The Zoom videoconferencing platform had a successful year, with its share price rising more than 500% due to the unprecedented increase in remote work caused by the coronavirus pandemic. But now the company is looking to expand beyond video chat in the workplace and into new territories, specifically email and calendar services, according to a new report from The information.
The company is already working on the e-mail product, which, according to the report, will be a web e-mail service that Zoom can start testing as early as next year. The calendar app appears more distant and it is unclear whether development has started. But both ideas are smart ways for Zoom to explore, especially if companies start bringing employees back to the office and the dependency on videoconferencing decreases as the distribution of the COVID-19 vaccine increases through 2021.
Many of Zoom’s main competitors are video conferencing platforms grouped as part of larger corporate application suites, with the two largest belonging to Microsoft with its Office 365 platform and Google with its competing Workspace package. Both platforms offer calendar, email and video conferencing products, so it makes sense for Zoom to look at email and calendar to try to complete their offerings and make Zoom less a single-purpose platform.
The informationin The report has a number of other telltale signs that the company is interested in building a complete enterprise application package, including job ads for “interesting chat features” and its existing integrations with other applications like Asana and Dropbox. But there is always the possibility that the company may decide to wait and see how moving back to office work affects business and whether remote work remains a prominent factor in life in the future. Zoom did not immediately respond to a request for comment.