We use Zoom in two or three ways. One is for regular meetings. Most of our meetings are done over Zoom because people work from home due to COVID. A cloud meeting is the best way to go. People can initiate a meeting and invite people for one hour or two hours at a specific time.
When people want to do that, they have to buy Zoom's cloud meetings and licenses. If you want to conduct a cloud-based event, Zoom has a solution for events, and you have to buy an event license from them.
The third thing is Zoom rooms or Zoom video communications. Suppose you want to have a video conferencing device in your office, and you want to use that to connect via Zoom. You're in a boardroom where you have done the A/V integration. You can buy a Zoom room license and connect that solution to your Zoom meetings.
Mostly, we like Zoom meetings and Zoom rooms.
We started using Zoom last year.
Zoom has an email address. You write to them about any issues, and they respond.
Every solution has its special features because they're all competing with Zoom now. Zoom has started cornering the commercial market. WebEx was already in the enterprise market. Since the COVID outbreak, things have changed. Everybody's competing to update looks and features. I've been selling WebEx for a long time and Zoom also. I've used BlueJeans. All of the solutions are doing well, but Zoom's main benefit is that it's easy to manage.
Zoom is orienting itself to the commercial market. They are considering allowing users to start with a hundred participants per meeting, and then if you want to increase, you pay more. Webex allows a thousand participants to start. You can join from any video device. With WebEx, if you want to join from a video device, you have to buy additional licenses.
Most of our customers use Webex, but the government offices can't because of security issues. Banks also limit cloud applications to general meetings. Official meetings are on-prem only because they don't want to leak data on the cloud. Every major meeting must be recorded, so they won't do any cloud calling. If it is an urgent corporate meeting, they will not host it online. They only use Zoom or Webex for customer meetings or outside meetings.
Zoom costs less and offers more features if you're going for the lower versions. Zoom will be cheaper if you want to have a general meeting, but if you want a real enterprise version, Cisco will be cheaper.
Everything is easy with Zoom. You don't need to do anything but order it and tell the admin for that organization, and they will give one ID. For the remaining IDs, the admin will add the rest of the users. It's the same for any service, be it WebEx, BlueJeans, etc. You'll get one ID assigned to the administrator, and they can assign the rest of IDs to anyone in the organization. If you have 10 licenses, one ID is configured for the administrator, and they distribute the rest. We give a training on how to do it. It's all cloud-based, so nothing needs to be implemented in the office or anything.
Any cloud-based service offers a lot of benefits for customers. They don't have to invest in any on-prem infrastructure and they can use it on the go. They can be in the office, at home, traveling, at a hotel, or wherever, and they can start a meeting. There is no investment or recurring costs aside from the annual licenses.
I rate Zoom nine out of 10. It always works, and they try to appeal to what the user wants. They added features like background music for those people who use Zoom for online church services. They try to make the solution more useful for the user. For example, I tried to sell WebEx to a church, but I also gave them Zoom for a trial. They were impressed with that because that was the feature they were looking for. Zoom got most of these churches globally because of one feature.
It all depends on what the customer needs. Some people come along and say, "I want Zoom" just because they've heard of Zoom. However, it might not be a good fit when I tell them about the features. I speak to the customer, understand the requirements, and recommend they try this or that. Some people don't even need Zoom, but they ask for it.