greatest video communication technology from third party equipment providers. Customers can deploy a world-class communications experience with a variety of subscription options for phone and meeting room hardware. Customers can also scale video conference rooms and phones with hardware options and hardware refreshes at an affordable, fixed monthly price.
Zoom Conference Room Connector
The Zoom Conference Room Connector is a gateway for SIP/H.323 endpoints to join Zoom meetings. For organizations that use SIP/H.323 conference room systems from providers, such as Poly and Cisco, Zoom’s Conference Room Connector can take these traditional hardware video conferencing systems to the cloud, allowing users to leverage their existing investments while taking advantage of the Zoom platform. As organizations transition from legacy hardware-based conference rooms to software-based Zoom Rooms, IT administrators save cost on layers of service, maintenance, and support contracts and bridge their endpoints with Zoom Conference Room Connector. With the cost-savings, organizations can reinvest in video-enabling more rooms and continue to leverage their existing SIP/H.323 endpoints with a consistent, cloud-based experience across all their rooms.
Zoom Events
Zoom Events provides businesses with a virtual event management solution powered by the Zoom platform. Zoom Events enables users to manage and host all types of internal and external virtual events, from small interactive sessions to multi-day and multi-track events like conferences or consumer events. This includes the ability to create a “hub” where all of a business’ events can be listed with corresponding information about each experience. It also enables event hosts to provide ticketing and registration for attendees, and the ability to track these activities.
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OnZoom is a prosumer-focused virtual event platform and marketplace for Zoom users to create, host, and monetize online events. OnZoom is an extension of Zoom’s unified communications platform with robust monetization (ticketing and fundraising) and simpler event management capabilities. OnZoom is currently offered as a public beta for United States (“U.S.”) users to host and attend online events.
Zoom Webinars
Zoom Webinars support interactive video presentations to large audiences from almost anywhere in the world and from many devices. Zoom Webinars scale up to 50,000 people, including up to 100 interactive video panelists. With webinars, hosts have control over the video viewing experience and attendees join to listen, learn and interact using chat, Q&A, live polling and more. Our powerful third-party integrations help users maximize usage of their webinars and expand capabilities with paid registration, marketing automation, lead nurturing, and learning management.
Zoom Developer Platform and Zoom App Marketplace
The Zoom Developer Platform enables developers, platform integrators, service providers, and customers to easily build apps and integrations that use Zoom’s video-based communications solutions across video, phone, chat, or integrate Zoom’s core technology into their products and services, with opportunities for co-marketing, discovery and distribution. Our developer platform also allows Zoom customers to administer their accounts including managing app requests and provisioning, as well as optimizing account usage with access to dashboards and comprehensive usage metrics. With our SDKs, APIs, webhooks and extensive developer resources, Zoom, third-party developers, and partners build applications that integrate our platform with other globally in-demand applications, platforms, websites, and services. Our customers also have access to tools and resources to develop private applications that integrate Zoom and Zoom technology into their workflows and systems.
Our App Marketplace brings together integrations built by Zoom and third-party developers, making it easy for developers to publish their apps and for customers to enhance their Zoom experience with new functionalities. The App Marketplace features third-party integrations of Zoom into best of breed apps, Zoom Apps (third-party apps integrated into the Zoom experience) and SDK apps (apps built by ISV program partners using our Meeting SDK). Key integrations include Google Workspace, Calendly, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Salesforce, Otter.ai, Hubspot, Asana, Kahoot! and Miro.
Zoom Apps combine users' favorite apps with the power of video communications by allowing users to access them directly in Zoom Meetings. Users can enrich their Zoom experience with a variety of apps that cover many use cases — including whiteboarding, project management, note-taking, gaming, and more.
Zoom Contact Center
In February 2022, we introduced Zoom Contact Center which combines contact center functionality with our Zoom unified communications solutions. Zoom Contact Center is currently available in the U.S. and Canada with additional international availability planned for later this year.
Our Technology and Infrastructure
Our unique technology and infrastructure enable best-in-class reliability, scalability, and performance. We designed our communications platform to be video-first and cloud-native. Most legacy approaches utilize single multipoint control units (“MCUs”) to bridge video and voice participants into an integrated stream that is broadcast back to the participants. These hardware devices are shipped with defined processing and memory capacity that are difficult to scale. In addition, an MCU architecture is similar to other mainframe-like approaches where stream processing and mixing run on the same machine, which is resource-intensive and limits scalability.
Our technology was specifically designed from the start to address the most difficult component of communications: video. Video requires intense computing resources for encoding, decoding, multiplexing, and synchronization, as well as higher bandwidth and network performance, to a much higher degree than other forms of communication like voice, chat, and content sharing. Our architecture separates video content processing from the transporting and mixing of streams. We allocate video content processing to intelligent agents that reside on client devices and dynamically encode and decode based upon the performance of client technology, network performance, and bandwidth. We leverage a next-generation multimedia router that operates on commodity hardware and a globally distributed cloud infrastructure to determine the optimal data centers to host a meeting and an optimal set of paths to connect the participants.
