Last weekend we hosted a Zoom-based birthday party for my girlfriend, packed with a four-round quiz, six-part scavenger hunt and a few rounds of e-Pictionary. Oddly enough we were having just as much fun online as we would if we’d headed for a night out at Popworld, as was originally planned. This has become the new normal, and we’re not alone. 

Millions of us have inexplicably signed up to the business-centric video conferencing platform in recent weeks to stay in touch with friends and family. Our online gatherings now extend beyond work meetings into the realm of virtual pub trips, birthday parties, and even pre-booked dance classes. 

Even as the coronavirus crisis began escalating, nobody could have foreseen the extraordinary surge in Zoom’s popularity, especially given the former dominance of Skype. Not even Zoom’s founder and CEO, Eric Yuan, would have anticipated a thirty-fold increase in usage, with daily meeting participants ballooning from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million just last month. 

Zoom’s surge is bizarre in many ways, none more so than how it flew by Skype, although the surge in popularity is something of a special case. Its success is entirely predicated on a short-term growth in demand fuelled by COVID-19 lockdown measures, which will likely be lifted to a great extent by the end of the year. The firm’s privacy and security woes have proven that success isn’t always a walk in the park either, but these problems are ultimately manageable. The more worrying challenge might come a little later down the line.

There’s every possibility, first of all, that the company has hit its peak in terms of its user base. Additionally, many of us have been taking advantage of the company’s cost-free tier, meaning the company now encounters a headache that oddly enough resembles the existential crisis plaguing the digital media industry. While online publications have had no problem attracting hundreds of millions of online readers, figuring out how to monetise this massive traffic has been difficult. Zoom, similarly, may struggle to actually convert this unprecedented demand into a viable revenue stream.

To make matters trickier, phasing in a cost-barrier beyond a 40-minute time limit, which itself can be easily bypassed by starting a new conversation with participants, may drive people away. The likes Skype or Facebook’s own newly announced services are just as capable.

The final, crucial point to consider is that people aren’t attached to Zoom as a company or platform, but to the friends and family it allows them to keep in touch with. Once lockdown measures are lifted, it’s more likely than not we’ll leave the service as quickly as we found it and arrange to meet up in-person with the folks we’re desperately missing. As enjoyable as our Zoom-based birthday bash was, I’d still choose that night out in Popworld if given the option.

For these reasons, the company’s explosion in popularity, a surge in daily participants and even its exorbitant $40.5 billion valuation – more than double its $16.1 billion market value in January – are all highly volatile. Zoom’s executives, therefore, must ensure all business and product decisions made in light of this short-term success are sufficiently future-proofed.

There really is no predicting what might happen in a world riddled with coronavirus, but there’s every chance that once we’re all allowed outside and Zoom’s active daily user count plummets, its investors will lose confidence and cut their losses. That could leave the company in a far more precarious position than it has ever been, even before COVID-19. While Zoom represents an astounding story of business success in 2020, the same forces that fuelled its rise may also be the root of its downfall.

Google Cloud has defied the current economic turbulence to experience a 52% year-on-year surge in revenue for the first quarter of 2020, despite its parent company Alphabet beginning to feel the effects.

The company’s cloud business generated $2.78 billion in revenue during the first quarter of 2020, representing a 52% year-on-year surge. This is in line with its financial results from the previous quarter, with $2.6 billion in revenue representing year-on-year growth of 53%, according to Business Insider.

This continued surge is in spite of Alphabet’s executives bemoaning a «sudden and significant» slowdown in revenue in March due to the effects of COVID-19.

Although Google’s total ad revenues rose to $33.76 billion during the quarter, representing 13% year-on-year growth, this increase in revenue began to rapidly decelerate towards the end of the quarter.

«Q1 was in many ways the tale of two quarters. For our advertising business, the first two months of the quarter were strong,» Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in an earnings call with analysts.

«In March, we experienced a significant and sudden slowdown in ad revenues. The timing of the slowdown correlated to the locations and sectors impacted by the virus and related shutdown orders. 

