Zoom competitor 8x8 sees spike in usage amid coronavirus

8x8 CEO Vik Verma joins Yahoo Finance’s Seana Smith to discuss the company's increase in usage amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as Zoom encounters concerns over its security and privacy.

Video Transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance. Video conferencing companies are seeing a huge surge in demand as millions of Americans are working from home and millions of students are now learning online. Now, one company that's seen a significant boost is 8x8. It's a leading integrated cloud communications platform. For more on this, I want to bring in Vik Verma, the CEO of 8x8. Vik, thanks so much for joining us this afternoon.

I know your company has been extremely busy over the last couple of weeks. Let's just start big picture here. Tell us what have you seen just in terms of how big of a boost for the demand for your product, and whether or not you're able to keep up with that demand.

VIK VERMA: Thank you, Seana, for having me on. Look, to a large degree, it's a horrible time that the world is going through, but we are happy to play our part. We built our company to be a communications platform. It has accelerated like you won't believe, particularly video conferencing. We've seen video conferencing go a few short weeks ago from a couple 100,000 monthly active users to over 8 million.

We have seen use of our soft phone and telecommunication services pick up all over. We have seen contact centers working from home. We're finding that people, on average, are working 10 to 12 hours using our mobile technology, because they're now all working from home, and it seems like the overall work-life balance has gone very differently for people. And so you know, the company is keeping up. I mean, we have 1,600 employees all over the world, and they've done a phenomenal job of taking care of our customers.

SEANA SMITH: Vik, it's interesting, because a lot of friends that are of this-- at least as it pertains to some of your competitors out there, has been the privacy factor-- whether or not some of these video platforms are doing enough to protect the users. We just had a news story on Yahoo Finance today by Ethan Wolff-Mann, and he was talking about how hackers are selling verified Zoom accounts on the dark web. And there was also the news out over the weekend that New York City schools are no longer using Zoom-- that's one of your competitors-- in order to teach the kids from home. What measures are you taking in order to protect your users at this point?

VIK VERMA: Remember, we're an enterprise company. So we built security from the ground up right when we built out the entire platform. And we do a whole series of things-- I mean, the simplest ones, all our meeting names are randomized. And so there is a series of words strung together as opposed to numeric. We also basically publish an easy-to-use guide for teachers and everybody else to be able to generate password-protected meetings.

We also built our entire platform on an open source code that we sponsor called Gypsy, which has been used by thousands of developers all around the world for probably five, six, seven years. And so it's been really battle hardened with millions of downloads. And that's what governments use. That's what people in the operating system community use to really test it out. And open source is a great way to ensure that you can build very secure and private platforms.

And again, for us, customers for us range from governments to hospitals to schools. And so that's absolutely critical for us to ensure that we can ensure that they have the privacy and security that they need.

SIBILE MARCELLUS: And what are your thoughts on what Zoom's CEO has said, basically saying that he messed up, that he let users down-- how difficult is it to actually protect this data from hackers?

VIK VERMA: So I won't comment on Zoom. I mean, Eric's a good guy. My focus is on us. I mean, what we have tried to do right from the beginning-- we are a company that has been built over multiple years, and we've been built with a secure platform, and we have made a real point of ensuring that it's all part of an integrated platform from voice, video, contact center. And we, as I said, built our video conferencing on open source. And we built privacy and security in right from the very outset. And we'll have a couple of very interesting announcements on both privacy and security over the next few weeks. But again, our focus is on our customers.

SEANA SMITH: Just real quick, it's just interesting just in terms of the scope or the wide variety of users that you have on your platform, because I was reading that, obviously, you are doing the education part, helping employees work from home, but then also you're assisting the medical field as well.

VIK VERMA: Yeah, we are doing telemedicine. That's been a huge example that we have done. We have done it for one particular-- Every Child of Pediatrics, which is for underprivileged kids. They provide medical care. And so, obviously, hospital visits stopped. And they are using our X-series platform to be able to see patients remotely, do quick diagnosis, health checks, nutrition, et cetera remotely. And only in the most important cases do they bring somebody in for a visit.

We stood up an entire school platform where 30% of the registered teachers in Italy are using a platform based on our technology, which is being used to provide literally between 5,000 and 10,000 classes a day for hundreds of thousands of students. And that was literally done over the course of a week or so. So I like to think-- this is where I'm so proud of our employees. They have all stood up.

We built a platform which enables remote work, remote call centers, remote video conferencing. And they've stood up to take care of their customers at a time when our customers need us the most.

SEANA SMITH: Vik Verma, CEO of 8x8, thanks so much for taking the time to join us this afternoon.

VIK VERMA: It is absolutely my pleasure. Thank you.