INTERVIEW Daniel Creigh - Zoom Communication
“What we are not trying to do is bring people onto an island of Zoom...”
Daniel Creigh, Head of UK & Ireland, Zoom
No (huddle) room is an island
Following its Q2 financials CommsBusiness was able to sit down with Zoom Communication’s very own Jon
Donne, otherwise known as Head of UK&I Daniel Creigh
September has been a
good month for Zoom
Communications.
Following a favourable
second quarter of their nancial
year, in which the conferencing
provider boasted 90 per cent
growth, Zoom were able to
announce a deal with its second
nancial institution in the UK,
HSBC.
Although relatively new to
the video conferencing game
(2011), Zoom is certainly
making a name for itself. If
you were lucky enough to
attend any exhibition for the
communications or audio-visual
industries, you’d know that
everyone is paying attention.
Daniel Creigh, Head of
UK & Ireland for Zoom says
that that success has followed
an approach to “make these
islands of communications
talk to each other” in a world
that is recovering from a siloed
approach from the traditional
providers.
“e major go to market for
us is just simplicity and creating
a frictionless product that is
easy for people to use.
Historically video has been
a complicated aair, especially
when you get involved with
remote controls, dialling IP
addresses and making sure
that the system you are trying
to connect to with an external
party is the same.
We are trying to remove all
the complexity so that anyone
can walk into a room, connect
to their meeting and then get
on with their meeting.”
However potentially costly
in the past, Zoom has seen an
opportunity in the wake of the
traditional kitted out conference
room; their own Zoom Room.
“e concept of a Zoom
room is a set of o-the-shelf
components, not Zoom
hardware, with a whole
ecosystem of partners we
support, to enable a user to
walk into a room, click or tap
on a meeting on a tablet and be
placed into the meeting.
So, there’s no remote
controls, no cables, no
complexity. We provide
interoperability between all
of the dierent islands of
collaboration out there.
What we are not trying to do
is bring people onto an island
of Zoom, therefore we have to
work with all of those dierent
hardware providers and
software ecosystems and interop
with them.
at could be SalesForce,
Microsoft Teams or Facebook
Workplace, on the hardware
side we work with the Logitech
Ecosystem, Cisco and Poly
and interop between all these
systems.”
However before anyone
gets worried about kitting
out another conference room,
Creigh says “Our objective is to
make those dierent islands to
be able to talk to each other.
We provide the ability to
video enable those spaces with
o-the-shelf components, many
of which our customers will
have already. ey will probably
have screens on the walls,
they might have iPads, sound
systems and mics set up.
So we are already leveraging
those assets in the workplace
and enabling our customers
to video enable those rooms
that they didn’t put video
conferencing in before because
of the cost associated with it.”
Looking forward, Creigh
is condent that the days of
exclusivity when it comes to
video conferencing systems are
not set for a return. e Head
of UK&I said that he believes
Zoom are well placed for
future success in this growing
conferencing market.
“I think it’s unlikely
because most of the hardware
manufactures want to work
with dierent systems. You will
come across certain exclusive
relationships but that was just
for one product and not its
entire range.
We haven’t seen that happen
in the past but, typically, people
want to work to open standards.
at’s our preference, to work
to open standards and have
that interoperability to as many
dierent ecosystems as we can.
Recently we have done some
very specic work around DDI
environments so Zoom works
on eLux and Citrix which
is really hard to do from an
engineering perspective.
But it means that we have
a product that just works
regardless of whether you’re
using an iPhone or Android,
Windows, Mac or DDI
systems.”
44 | Comms Business Magazine | October 2019 www.commsbusiness.co.uk
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