«As the impact of COVID-19 came into view, we delayed some ad launches and prioritized supporting our customers as many adjusted their strategies.»

While the firm’s quarterly financial results are slightly tarnished with a deceleration in ad revenue, the continued growth of its cloud business, led by Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, offers signs of encouragement. 

That Google Cloud has been somewhat immune from the dire economic consequences ongoing pandemic may not come as much of a surprise, given cloud providers have generally sustained heightened demand.

The number of G Suite users, for example, has risen sharply over the last few weeks. With millions of people now working from home fuelling a 25-times surge in usage for industry-focused video conferencing platform Google Meets.

This is an effect felt by major cloud players across the industry, with SAP, for example, reported an increase in revenue last week of 7% for the first quarter of 2020. Services like Microsoft Teams, meanwhile, have also experienced a massive rise in the usage of collaboration software.

Zoom has chosen public cloud giant Oracle to manage the enormous surge in users that its video conferencing platform has sustained a result of the global coronavirus pandemic.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure will be adopted to support Zoom’s rapid growth and evolving business needs as it continues to develop its services. To illustrate the platform’s exorbitant growth, the firm added 100 million new users within a three-week period and also claims to boast 300 million daily meeting participants.

Zoom realised it needed additional cloud capacity immediately, so the service provider’s second-generation infrastructure was chosen to help the firm scale its capabilities so it could continue to deliver an undisrupted service to users and customers. 

«We recently experienced the most significant growth our business has ever seen, requiring massive increases in our service capacity. We explored multiple platforms, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure was instrumental in helping us quickly scale our capacity and meet the needs of our new users,» said Zoom’s CEO Eric Yuan. 

«We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance, and unmatched level of support.»

Oracle claims it’s well placed to support Zoom’s rapid expansion thanks to its network architecture, capacity and the locations of its data centres. For reference, Zoom is currently transferring more than 7,000TB through Oracle’s systems each day, with this figure is only expected to grow.

Despite Zoom’s rapid growth and overnight success, the platform has been tarnished with a heft backlash around a collection of security and privacy shortcomings, varying in severity. The phenomenon of ‘Zoom-bombing’, for example, was deemed severe enough for the FBI to officially warn consumers and businesses against the potential for their meetings to be infiltrated by unauthorised third-parties.

Moreover, claims in Zoom promotional material that the platform guaranteed encryption was debunked following an investigation by journalists and analysts. The company last week released a major update adding 256-bit encryption to address these concerns, as part of a 90-day plan to rectify the overarching security concerns.

For Oracle, meanwhile, the deal represents a chance to eat into the massive market share enjoyed by its major cloud rivals Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. 

​Facebook will update its ecosystem of messaging apps, including WhatsApp and Portal, with a set of features aimed at capitalising on the heightened demand for video conferencing.

Messenger Rooms, which largely resembles the features included in video conferencing app Zoom, is set to be rolled out to Facebook and Messenger this week.

The free service will offer Facebook users the tools to host catchups with up to 50 participants with no time limits. The user interface (UI) will also allow up to 16 people to share the same screen.

This is in addition to added capabilities for existing video hosting features, such as allowing Facebook users able to join live broadcasts midway through.

While the likes of Messenger and WhatsApp have played a role in helping friends, family and colleagues stay in touch during the coronavirus lockdown, users have flocked to services like Zoom and Skype to maintain face-to-face contact.

«Lately Facebook has felt the demand for real-time video,» the company said in a statement. 

«Between WhatsApp and Messenger, more than 700 million accounts participate in calls every day. In many countries, video calling on Messenger and WhatsApp more than doubled, and views of Facebook Live and Instagram Live videos increased significantly in March. 

«Spending time with each other should be spontaneous, not strained. So to help people feel like they’re together, even when they are — or have to be — physically apart, we’re announcing features across our products that make video chat and live video easier and more natural.»

