Video chat app Zoom has replaced Slack as the hot new business app
Last year it was Slack. This year it's Zoom.
Fresh off a $100 million financing at a $1 billion valuation, the video-conferencing company now the fastest-growing business application by one measurement.
That's according to a report released on Thursday by Okta, whose identity management software gives the company visibility into what customers, ranging from small business to large enterprises, are using internally.
In Okta's previous report from March 2016, chat service Slack was gaining the quickest traction. In the past six months, Zoom's use among Okta customers has jumped 67 percent. Slack, which is now valued privately at $3.8 billion, was third with 44 percent growth, just behind Cisco's Umbrella security platform at 47 percent.
Founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a former executive in Cisco's collaboration unit, Zoom announced this week that it raised $100 million in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital. The Silicon Valley start-up said it's used by over 450,000 companies and that its revenue grew more than 300% from 2015 to 2016.
Zoom is in a hotly-contested space that includes big tech companies like Microsoft (Skype), Google, Cisco and Citrix as well as start-ups Blue Jeans Network and Vidyo.
Yuan attributes his company's growth to making a simple, high-quality service that lets workers quickly launch video conferences from any device. The product has a basic free version for one-to-one conversations so anyone with a work e-mail address can access it.
"Legacy systems are very big and complicated to use," Yuan said on Thursday at an event at Okta's San Francisco headquarters.
Taking advantage of the recent trend in voice controls and machine learning, Yuan said Zoom also just rolled out voice-activation, so an employee can walk into a room and just say, "Hey Zoom, start a meeting."