Zoom piloting projects in India where it will be used with drone systems

Zoom Video Communications plans to go beyond being just a video conferencing network to becoming a collaboration platform, a senior executive said.

The company is piloting some projects in India to find use cases with drone systems, Sameer Raje, general manager and head, India & SAARC, at Zoom Video, told ET.

The company has also launched Zoom Events in India.


“We are launching something for a customer where Zoom meetings are being used on a drone system to provide feedback for geographical mapping and geographical survey, as well as finding missing people,” Raje said. “So, it's a complete collaboration story. It's not (just) a meeting application. As technology evolves, it's (Zoom) evolving in various formats.”

The use cases, he added, were "simply phenomenal" - be it using Zoom on drones to capture details to monitor plants, factories and pipelines as well as for geotagging of land surveys and the like.

"As of now, in India, we are doing some of the pilots (and) are in the very initial stages," Raje said. "But in the US, Zoom is being utilized by the law enforcement agencies and the police to take live feed from multiple teams and get it back to the control room. This is then shared with the senior leadership and there are multiple people on a Zoom meeting observing the live feed from the drone, which is out in the field.”

The Oceanside Police Department in California uses remote-controlled drone video, shared via Zoom, to enable command and control visibility for operations conducted by police, first responders, and other emergency personnel.

By using Zoom to expedite the way they process and share information, the Department could save lives, conduct safer operations, and extend capabilities in the areas of search and rescue and public safety.

“The strategic application of collaboration technology can create the ultimate human and machine team. By integrating Zoom with drone footage, body cam technology, and other physical on-site components, public safety departments can reduce risk to team members while increasing visibility and situational awareness," Zoom said on its website.

Raje said India was one of the most important markets for Zoom because of the customer base and the kind of clientele the company has. This was one of the primary reasons for the Nasdaq-listed company to launch Zoom Events in India.

The product, an all-in-one platform that combines the reliability and scalability of Zoom Webinars, Zoom Meetings and Team Chat in one solution for event organizers, has the ability to produce live events for internal or external audiences of almost any size.

It enables businesses across industries to seamlessly host virtual and hybrid experiences including company events like all-hands and sales summits and external events like user conferences.

The San Jose-headquartered company said that since launching in 2021, more than 7,000 customers have used Zoom Events, and the platform has averaged more than 150 events daily.

Zoom also hosted Zoomtopia 2021 on Zoom Events, delivering the latest in the world of communications to more than 30,000 virtual attendees worldwide.

“As enterprises in India embrace virtual and hybrid events as a core part of their communications and collaborations strategy, they can look to Zoom Events to create one-of-a-kind, interactive and immersive virtual experiences,” Roopam Jain, vice president of research, information and communications technologies at Frost & Sullivan said in a statement.