Zoom, WhatsApp, Teams, Skype, Webex most used tools during lockdown

Security and privacy concerns notwithstanding, the US-based video meeting app Zoom has clearly emerged as the preferred collaboration and conferencing tool being used in India by remote workers to ensure business continuity during the lockdown in the country.

It is followed by WhatsApp and Microsoft Teams, which share the top three slots of the most-used tools by the corporate sector to facilitate work-from-home and during the COVID-19 times.

According to an industry survey by Voice&Data, an overwhelming 54% of corporate respondents in India indicated that they were using Zoom as a tool to enable collaboration between remote workers, as well as for communicating and networking with clients since 25 March 2020, when the nationwide lockdown became effective in India.

While 40% of respondents said they use WhatsApp, over 31% indicated using Microsoft Teams for collaboration and communication. Skype and Webex are the other two most popular tools ranking #4 and #5 respectively, with 29% and 26% of those surveyed saying they are using these for business continuity.

It is important to note that most of the respondents indicated that they are using two to three different tools for their business collaboration and communication needs during the lockdown phase.

Reacting to the news, Zoom Video Communications India country leader Sameer Raje said, “It is truly an honour to be recognized as the #1 collaboration and communication tool used by organizations in the country. This endorses our core values of being transparent, honest and caring with a focus of delivering happiness.”

“The ability of our platform to perform through fluctuating bandwidth makes it a real winner in India. While the simple and easy to use interface ensures speedy end-user acceptance and adoption, robust controls, report, and visibility for the IT team makes it a platform they can trust. We have seen the acceptance of our solution across a wide spectrum of organizations, from small to very large enterprises, and industry verticals. We will continue our journey with the same dedicated focus on keeping our customers happy,” Raje stated.

Commenting on the massive growth of Webex, Cisco Chairman and CEO Chuck Robbins said, “We’ve seen the need for collaboration technology skyrocket, and the demand for our secure Webex capabilities increase dramatically. We have also hosted 14 billion meeting minutes in March, more than double the number in February. To support and secure this massive growth, we are taking an aggressive, proactive posture to get well ahead of the highest demands on record.”

He further stated that being the world's largest enterprise security company Cisco was uniquely positioned to protect customers as their workforces go remote.

Reflecting on the role played by WhatsApp during the lockdown, it’s Head of India Abhijit Bose said: “The global crisis is having an unprecedented impact on people all around the world, and we are happy that businesses across India are finding WhatsApp to be a lifeline to communicate and collaborate with those who matter the most—their colleagues and customers in a reliable and secure way.”

Speaking on the role played by Microsoft Teams, which is a part of the Microsoft 365 solution stack, the company’s Modern Workplace Country Head for India Samik Roy said that Teams enables communication and collaboration in a secured environment and is designed as a virtual office that one can take anywhere they go.

“You can quickly jump into calls and meetings, collaborate by co-creating and co-authoring documents directly, and securely store files where the right people can access them. In the absence of a physical conference room, bringing everyone together can feel like the biggest remote-work challenge," he said, adding that meetings functionality of Teams help in creating an online conference room and remote meetings on Teams can be as effective as being present in person.

“Features like background blur, real-time noise suppression, meeting recording and many more can be leveraged by users to get more out of working on Teams. In remote working environments, security often gets compromised as users are not working on office networks or organizations devices. Security and privacy should be of paramount importance as users and devices are vulnerable to attacks. We offer a variety of privacy and security controls for video conferences in Teams, safeguard your privacy by design, protect your identity and account information as well as your data from cybersecurity threats and comply with global, national, regional, and industry-specific regulations,” Roy said.

Overall the respondents listed 17 different tools, including Google Hangouts (20%) and Slack (11%). The other tools and apps used by the companies to facilitate communication during work-from-home due to lockdown in India include Bluejeans, Facetime, Google Duo, GoToMeeting, Lifesize, Loom, Ozonetel, Tencent QQ, and WeChat.

However, some of the organizations also indicated using their own proprietary tools for both, internal and external communication and collaboration, including that with the partners. Salesforce, for example, informed that globally the organization uses Quip, the collaborative platforms that it acquired in July 2016. The platform helps combine documents, spreadsheets, and chat enabling the distributed teams to work together effectively.

Similarly, besides using off-the-shelf communication tools, Orange Business Services (India) also uses its internal social networking tool ‘Plazza’. The legal support services company Effectual Services indicated using its internal chat interface Pidgin, while Simpliance—a Bengaluru-based compliance technology startup—uses its online virtual office ‘Sococo’.