This massive spike in demand has seen the likes of Zoom prosper almost overnight, with the video conferencing service gaining 100 million new users within a three-week period. As a result, the company’s fortunes have expanded and its shares have risen sharply.

Like Zoom and Skype, Facebook’s video conferencing service can be used by those without an account by distributing a meeting link. No software is required, and catchups can be started through the News Feed, Groups or Events. The company is also exploring ways to create this functionality from Instagram Direct, WhatsApp and Portal too. 

WhatsApp, meanwhile, has been updated with Group Calls feature that can allow video-chatting between eight participants, all sharing the same screen. While primarily a consumer-oriented app, many businesses use the application for colleagues to stay in touch. The addition of expanded video functionality, with secured end-to-end encryption, may tempt users to stay in-app for meetings rather than shift across to other services.

The security and privacy settings within these services, meanwhile, will be of particular concern to many, with Facebook seen by a large number of people as questionable when it comes to gathering and handling user data.

Zoom came under significant criticism during its explosion in popularity for not featuring a number of important privacy and security controls. As a result, its rise in usage coincided with the emergence of a phenomenon known as ‘Zoom-bombing’, where unauthorised third-parties would invade meetings unannounced.

The company has recently worked to address these issues as part of a 90-day effort to improve the security of its platform. Last week, for example, the firm upgraded the software to version 5.0, introducing 256-bit encryption and administrative controls. 

Messenger Rooms includes a host of privacy and security settings, allowing users to manage, for example, who can join meeting rooms. Users can also remove participants from a call and locking an entire meeting down.

While Rooms offers a certain level of encryption, the video chats hosted through the service won’t benefit from end-to-end encryption as WhatsApp does. Facebook, however, insists it doesn’t watch or listen to audio or video calls, according to its privacy policy. 

The platform will also limit the information it asks non-users to provide to just their name, which will be shown to other guests.​

​Zoom has rolled out a flagship update comprising data encryption and front-end security-centric functionality as part of the company’s 90-day plan to address privacy and security gaps. 

The company hopes the implementation of the 256-bit AES-GCM encryption standard in Zoom 5.0 will give users concerned over the security of meetings some reassurance that their data is protected from cyber criminals. 

With the added layer of encryption, Zoom Meeting, Zoom Video Webinar and Zoom Phone data will be protected against tampering, the company insists, with this latest update providing a level of confidentiality that wasn’t present in previous iterations.

The standard will take effect once all accounts are enabled with GCM, with system-wide account implementation set to take place on 30 May.

Zoom was previously criticised for not using end-to-end encryption to safeguard meetings despite claiming to on promotional materials.

The network improvement comes in addition to Control Data Routing, which allows account administrators to choose which data centre regions their account-hosted meetings and webinars use for real-time traffic. This measure was announced by the company earlier this month.

Meanwhile, the front-end user interface (UI) will be overhauled to include a host of additional functionality, from host controls to passwords for cloud recordings.

«We take a holistic view of our users’ privacy and our platform’s security,» said Zoom CPO Oded Gal. «From our network to our feature set to our user experience, everything is being put through rigorous scrutiny. On the back end, AES 256-bit GCM encryption will raise the bar for securing our users’ data in transit. 

«On the front end, I’m most excited about the Security icon in the meeting menu bar. This takes our security features, existing and new, and puts them front and centre for our meeting hosts. With millions of new users, this will make sure they have instant access to important security controls in their meetings.»

As part of the major update, users will be given a central security hub, which can be accessed through a security icon on the host’s interface. Hosts can, for the first time, report a user to Zoom, and disable the ability to participants to rename themselves, among other controls. The virtual waiting room, meanwhile, will be enabled by default so hosts can control who can enter meetings at all times.

The latest version of Zoom will also support a new data structure for larger organisations, allowing them to link contacts across multiple accounts so people can seamlessly search and find meetings, phone contacts or chats.

Improvements to the dashboard will allow account administrators to view how their meetings are connected to Zoom data centres, which includes any data centres connected to HTTP Tunnel servers, as well as Conference Room Connectors and gateways.

