Ms Bawa declined to say how many of Zoom's 8,000 employees are in Singapore, or how many people the company plans to hire, but Zoom lists three positions on its career site. Thirty more openings can be found on LinkedIn. The positions are in areas ranging from human resources, audit and sales to programming.
The company thrived on a boom in Web meetings at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many employees worked from home. Now faced with workers returning to offices and a decline in the number of Web meetings, the 11-year-old company has gone on a global marketing blitz this year to remake itself as a one-stop mall of work tools.
This positioning is not unlike the Microsoft or Google worlds that allow, but not encourage, users to jump from one company's app to another.
Zoom even squeezed in four new Os to make ZOOOOOOM in a logo variation, unveiled in September, to remind users that they have plenty more to focus on: employee team chat, phone, meetings, rooms, events, and contact centre.
An enterprise client at the event said he switched out Microsoft for Zoom after finding its tools more user-friendly and its service responsive. However, Zoom's much-touted lower price tag does not hold up anymore with Microsoft trimming prices recently, he said.
His global company has a multi-year contract with Zoom, but that does not stop the partnership being reviewed on an annual basis, he said.
Asked what he thinks of Zoom's crossing into other domains and office functions in such rapidity, he said: “I'm not concerned, but they should be.”
The software engineer famously founded Zoom after failing for a year to convince his former employer, now competitor, Webex to respond to customers' gripes about clunkiness and friction in its solution.
In his keynote speech, Mr Yuan - in his often lofty style - used the word “love” to relate to customers, employees and Zoom's work more than 15 times. He also talked about realising the company's culture statement to "deliver happiness'' and introduced the company's obscure mascot, Happy the Humpback whale.
Zoom was never meant to be just a video-conferencing app, he said on stage at the McEnery Convention Center in San Jose, against a picture of his younger self in the founding years.
“I started Zoom with video architecture. I know I wanted to make customers happy, but my ambition was always to go beyond that. So once we nailed the video-conferencing killer app, we started creating the rest of the parts of a collaboration and communication platform,” he said.
“Our team has been so busy this past year, continuing to evolve Zoom into a platform that sparks the most powerful aspect of global connection and communication. We have built, and launched, over 1,500 features and extra enhancements this year.”
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