Microsoft and others say demand for video calls continues to rise

REUTERS: Microsoft Corp said Thursday that video calls and educational use of its Teams productivity software had increased in recent weeks as employees work remotely and some US schools. USA They cancel classes in person for the rest of the academic year.

Microsoft said video calls on Teams, which competes with apps like Slack Technologies Inc and Zoom Video Communications Inc, increased 1,000 percent in March, but did not give an absolute figure. The company said the proportion of meetings and calls that included video more than doubled to 43 percent from 21 percent in March.

Jared Spataro, Microsoft 365 corporate vice president at the company, said Microsoft data showed the use of embedded videos during the workday.

“We will see jets on a video conferencing team, but then we will see people go offline and do a lot of work in chat and documents, and then come back,” he said.

Microsoft also said that 183,000 educational organizations, each of which can include multiple schools, in 175 countries now used their Education Teams, although it did not provide a prior baseline. Total minutes spent on meetings by all Teams users reached 2.7 billion on March 31, Microsoft said, tripled 900 million minutes on March 19.

With billions of people worldwide under lockdown orders to stem the spread of the coronavirus, remote work and learning tools have grown rapidly.

For example, on the end-to-end encryption messaging service Wickr, which offers fully encrypted video calls with up to 50 participants, business sales have more than doubled each week for a month, Chief Executive Officer Joel Wallenstrom said.

Wickr typically caters to executives or security teams within a large company who want their encryption to discuss financial or government secrets, rather than crowding out teams, Zoom or Slack.

“We had a client that had 150 primary users,” said Wallenstrom. “But when there wasn’t much they could do outside of the office, they reached 80,000 in two weeks.”

Slack said last month that simultaneously connected users increased to 12.5 million on March 25 from 10 million on March 10. Zoom daily meeting participants increased to more than 200 million in March from a previous high of 10 million. No figure is directly comparable to each other or to Microsoft’s figures.

But Zoom’s rise has sparked a global backlash over security and privacy concerns, with Alphabet Inc’s Google this week banning the use of its desktop app by employees and a California school district suspending the use of Zoom in after an intruder is exposed and yells out racial slurs during a high school student video gathering.

(Report by Stephen Nellis and Joseph Menn in San Francisco; Edition by Peter Cooney)