The company has ploughed its resources into resolving a host of well-documented security issues which have arisen since the video conferencing platform was thrust into the spotlight following an explosion of user activity.

While many have opted to use the service in light of the coronavirus pandemic forcing employees to work from home, a string of organisations have instead banned the platform, including the Ministry of Defence (MoD) and Google.

SAP will part ways with its co-CEO, Jennifer Morgan, a matter of months after she took up the mantle alongside Christian Klein following the departure of former chief Bill McDermott last October.

The ERP software giant has restructured to adopt a ‘sole CEO model’, which means Morgan, who has been at the company in various capacities since 2004, has been squeezed out. The co-CEO will depart the company on 30 April. 

The changes have come in light of «the current environment» which requires the company to take «swift, determined action» supported by a clear leadership structure.

«With unprecedented change within the world, it has become clear that now is the right time for the company to transition to a single CEO leading the business,» Morgan said. 

«I would like to thank Hasso Plattner for the opportunity to co-lead this great company, and I wish Christian, the Executive Board, and SAP’s talented team much success as they drive the company forward.»

The decision to part ways with the SAP veteran comes amid the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, which is wreaking havoc in all sectors across the global economy, including major IT and tech companies. 

SAP, incidentally, has sustained growth in revenues and profits during the first quarter of 2020, suggesting the sudden move to restructure its leadership is precautionary. The strong showing is headlined by a 7% rise in revenue.

However, the company has conceded the decision to shift its leadership model has come «earlier than planned» as it needs to focus on ensuring continuity, and unambiguous decision-making, during the crisis.

«Throughout SAP’s transformation, Jennifer has always been laser-focused on customers, partners, shareholders and employees,» said sole CEO Christian Klein. 

«It’s thanks to her that we have established a strong position in experience management solutions. I know she will always be a champion of SAP.»

Morgan joined SAP in 2004 and was appointed co-CEO with Klein in October 2019 when McDermott left. He now serves as the chief of the cloud software company ServiceNow.

Microsoft has released an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tool to help developers categorise bugs and features that need to be addressed in forthcoming releases.

The software giant’s machine learning system classifies bugs as security or non-security with a 99% accuracy, and also determines whether a bug is critical or non-critical with a 97% accuracy rating.

With ambitions to build a system with a level of accuracy as close as possible to a security expert, Microsoft fed its machine learning model with bugs labelled as security and non-security. Once this was trained, it could then label data that was not pre-classified. 

«Every day, software developers stare down a long list of features and bugs that need to be addressed,» said Microsoft’s senior security program manager Scott Christiansen, and data and applied scientist Mayana Pereira. 

«Security professionals try to help by using automated tools to prioritize security bugs, but too often, engineers waste time on false positives or miss a critical security vulnerability that has been misclassified.

«At Microsoft, 47,000 developers generate nearly 30 thousand bugs a month. These items get stored across over 100 AzureDevOps and GitHub repositories. To better label and prioritize bugs at that scale, we couldn’t just apply more people to the problem. However, large volumes of semi-curated data are perfect for machine learning.»

Because the system needs to be as accurate as a security expert, security professionals approved training data before this was fed into the machine learning model. Once the model was operational, they were brought back to evaluate the model in production.

The project began with data science and the collection of all data types and sources to evaluate quality. Security experts were then brought in to review the data and confirm the labels assigned were correct. 

Data scientists then chose a modelling technique, trained the model, and evaluated performance. Finally, security experts evaluated the model in production by monitoring the average number of bugs and manually reviewing a random sample.

The mechanism uses a step-step machine learning model operation; first learning how to classify between security and non-security bugs and then to apply a severity rating.

As a result of the level of accuracy, Microsoft now believes it’s catching more security vulnerabilities before they are exploited in the wild.

Development teams can read details in a published academic paper, with the machine learning methodology set to be open-sourced through GitHub in the coming months. 

Zoom customers will be able to choose which data centre regions their account can use for transmission of real-time meeting traffic, meaning that traffic now doesn’t need to be routed through China.