Our Customers
We have customers of all sizes, from individuals to global Fortune 50 organizations. Our current customer base spans numerous industry categories, including education, entertainment/media, enterprise infrastructure, finance, government, health
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care, manufacturing, nonprofit/not for profit and social impact, retail/consumer products, and software/internet. No individual customer represented more than 10% of our total revenue in the fiscal year ended January 31, 2022.
Sales
Our sales model combines our viral demand generation and our free Zoom Meetings plan with a sales approach optimized for the size of each customer opportunity. Our direct sales force includes our field sales representatives as well as our inside sales team, and it is organized by customer employee count, region, and vertical. Our channel team coordinates the activities of resellers and strategic partners to build a strong ecosystem that broadens our reach. Our online channel supports high-volume, high-velocity, self-service sales.
Marketing
Our marketing team’s primary objective is to create preference for our brand by leveraging our viral growth, enhancing brand perception, and engaging our users with virtual events, content, social media, and customer advisory councils. We complement our viral growth with targeted online and out-of-home advertising. We shifted our events strategy from in-person to online during the pandemic, including hosting Zoomtopia, our annual user conference, virtually to tens of thousands of attendees.
Research and Development
We drive our business with constant innovation. We have research and development presence in the United States, India, Singapore, and China, which we believe is a strategic advantage for us, allowing us to invest more in increasing our product capabilities in an efficient manner with a “follow the sun” strategy.
Our Competition
The markets in which we operate are highly competitive. We face competition from legacy web-based meeting services providers, including Cisco Webex and GoTo, bundled productivity solution providers with video functionality, including Google Workspace and Microsoft Teams, and UCaaS and legacy PBX providers, including 8x8, Avaya, and RingCentral, as well as consumer-facing platforms that can support small- or medium-sized businesses, including Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. Additionally, as we build out Zoom Contact Center, we may face additional competition, including from Five9, Inc., Genesys and NICE inContact.
We believe we compete favorably based on the following competitive factors:
• video-first platform;
• cloud-native architecture;
• functionality and scalability;
• ease of use and reliability;
• brand awareness and preference;
• ability to utilize existing infrastructure, such as legacy conference room hardware; and
• low total cost of ownership.
Intellectual Property
We rely on a combination of patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets, as well as contractual protections, to establish and protect our intellectual property rights. We actively seek patent protection covering inventions originating from our company. We also pursue the registration and enforcement of trademarks and domain names in the United States and in various jurisdictions outside the United States.
We control access to and use of our proprietary technology and other confidential information through internal and external controls, including contractual protections with employees, contractors, customers, and partners. Our software is protected by U.S. and international intellectual property laws. Our policy requires employees and independent contractors to sign agreements (1) assigning to us any inventions, trade secrets, works of authorship, and other intellectual property generated by them in the course of their employment, and (2) agreeing to protect our confidential information.
In certain circumstances, we license intellectual property from third parties for use in our products. This may include open source software. We take steps to ensure compliance with the terms of the licenses governing such licensed technology. We believe our business is not materially dependent on any individual patent, trademark, copyright, trade secret, license, or
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other intellectual property right. For information on the risks associated with our intellectual property, see “Item 1A - Risk Factors.”
Government Regulation
Our business activities are subject to various federal, state, local, and foreign laws, rules, and regulations. Compliance with these laws, rules, and regulations has not had, and is not expected to have, a material effect on our capital expenditures, results of operations, and competitive position as compared to prior periods. Nevertheless, compliance with existing or future governmental regulations, including, but not limited to, those pertaining to global trade, business acquisitions, consumer and data protection, and taxes, could have a material impact on our business in subsequent periods. For more information on the potential impacts of government regulations affecting our business, see “Item 1A - Risk Factors.”
Human Capital
As of January 31, 2022, we had 6,787 full-time employees. Of these employees, 4,009 are in the United States and 2,778 are in our international locations. None of our U.S. employees are represented by a labor union. Employees in one of our non-U.S. subsidiaries have the benefit of a collective bargaining agreement and are represented by a workers’ council. We have not experienced interruptions of operations or any work stoppages due to labor disagreements.
Our Culture of Happiness
We are focused on delivering happiness to our employees and customers. We strive to change the way business is done through our communications technology and our company culture. We take happiness so seriously that we have an employee-led happiness committee and crew to facilitate and amplify our efforts to deliver happiness to our employees and customers.
