Zoom announces innovations for enterprises at Zoomtopia 2021

Zoom Video Communications, kicked off Zoomtopia 2021, unveiling plans for innovations across its platform for new work environments for businesses and collaborations.

“We have released hundreds of new features, enhancements, and capabilities this past year alone and we have exciting new features in our development pipeline. With the ability to visually brainstorm on a virtual whiteboard and collaborate with colleagues similar to an in-person experience, or the endless opportunities of live transcription and translation services powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI) – previously considered ‘futuristic’ technologies are on the verge of becoming a reality, and could reshape the way we work," said Eric S. Yuan, Founder and CEO at Zoom.

Zoom's future potential projects include:

• Zoom Video Engagement Center (VEC): Zoom claims that users can be connected in a structured and immersive virtual environment. With industry-specific solutions, Zoom VEC will offer the same cloud-first scalability.
• Zoom Whiteboard: Zoom Whiteboard will act as a digital canvas, enabling seamless, real-time and asynchronous collaboration, with the ability to interact with the whiteboard similar to an in-person experience, creating more visually engaging and efficient meeting experiences.
• Zoom & Oculus Team Up: Zoom will be teaming up with Horizon Workrooms to bring the physical and virtual world together using Zoom. The goal is to allow users to access their Zoom Whiteboard and Zoom Meetings within the virtual Workrooms environment when this ships next year.
• Live Translation and Transcription: Zoom meetings will have real time, automated translation, as well as expansion of its existing live transcription, with support for multiple languages coming later next year.
• Zoom Rooms Smart Gallery: Zoom plans to expand use cases of Zoom Rooms Smart Gallery for meeting spaces of all sizes by creating individual video feeds of in-room participants, so they’re viewed clearly and equally by remote employees.
• Hot Desking: Zoom’s envisioned hot desking solution, available later this year, will allow employees to reserve desks and spaces in their offices using an interactive map and enable easy authentication to bring your personal Zoom experience to any Zoom Rooms or Zoom Phone appliance.
• Platform Security: Zoom is developing a Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) offering, with an initial beta planned for later this year. Additionally, Zoom plans to extend End-to-end encryption (E2EE) to Zoom Phone, potentially enabling users to upgrade to E2EE during one-on-one phone calls that occur via the Zoom client in the coming year.

Events Platform:

Zoom’s recent study on the role of video communications in daily life examined people’s preferences for how they envision using this technology in a future world. Globally, the majority of respondents agree that everything will have a virtual element – including celebrations and events.  

• Zoom Events Conference is a new event type that Zoom plans to make available this fall on Zoom Events, which will allow hosts to organize multi-track and multi-day events in a sophisticated format, with rich functionality, including, event lobby, chat, networking, sponsors, surveys, recordings, analytics, and more. Zoom Events Conference will offer hosts and attendees a customizable experience with the ability to provide an engaging and connected virtual event experience.

“Innovation remains at the forefront of Zoom’s annual Zoomtopia conference,” said Daniel Newman, Principal Analyst at Futurum Research. “I am particularly impressed with how Zoom’s plans for new solutions, like Zoom Video Engagement Center and Zoom Whiteboard, could continue to broaden Zoom’s impact on different facets of ourwork and lives, while enabling customers to create and grow businesses entirely on its platform.”