From 18 April, administrators and account owners of paid-for Zoom accounts can either opt-in or opt-out of a specific data centre region across the world, giving more control over how their traffic flows. 

The data of free users outside of China, moreover, will never be routed through China, with these users locked into data centres within their default region in which their account has been established.

The platform change has been implemented following a period of sustained criticism levelled towards the company for security concerns as well as privacy risks with its now extremely popular video conferencing platform. 

Last month, for example, it emerged that Zoom had been inadvertently sending a granular level of iOS users’ device data to Facebook through the mechanism of a sign-in integration. After this came to light, the company killed the integration and pledge to no longer transmit this data to the social media firm. 

In light of countless other complaints, the company last week moved to hire former Facebook chief security officer (CSO) Alex Stamos in a freelance advisory capacity to boost the platform’s integrity and robustness.

The backlash against the company reached a nadir last week after a host of organisations announced they were banning employees from using the platform. Even Taiwan distributed a declaration prohibiting government agencies and public sector employees from using Zoom, becoming the first country to ban the platform.

This ban was issued for security reasons, although many have suggested that, reading between the lines, the severity of the move was motivated by the revelation that some Zoom traffic was inadvertently routed through China. Diplomatic ties between the two nations are frosty, given that China does not recognise Taiwan’s independence. 

The swiftness by which Zoom has implemented changes to ensure traffic does not have to be routed through China, for both paid and free users, suggests the company is keen to mend its relationship with Taiwanese officials.

Paid-for Zoom users will be able to choose which data centre region their traffic is routed through, between the US, Canda, Europe, India, Australia, China, Latin America and Japan/Hong Kong. 

The Mozilla Corporation’s first CEO Mitchell Baker has rejoined the company to serve as its next chief executive after Chris Beard announced his intention to resign in August last year.

Baker, who was instrumental in the creation of the Mozilla Foundation, has been serving as the company’s CEO on an interim basis since December 2019 when Beard officially stepped down from his position.

The company has been attracted to her “innate knowledge of Mozilla” alongside a sense of urgency and transparency and a focus on long-term development, which she’s demonstrated since taking over from Beard.

Google’s flagship G Suite collection of cloud-based collaboration tools has surpassed six million paid business subscribers, while the usage of video conferencing Google Meet has surged 25 times amid the coronavirus pandemic. 

Around a million more organisations have taken up the paid-for iteration of Google’s suite of productivity apps since February 2019, a spokesperson from Google confirmed.

This is in addition to usage on Google Meets, the business-focussed iteration of conferencing app Google Hangouts, surging by 25 times since January. 

The latest stats were first outlined by the vice president and general manager of G Suite, Javier Soltero, speaking with CNBC

«The business of G Suite is growing at an incredibly healthy and, frankly for me, surprising rate,” Soltero told the news network. 

He added that millions of people working from home have boosted the adoption rate of Google Meet, which sits alongside Gmail, Google Drive and other services that comprise the G Suite.

Meets differs from Hangouts in that it’s only available to business users, while anybody with a Google account can use the consumer-focused Hangouts.

Services offered by rival developers, such as Microsoft Teams or Zoom, have also seen an explosion in interest. Zoom, in particular, has seen its popularity explode despite a string of security concerns, while Microsoft previously reported a massive rise in Teams usage in Italy, amounting to a 775% surge.

G Suite, which competes with Office 365, holds a much smaller market share against the Microsoft suite of workplace applications. 

Google has implemented a host of changes over the last few years in a bid to change its fate, for example, by rolling out voice commands, text suggestions and an AI boost in the form of Google Assistant, among other new features. 

The industry giant has also been keen to make inroads on the dominance of Microsoft Teams and its rival Slack, announcing plans earlier this year to combine G Suite services into a single mobile entity alongside communications functionality.

Under the plans, the entire G Suite collection of apps would combine into a single mobile entity, with a prototype of the app currently being tested internally.