Reflections on Zoomtopia 2024: A Standout Experience

#Zoomtopia2024 was both enlightening and energizing. I have attended countless CCaaS and UCaaS conferences over the years as a platform-agnostic technology partner, and Zoom has really stood out to me in 2024 as an exceptional partner with unusual excitement behind them. The level of enthusiasm from employees, customers, and analysts that I’m seeing and hearing is unmistakable, and Zoomtopia helped clarify why.

1. CX. The old Steve Jobs adage of "You’ve got to start with customer experience and work backwards to the technology" is cliché because it’s true, and Zoom makes it consistently clear that they live it. Good CX can be summed up by the user sentiment that “it just works”, and anecdotally--I’ve heard 2 separate Zoom CCaaS customers in the last few weeks tell me just that. They each explained that they have been shocked at how easy (translation: ease of use + reliability + support) deploying and managing Zoom has been, specifically calling out no longer needing to go through painful annual upgrades and instead just waking up with new features every few weeks. 2 customers is a small sample size, but it aligns with my personal experience and that of Journey 's engineering team.
2. Unified Architecture. Zoom's ability to introduce 3,000 new features in the last 12 months is impressive, particularly as a relative newcomer to the UCaaS and CCaaS spaces. From my perspective, much of this innovation is made possible by the unified architecture across contact center, phone, and meetings. This consistent architecture enables Zoom, and their partners like Journey, to develop more holistic product strategies, which not only accelerates innovation but reduces the risk of development silos and tech debt.
3. The Speed of Innovation. One of the recurring phrases I hear from around the Zoom ecosystem is "the speed of Zoom", and it was on display at Zoomtopia with the volume and scale of new products and features that were announced. It appears to me, as an outside partner with admittedly limited visibility, that there is a culture of decisiveness, high risk tolerance, and swift execution that permeates the organization, all of which are helped by the fact that their modern environment supports this fast pace. There is of course a tipping point somewhere when customers won’t be able to keep up with (and derive value from) the pace of new features and capabilities that a company releases, and I believe that CX is one of the greatest factors in determining where that point is. New features that “just work” lead to happy customers and so on. The unified architecture plays a critical role in unlocking speed as well. There is a tendency in tech to bolt the latest and greatest buzzword compliant (blockchain, AI, etc) bells and whistles onto every project and initiative, but sharing this more unified architecture across the organization seems to allow for tying innovation more directly to Zoom’s core tech and core mission.
4. (Bonus): Journey Demos! It was especially exciting to see Journey’s work showcased throughout the event. Watching our innovations make an impact within the Zoom ecosystem was a proud moment for our team. Justin and the team at Zoom did a fantastic job highlighting the value that Journey provides in both agent assisted and ZVA (Zoom Virtual Agent) interactions with customers.?If you've read this far and you have a few moments longer - I encourage you to stream the presentations to see some of the great work from Justin Steinberg , Alan Johnson , Benjamin Wiswell and others!

Thank you to everyone who made my first Zoomtopia an experience to remember!

Chris Morrissey , Amy Roberge , Vi Chau , Eric S. Yuan , Sean Fair , Brendan Ittelson , Kentis Gopalla , Mahesh Ram , Chris Moss , Abhisht Arora , Zeus Kerravala , Alpa S. Sheila McGee-Smith