Growth Driver: Zoom Rooms

Zoom (ZM 0.15%) has come so far into the public consciousness during the pandemic, but how well it can grow in the future remains a question.

In this Backstage Pass video, which aired Sept. 28, 2021, Motley Fool contributor Brian Withers explains how Zoom Rooms can help drive that post-pandemic growth.

Brian Withers:The piece that I'm going to talk about is Zoom Rooms. This is something that I'm really excited about the future of Zoom.

I bought Zoom stock back in April when it was 326 and now I looked today it was like 260 something. [laughs] You can get it at a better price today. I've been saying the same thing since April that this is a company with a long runway.

I think the Zoom Rooms piece you'll be able to see why it's not just a coronavirus play.

When we get back to the office, think about all the different places that Zoom could play a role.

Emergency response. What about a virtual receptionist? Having a receptionist for multiple different entry locations? This has always been a problem where there's multiple entrances to a building and security can only monitor one and if they do even have a little thing there, it's one of these crackly speakers that doesn't [laughs] really work really well. You got phones here, you got room schedulers. You have certainly updating conference rooms to allow them to be used as a Zoom enhanced room. You see these little units where you can set one-person. That's cool. There's a number of different ways that Zoom Rooms can be used throughout the business once people get back to work.

I love the quote, there's a quote by Kelly Steckelberg. The analysts were pressing management on, "Well, how many rooms are out there? How many customers do you have that have rooms? How many are they telling you about?" She said, "When people go back into the office, every room, unless it's a storage room, [laughs] is going to be video-enabled."

You can see some of the cool little functions that they've released. Kiosk mode or counting people in the room, Zoom for Home. I'll talk a bit about Smart Gallery because this is the one of the coolest features. Again, they are relying on.

They're not doing the hardware. You can buy whatever off-the-shelf hardware. This makes the room setup inexpensive and it makes it so that you can do it over time. You don't have to like buy it all at once and proprietary Zoom's stuff. You can do this over time. I think this is going to have a long runway, a long tail.

Here's some of the announcements, whether it's reserving rooms, checking in, signing out. Again, this is looking at all the different places, all these green dots or Zoom enabled. These conference rooms are certainly opportunities for Zoom Rooms as well as the entryway, things like that. Throughout the building, you are going to have Zoom capability.

Here's an example meeting where this lady is calling in from home, where these four people are in the office. What Zoom is able to do is to create this conference room, take these people in this conference room and set them in their own window. It recognizes their shape and gives them each equal footing in the meeting. They mentioned this equity and inclusion thing. If you've ever been part of a remote meeting when everybody was in the office before, it stunk, it was terrible.

Now, everybody has been remote, so they get it. Having something like this, here's another example. You can see that Zoom takes a picture of these people and lumps them up in the Zoom configuration here that we're all used to. A number of different, they talked about the whiteboarding. We talked about whiteboarding earlier. There's also this Oculus integration with Oculus. You can have a more virtual metaverse feel to it.