Zoom is one of the companies that have had an awesome year. The videoconferencing company has seen its stock price rising more than 500 percent, due to the unprecedented need for work to go remote, thanks to the global coronavirus pandemic.
According to reports making rounds, the company is looking to expand beyond real-time cloud meetings, and into new frontiers, specifically email and calendar services.
Zoom is already working on the email product, according to The Information. Report states that it will be a web email service, and Zoom may begin testing the product as early as next year.
The reports about the calendar app appears rather uncertain. It is unclear if development has started yet; however, both ideas seems to be smart avenues for Zoom to explore, especially if companies start bringing employees back to the office.
Read also: Amazon Takes Home Security To A New Level; Unveils Drone Camera That Flies Round The House
The reliance on videoconferencing might decline as COVID-19 vaccine distribution picks up in the coming year, but with Zoom already holding a spot in the heart of many organizations, it might give the company a good ground to push other products.
At the time of publishing this article, Zoom has not made any official confirmation or rebuttal.
Zoom’s major competitors are videoconferencing apps which are part of a larger enterprise of app suites. The two biggest competitors – Microsoft Teams and Google Meet – belongs to Microsoft with its Office 365 platform, and Google with its competing Workspace bundle, respectively.
Both of the parent company of Zoom’s competitors offer calendar, email, and videoconferencing products, so it could infer why Zoom would look towards creating a product that offers email and calendar services.
The reports by The Information has a number of other telling signs that suggests that the company is interested in building a full enterprise app suite, including job postings for “exciting chat features” and its existing integrations with other apps like Asana and Dropbox.
However, there is always the possibility that the company decides to wait and see how the shift back to office work affects business and personal communication, and whether or not, remote work remains a prominent factor of life well into the future.
