Zoom to increase hiring in India after free user base grows 67% in 4 months

KEY HIGHLIGHTS

• Zoom plans to expand R&D footprint in India with a new technology centre in Bengaluru
• Most of the vacancies will be in engineering, data and operations related work
• The team expansion in India comes on the back of increased user base and engagement
• Free user base in India grew 67% between Jan-April this year

Video-collaboration platform Zoom has expanded its operations in India by opening a new technology centre in Bengaluru. The new centre will be an addition to the existing R&D centres and support Zoom's engineering at its headquarters at San Jose, California. Though Zoom did not provide a number, it said headcount of DevOps engineers, IT, Security, and Business Operations teams in India would be ramped up.

The company will now have teams operating in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi. Emphasising the opportunity that India holds, Aparna Bawa, Chief Operating Officer at Zoom, said Indian market saw free user base grow 67 per cent between January and April. However, calling out India revenues will take time in spite of India being the fastest growing international market for the company.  

Zoom also said that its US centric focus has now changed, "Most of the growth now is coming from international, so our commitment and our focus is definitely on the future," said Bawa.

The team expansion in India comes on the back of increased user base and engagement. Zoom also said it increased the capacity of its Mumbai and Hyderabad offices nearly three to four times in the last few months.

"The paid customers went up by four times between Jan to April, one of the fastest growth worldwide. We grew in all sectors, be it financial, manufacturing, education and technology," said Sameer Raje, India Head, Zoom communications.

"We are also looking to bring the whole IT into India, which includes IT infrastructure, application development, desk top services management. Along with that we are also bringing some of the business operations such as HR, legal," said Velchamy Sankarlingam, President of Product and Engineering.

Addressing the security concerns around how data is handled, Zoom said that it is already providing enterprise and paid customers the option to choose data centres to route the data according to the region.

It also said that most calls are treated as transit data which are not stored in any of the servers. Zoom, though refrained from commenting on JioMeet having a similar interface.

According to the company's annual report, Zoom's total head count until end of January 2020 was 2,532, including US and international employees. The R&D centre in China have nearly 700 employees.

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