Zoom Expands Collaboration Reach with Workvivo Buy, Oracle Releases Grow, More News
That Zoom had ambitions in the digital workplace beyond video communications has become increasingly clear over the last few years. Even before the inevitable decline in video meetings following return to office mandates, Zoom had started broadening its offerings.
This week the company announced plans to buy Workvivo. The Cork, Ireland-based company develops what it describes as an employee communication platform, but it goes beyond simple communications by connecting internal teams and, in doing so, increasing employee engagement. The offering clearly resonated in the market as the company has raised $37.5 million since its founding in 2017.
While the statement from Zoom did not disclose how much the deal — expected to close in Q1 2024 — is worth, there are two notable points in the statement.
Firstly, according to Zoom, Workvivo has seen triple-digit growth in the past three years, a period of time that corresponds with the arc of the pandemic. It also has an impressive customer base including the likes of Liberty Mutual, Ryanair and even Madison Square Garden.
The other notable point comes from a McKinsey stat cited in the statement: 70% of US employees are frontline workers and are not necessarily attached to a physical workplace. These workers help drive the success of all organizations so it is important that they remain engaged.
Zoom already offers communications via external and internal channels. Workvivo, on the other hand, offers asynchronous communications and is less project- and team-focused than Zoom. It enables easy communication across the entire work network and does not require immediate responses from teammates to function.
Zoom founder and CEO Eric Yung acted as an angel investor in Workvivo back in 2019. At the time, Yung called Workvivio and Zoom a perfect match. "[The] Irish firm’s culture, values and technology [are] a perfect fit for his vision of employee communication, engagement and satisfaction,” he said in a statement at the time.
As to why Zoom took the plunge now, Yung explained that the remodeling of the workplace is forcing company leaders to rethink their strategies: "Leaders need to think differently to retain talent and maintain company culture. Today’s workforce is hybrid and distributed — with people working from home, in an office, at a remote location, on the frontlines ...,” he said in the statement about the deal.
He also offered some small insight into where he sees Zoom going with this. "With this acquisition, Zoom continues its evolution to provide the best end-to-end collaboration platform focused on enabling modern work and powering the digital-first workplace,” the statement reads.
The intent is clear. Yung sees Zoom not as a mere communications platform, but as a one-stop shop for enterprise collaboration. Workvivo brings engagement for workers located anywhere, be it the physical workplace, remote workplace or a combination of the two.
Zoom, Oracle Deepen Partnership
Before leaving Zoom, the company also announced this week it is deepening its partnership with Austin, Texas-based Oracle. The renewed partnership is designed to meet a very specific need, notably to provide easier, faster and more effective telehealth services through Oracle Cerner Millennium.
Oracle acquired Cerner on June 8, 2022. Cerner provides digital information systems used within hospitals and health systems to enable medical professionals to deliver healthcare to patients and communities. Millennium for its part, supports an enterprise-wide view of clinical information to coordinate patient care and document the point at which it was delivered in both acute inpatient and outpatient settings.
According to a statement from the two companies, by connecting the two platforms, health providers will be able to build better workflows for physicians as well as a way of recording all the details and content related to a given health visit.
Zoom already has a notable presence in the healthcare space through its Zoom for Healthcare offering, which makes it possible to communicate across the entire care continuum and offers a space where patients can meet with healthcare providers.
Both vendors are compliant with HIPAA, PIPEDA/PHIPA, GDPR, Mars-E and other data privacy programs to ensure that patient data remains private.
Oracle Introduces Grow, Expanding Its Oracle ME Offerings
However, for the digital workplace the big release from Oracle this week is the upgrades to its Oracle ME, the employee experience platform within Oracle Fusion Cloud Human Capital Management (HCM).
As might be expected in the current climate, the focus of these updates is AI and the release of Oracle Grow. Grow is an AI-based platform that provides workers with suggestions of skills to develop to keep their career on track as well as offering ways to build the new skills and insights into what those skills might do for them.
Given Oracle’s substantial investment and development in human capital software, it is unsurprising to see Oracle pull many of its existing elements together under the Grow name so they can be accessed through a single interface.
