Hello and welcome to Protocol Enterprise! Today: Zoom’s chief product officer outlines how the company thinks it can move beyond the meeting, Atlassian acknowledges that its Jira outage will cost it money, and Intel promises it’s ahead of its turnaround schedule.
Spin up
While Intel is still working out some kinks, it’s otherwise a great time to be in the chip business. Global sales of semiconductors rose 23% in the first quarter to $151.7 billion, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.
Why Zoom wants to move beyond the meeting
Zoom is still trying to prove that it’s more than a meeting company. Despite falling short of analyst expectations during its last earnings call, the company is optimistic that a new suite of products across events, customer service and collaboration will drive future growth.
According to an interview with Zoom Chief Product Officer Oded Gal, the company is betting that a string of new product launches can turn it into a platform company.
- Since Zoom already has the infrastructure for large-scale communications, Gal thinks events, collaboration tools and contact centers are natural extensions.
- To Gal, Zoom is poised to be much more than a meeting company. “We see ourselves as a platform,” he said.
- Over the past months, Zoom’s product strategy has been focused on proving that thesis via a string of acquisitions and product launches.
After Zoom’s failed acquisition of Five9 last September, the company decided to release its own contact center service earlier this year, followed by Zoom IQ, new features to Zoom Events and most recently Zoom Whiteboard.
- Zoom’s acquisition strategy in part is focused on augmenting existing products as well. That’s why the company made three recent acquisitions, including Liminal Assets last December.
- “We started with security, recently NLP and also video manipulation for our events product, so we kind of tried to get help in solving problems through those acquisitions,” said Gal.
But can these new product launches turn Zoom into the company it thinks it can be?
- For one, Zoom IQ received some blowback, and Zoom Whiteboard isn’t necessarily groundbreaking, although Gal sees its ability to facilitate asynchronous collaboration as integral to the company’s product strategy.
- “We are really a platform for all your collaboration and communication needs and the whiteboard is really a big part of that moving forward,” he said.
- Still, Zoom remains confident that its product strategy will prove it can do more than just meetings. “Thinking about Zoom as a kind of broad platform company, it’s not just the meetings. Meetings [are] what we're known for but we've built a suite of products,” said Gal.
Zoom desperately wants to prove to investors that it's more than just a meeting company. But customers and developers might need to see more than a string of newly launched products to start thinking about the company as a central hub for their application development.
A MESSAGE FROM FORMSTACK
Join experts from Salesforce, Crowe, Banner Health, and Formstack as they discuss the 2022 State of Digital Maturity: Advancing Workflow Automation report, the movement toward continued automation, and the top ways to accelerate your organization's digital maturity.
Credit where credit is due
Atlassian acknowledged Thursday that it will have to refund Jira customers for the long outage it endured earlier this month, but it doesn’t expect the outlay to be material to its financial results later this year.
In reporting its third fiscal quarter results, which saw revenue attached to its cloud services increase 60%, Atlassian executives “addressed the elephant in the room,” as The Register put it. Like almost all cloud services, Atlassian provides customers with a service-level agreement that specifies how credits will be awarded in the case of outages, and CFO James Beer said that compensation will be factored into next quarter’s results but it is not expected to be “material.”
Atlassian also released an extremely detailed post-mortem report Friday that goes into the scope and structure of its cloud services and how everything went wrong in this particular case, and Protocol Enterprise remains a strong supporter of publicly available detailed incident reports following major outages.
“At Atlassian, one of our core values is ‘Open company, no bullshit’. We bring this value to life in part by openly discussing incidents and using them as opportunities to learn,” the company said at the beginning of the report.
— Tom Krazit (email | twitter)Around the enterprise
Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger told Bloomberg that Intel’s manufacturing comeback plans were ahead of schedule, and we just set a calendar reminder for this date in 2024.
The CIA just hired a CTO: Nand Mulchandani, a longtime enterprise tech executive, will join the spy agency “to revamp the agency’s approach to technology and competition, especially against China,” according to The Record.
A MESSAGE FROM FORMSTACK
Join experts from Salesforce, Crowe, Banner Health, and Formstack as they discuss the 2022 State of Digital Maturity: Advancing Workflow Automation report, the movement toward continued automation, and the top ways to accelerate your organization's digital maturity.
Thanks for reading — see you Monday!