At first, Zoom was a meeting solution. Then, it added Zoom Phone and Zoom Chat to become a UCaaS leader.
From there, it launched the Zoom Contact Center, Virtual Agent, and WEM. Calendar and Email are now even part of its communications portfolio.
Last week, it expanded even further, acquiring WorkVivo.
WorkVivo is an employee app with a social intranet and several other engagement solutions. These include forums, directories, recognition features, live video streams, and even podcast creation tools.
An analytics solution overlays these, assessing how employees adopt and interact with the app.
In a post announcing the news, Zoom noted:
With this acquisition, Zoom continues its evolution to provide the best end-to-end collaboration platform focused on enabling modern work and powering the digital-first workplace.
This transition to "modern work" has proven tricky. While most people are happy to attend meetings remotely, routines to improve employee development, culture propagation, and off-the-cuff communications are – in many cases – stuck in the mud.
For these reasons - amongst others - many businesses are mandating that staff return to the office.
Yet, as Business Insider reports: "Employees are rejecting the mandates and don't appear ready to back down."
As such, many businesses must look for an alternative, which Zoom aims to provide with WorkVivo.
Zoom Huddles – formerly known as “Zoom Spots” – and Zoom Clips saw it take similar strides. Nevertheless, this acquisition is perhaps the clearest step yet that it wants to become the hybrid work enabler with the most comprehensive communications portfolio.
From colleague to customer, in-office to remote, voice to video, scheduled to ad-hoc, human to virtual – it is paving over the communication pitfalls that scupper hybrid working experiences.
In a time where system convergence is front of mind, this is more of a differentiator for Zoom.
After all, UCaaS has become somewhat commoditized. Meanwhile, its CCaaS platform – while gaining momentum – lacks the breadth and depth of a NICE, Genesys, or AWS.
