Larry Ellison Calls Zoom ‘Essential Service For Oracle’

Larry Ellison is known for biting attacks on other tech companies, but the Oracle founder, executive chairman and CTO has nothing but high praise for video conferencing provider Zoom Video Communications.

Zoom “has become an essential service for Oracle,” Ellison said in a YouTube video posted Monday, its technology enabling Oracle to continue engineering, as well as customer support and sales, “even though we’re still working at home.”

Ellison said the huge shift to videoconferencing over the last month will continue even after the coronavirus crisis subsides.

“The way we work will never again be the same,” he said. Going forward, professionals will “meet sometimes face to face, and sometimes digitally via Zoom.”

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Last month, Zoom launched its first-ever referral partner program, which the company called the "cornerstone" of its new approach to the channel.

As part of that effort, the nine-year old company that went public one year ago is working with a handful of master agents, including AVANT Communications, Intelisys, Telarus and Pax8.

The San Jose, Calif.-based company has been offering free video options for education organizations and is promoting free 40-minute video meetings for businesses and consumers as the coronavirus crisis forces global school and office closures.

As a result, Zoom saw staggering growth in the usage of its platform in March, with daily active users up 151 percent year-over-year.

That rapid adoption brought on by the coronavirus pandemic has challenged the services stability.

About two weeks ago, Zoom users on the East Coast of the United States and parts of Europe reported error messages when attempting to log in to the Zoom web client. To a lesser extent, the outage was also felt in parts of California, Florida, and the Midwest, as well as Malaysia, according to DownDetector.com.