ESCO attends Zoomtopia 2018

About Zoom

Zoom was founded in 2011 by a Lead Engineer from Cisco Systems and its collaboration business unit, WebEx. Zoom has quickly become the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, collaboration, chat, and webinars across mobile devices, desktops, telephones, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, conference, huddle, and training rooms, as well as executive offices and classrooms.

About Zoomtopia

Zoomtopia was held on the 10-11th October 2018 and it was the first time ESCO was attending. Held in San Jose, the event was much bigger than anticipated. Zoomtopia was Zoom’s second annual hosted event for customers and potential customer.

ESCO has been working with Zoom for over 2 years and Zoom is one of the fastest growing solution providers in the UC space. This event showcased Zoom’s software solutions for video, voice, and collaboration. The event comprised of an exhibition floor with Zoom’s eco-system of partners and breakout rooms where participants attended keynote sessions most relevant to themselves. Manufacturers such as Crestron, Aver, Logitech, Polycom, Huddly, Panacast, Heckler, Yamaha and DTEN peppered the exhibition floor. As an integrator, it was interesting to not only see new products but also to see how many of these products were designed with close consultation with Zoom

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Individual sessions provided the opportunity for attendees to learn how to best deploy Zoom, develop applications with their available API’s and SDK, and get the most out of using and administering Zoom. ESCO’s very own General Manger – Christopher Lim was invited to speak in a session to share ESCO’s experience and success deploying Zoom. On the main floor, Zoom set up demo areas featuring Zoom Room case uses. The manufacturers showed off their hardware solutions for quick integration and cost effectiveness in launching a Zoom Room.

Topics covered during the summit were wide ranging in nature but covered the main areas such as:

1. Zoom Rooms and best practices
2. Proper utilization of Zoom’s administrative dashboard
3. API’s / Marketplace
4. Utilization of Zoom specific markets (I.e Healthcare)

There were also notable speakers such as;

• World tennis champion and entrepreneur, Serena Williams
• The Speed of Trust author, Stephen M.R. Covey
• Sequoia partner, and co-founder and former CEO of Polyvore, Jess Lee
• Zoom enterprise customer, Walmart’s VP of Associate Digital Experience & Enterprise Architecture, Joe Park
• Zoom collaborator and customer, AT&T Business Chief Product Officer, Roman Pacewicz
• LinkedIn CEO, Jeff Weiner

Zoomtopia was the perfect opportunity for Zoom to announce new features and partnerships. Two key strategic partnership were announced between Zoom and Dropbox and Atlassian. Zoom also shared upcoming Zoom features on the Roadmap. From the perspective of a system integrator, some of the most important updates were:

Zoom Voice – available as an add-on to Zoom’s video communications suite. Support for inbound and outbound calling through the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and seamlessly integrated traditional telephony features will enable customers to replace their existing PBX solution and consolidate all of their business communication and collaboration requirements.

Zoom Rooms Multi-Share – Multiple users in a Zoom Room can now simultaneously share content on displays, making for a richer, more seamless collaboration experience.

Enterprise Management – released enhancements that will help IT managers better mass deploy, troubleshoot, and proactively monitor their Zoom Rooms

Zoomtopia through the lens of Christopher Lim, General Manager.
(Speaker at Zoomtopia)

Zoom’s advancement into the meeting rooms provides end users with a very wide spectrum of possible solutions. User experience (UX) is a key concept in today’s world and new standards/designs are being developed everyday by Zoom and integrators alike. As ESCO’s General Manager, I was invited to share our experience as a Zoom integrator during the “AV integrator track”, specifically ESCO’s journey with Zoom and how to add value as integrators. In my opinion, integrators should always interface with their customers to understand what kind of user experience they are looking for and build solutions based on their findings. While catalog solutions are great, integrators should not just propose catalog solutions for the sake of it.

It was certainly a great privilege to be invited to speak at Zomtopia and to work with such a passionate Zoom team over the last few years. Overall, Zoomtopia was a very fruitful trip for ESCO. It proved that Zoom’s success over the last few years is no fluke with phenomenal progress continually being made in almost every area. The attendance of key customers and manufacturers only reinforced their belief in the direction Zoom is heading in.

Zoomtopia through the lens of Michael Lewis, Business Development Manager.

(Attendee at Zoomtopia)

Having personally called the San Francisco Bay Area home for the past 18 years, it was exciting to return to the Bay Area after spending the last 6 months settling into my new home and with ESCO in Thailand. If you are not already familiar with the Bay Area, it is home to “Silicon Valley” which serves as a global center for high technology, innovation and social media. The Bay Area is home to likes of Google, Facebook, Adobe, Instagram, LinkedIn, Cisco and Zoom Video Communications. While visiting my old home town, I had the opportunity to attend Zoomtopia in San Jose, CA and learn more about Zoom’s innovative software solutions and so much more.

It was great to see and experience how Zoom has gone from a simple video hosting service to where they are today; offering a wide array of feature-rich solutions for video, voice, collaboration that is easy to deploy, use and administer.