The result is that, using AI, workers are offered personalized insights into their career built on data coming from the intersection of Oracle Learning, Oracle Dynamic Skills and Oracle Talent.
Skills development is one of the most important elements in boosting employee engagement, so the benefits of this addition are obvious.
Benjamin Granger, chief workplace psychologist at Qualtrics wrote in a recent Reworked article that employees who feel positively about growth and development opportunities are more likely to report a stronger sense of wellbeing and inclusion and are less likely to report signs of burnout.
A long list of other studies show the same, too. Oracle Grow addresses this by offering:
- Unified Growth Experience: Offers insights into and AI-driven development opportunities to help users grow and develop.
- Career Paths: Offers insights into different career paths and possible opportunities.
- Personalized Development Playlists: Enables workers to manage their own development.
- Curation: Helps workers curate their own development journey that is tailored to their goals and aspirations.
- Enhanced Team Skills Center: Enables managers to indicate what skills are most needed and where they are needed.
- Skill sets: Enables leaders and managers to assign specific skills needed to achieve business objectives to their teams and organization, and automatically add them to every employee’s Oracle Grow experience.
- Personalized Development Preferences: Enables workers to choose what skills they want to develop.
Learning and development technology is a red-hot market at the moment as companies looking to retain and upskill staff.
Learning Opportunities
Last September, for example, Workday released a new solution on its Skills cloud that would make skills data interoperable, allowing companies to bring skills data in and out of Workday to inform learning and development strategy and better identify where gaps exist.
Clearly, it is not the same as Oracle’s Grow but it feeds into the same organizational need, notably to ensure employee engagement and skill development.
Europe Considers Regulating Generative AI
As the push into generative AI continues, the Europe Union appears to be getting nervous about the rate of development and has announced the creation of a task force to look into the use of data by ChatGPT.
Even before this, two European countries had already announced they were taking action against it. Italy, for example, issued a temporary ban on the artificial intelligence program last month over allegations its data gathering broke privacy laws.
France’s privacy regulator (CNIL) for its part has also said that it has received five formal complaints, while Spain's data protection agency opened an inquiry into the ChatGPT software and its US owner.
In an open letter and published by Europe’s Chair of the Special Committee on AI, Dragoș Tudorache, the European lawmaker said that that with “the rapid evolution of powerful AI, we see the need for significant political attention."
He added: "Our actions and decisions can guide us into the world full of AI potentials, whereas inaction can widen the gap between the development of AI and our ability to steer it, leaving the door open for more challenging future scenarios," the letter reads.
After Italy's order to halt ChatGPT, OpenAI has said it is "committed to protecting people's privacy" and believes its tool complied with the law.
This comes after Elon Musk, an original founder of OpenAI, and more than 1,000 experts in the AI field called for a six-month pause in the development of advanced systems.
Intranet Provider Interact Buys Sideways 6
Finally this week, enterprise-grade intranet provider Interact has announced it is buying London-based Sideways 6, which develops an idea management and crowdsourcing platform.
According to a statement from the companies, Sideways 6 will bring the ability to gauge employee sentiment to Interact, allowing managers to pinpoint actions to improve engagement.
Employee engagement has become increasingly important since the end of the pandemic. Gallup research published in January found that since the disruption that came with the pandemic, employee engagement is key to retaining employees. "In times of uncertainty … high engagement boosts retention,” the report reads. “Employees who are actively engaged are less likely to be actively looking or open to a new job opportunity. In fact, low engagement teams typically endure turnover rates that are 18% to 43% higher than highly engaged teams.”
Given the difficulty finding skilled workers, the value of ensuring positive employee engagement cannot be overestimated.
Sideways 6 integrates with platforms like Teams, Slack and Google Workplace so employees can:
- Share their ideas.
- Turn the best ideas into positive actions.
Interact Software was founded in New York City in 1996, while Sideways 6 was founded in 2014. Financial details of the deal were not released.
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About the Author
David is a European-based journalist of 35 years who has spent the last 15 following the development of workplace technologies, from the early days of document management, enterprise content management and content services. Now, with the development of new remote and hybrid work models, he covers the evolution of technologies that enable collaboration, communications and work and has recently spent a great deal of time exploring the far reaches of AI, generative AI and General AI.
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