In a rare YouTube video, Larry Ellison raves that Zoom has changed how Oracle - and all businesses, everywhere - will work forever

YouTube/Oracle

Oracle founder, chairman and CTO Larry Ellison on YouTube

• Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison made a rare YouTube video appearance this week when he posted a short message praising videoconferencing service Zoom.
• In the 50-second video, Ellison calls Zoom an "essential service" that has forever changed the way work will be done in the US as well as for Oracle's 136,000 employees worldwide.
• Oracle hasn't publicly admitted it yet, but Zoom has been using Oracle's cloud to help it meet its astronomical rise in demand, with Oracle cutting it a pricing deal so it could affordably do so.
• Ellison's vote of confidence comes at a time when Zoom has faced increased scrutiny about security issues.
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Oracle founder and chairman Larry Ellison made a rare YouTube video appearance this week when he posted a short message praising videoconferencing service Zoom.

In little over a month, Zoom has entered the national consciousness alongside internet giants like Google, Facebook, Amazon, to become a household name for everyone from pre-schoolers to retirees.

In the 50-second video, Ellison calls Zoom an "essential service" that has forever changed the way work will be done in the US, as well as for Oracle's 136,000 employees worldwide.

"Zoom has now become an essential service that allowed us to continue doing engineering, continue to do customer support, continue to do sales even though we're still working at home," Ellison said. "We're looking forward to the economy being reopened, we're looking forward to going back to work-but the way we work will never again be the same."

This wasn't part of a bigger, longer company-wide address. It was simply a quick message to cheer on the troops and tell everyone how impressed he was with the video service, and how they can expect Zoom meetings to continue.

"We will now meet not just face-to-face: We'll meet sometimes face-to-face and sometimes digitally via Zoom," he said. "Zoom has become an essential service for Oracle, for companies in the United States, and for companies around the world. It's allowed the economy to continue to function even though we're facing a COVID-19 pandemic."

To call this a highly unusual endorsement from Ellison is an understatement. He has never before jumped onto YouTube like this, much less to praise a product that isn't even of Oracle's creation.

So what might be going on here? He is clearly impressed with Zoom as a user, but the video service has also quietly become the marquee Oracle cloud customer of Larry Ellison's dreams.

When the pandemic hit and Zoom usage took off, the company needed to buy more cloud bandwidth immediately to meet the massive increase in demand. Without more cloud, Zoom's services would have crumbled under the load and its hoard of users would have looked elsewhere.

But because many of those new users are taking advantage of Zoom's free service instead of its paid product, the company's meteoric rise in usage could have spelled financial doom, unless cloud vendors offered affordable terms.

Zoom turned to the 800-pound gorilla, Amazon Web Services, but also Oracle's cloud, both of which proactively gave the company a discount, Zoom CEO Eric Yuan told Business Insider's Paayal Zaveri.

Yuan said that Andy Jassy, CEO of AWS, as well as Oracle's CEO Safra Catz and Larry Ellison told him that they would support Zoom "because you are supporting the economy."

Ellison never mentions that Zoom is a customer in his YouTube video and we'll see how and if he begins to talk about it. To his credit, he is not using this crisis to boast about how Oracle's cloud is saving the day.

But Oracle has been playing catch-up as a cloud player trying to grab a share in the shadows of Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. To be able to show that its cloud worked well for Zoom during the company's - and the world's - hour of need will be a mighty feather in its cap, when the time comes to publicly discuss it.

For now, the show of support from Ellison, one of the world's most powerful men in tech, is a nice salve for Zoom, too, which has faced barb after barb lately over its security and privacy issues.

Oracle has publicly jumped on the Zoom bandwagon in other, to-be-expected ways, such as integrating Zoom with its various tech, like its marketing software Eloqua and cloud identity security tech (which helps companies manage password).

Are you an Oracle insider with insight to share? Contact Julie Bort via email at jbort@businessinsider.com or on encrypted chat app Signal at (970) 430-6112 (no PR inquiries, please). Open DMs on Twitter @Julie188.

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