Our culture of delivering happiness drives our mission, vision, and values and is fundamental to everything we do at Zoom:
• Mission. Our mission is to make video communications frictionless and secure.
• Vision. Our vision is to empower people to accomplish more through video communications.
• Values. We care for our community, our customers, our company, our teammates, and ourselves.
This culture supports our hiring and serves as a competitive advantage in attracting and retaining top talent. Comparably recognized Zoom for numerous culture awards in 2021 including Best Company Happiness and Best CEO. Our employees also named Zoom among the winners of Glassdoor’s Employees’ Choice Awards honoring the Best Places to Work in 2021.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) at Zoom is an embodiment of our core value of Care. DEI also represents our intentional effort to create an inclusive environment of the brightest minds from a broad set of backgrounds in order to create the most innovative solutions for our customers. Our approach to DEI is driven across four strategic focus areas: workforce (who and how we hire), workplace (how it feels to work at Zoom), marketplace (how we include our customers) and community (how we help to make the world more equitable).
We have taken steps to diversify our candidate outreach through engagements with AfroTech, Merritt College, AnitaB.org, and a five-year strategic partnership with Claflin University. In our workplace, our Zoom Talks initiative creates ongoing spaces for our employees to learn more about one another’s unique backgrounds. We have a number of Employee Resource Groups (“ERGs”) with a focus on Black, Latinx, Women, Asian and Pacific Islander, Veteran, and LGBTQ+ communities. Our ERGs offer our employees support and community building opportunities, and help to foster an inclusive environment and diverse workplace. Our DEI Team continues to partner with teams leading our product design and marketing to invest in making our products even more inclusive and accessible to the diverse set of communities we serve.
Compensation and Benefits
We offer fair, competitive compensation and benefits that support our employees’ overall well-being. Our employees’ total compensation packages include base pay, bonuses or sales commissions, and equity. We offer a wide array of benefits including comprehensive healthcare benefits, including mental health and fertility benefits, wellness benefits, a book reimbursement plan to support continuous learning, and charitable gift matching through our Zoom Cares program.
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, we implemented significant changes that we determined were in the best interest of our employees as well as the communities in which we operate. This includes having the vast majority of our employees work from home, while implementing additional safety measures for employees continuing critical on-site work. We also provide flexible work hours in certain cases. We have also provided a work-from-home reimbursement policy to assist employees in that transition.
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Over the past year, we conducted a comprehensive employee survey with regular follow-ups and engaged in peer research to make thoughtful decisions on how to move forward in an evolving world of work. Two priorities were immediately clear: keeping our employees safe and supporting them through a meaningful employee experience. We believe that the future of work at Zoom will be based on enabling a flexible working environment for our employees. We have created three "workstyles" for our employees (in-person, remote and hybrid) and will be allowing most employees to choose their own workstyle.
Corporate Information
We were incorporated under the laws of the state of Delaware in April 2011 under the name Saasbee, Inc., and in February 2012, we changed our name to Zoom Communications, Inc. In May 2012, we changed our name to Zoom Video Communications, Inc. Our principal executive offices are located at 55 Almaden Boulevard, 6th Floor, San Jose, California 95113. Our telephone number is (888) 799-9666. Our website address is https://zoom.com. Information contained on, or that can be accessed through, our website is not incorporated by reference into this Annual Report on Form 10-K. The Zoom design logo, “Zoom,” “Zoom Video Communications,” and our other registered or common law trademarks, service marks or trade names appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the property of Zoom Video Communications, Inc. Other trade names, trademarks, and service marks used in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the property of their respective owners.
Available Information
We file annual reports on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, current reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to reports filed or furnished pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Exchange Act. The SEC maintains a website at www.sec.gov that contains reports, proxy and information statements, and other information that we file with the SEC electronically. Copies of our reports on Form 10-K, Forms 10-Q, Forms 8-K, and amendments to those reports may also be obtained, free of charge, electronically through our investor relations website located at investors.zoom.us as soon as reasonably practical after we file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC.
We announce material information to the public through a variety of means, including filings with the SEC, press releases, public conference calls, our website (www.zoom.com) and the investor relations section of our website (investors.zoom.us). We use these channels, as well as social media, including our blog (blog.zoom.us), our Twitter account (@zoom_us), our LinkedIn page (linkedin.com/company/zoom-video-communications), our Instagram page (instagram.com/zoom), our TikTok page (tiktok.com/@zoom), and our Facebook page (facebook.com/zoomvideocommunications), to communicate with investors and the public about our Company, our products and services, and other matters. Therefore, we encourage investors, the media, and others interested in our Company to review the information we make public in these locations, as such information could be deemed to be material information. Information on or that can be accessed through our websites or these social media channels is not part of this Annual Report on Form 10-K, and the inclusion of our website addresses and social media channels are inactive textual references only.