It has been more than a year now since the world started working remotely. Online video conferencing services such as those offered by Zoom Video Communications (Nasdaq: ZM) have helped organizations and educational institutions globally manage these unprecedented working conditions. Zoom recently announced its quarterly results that continued to outpace market expectations.

Zoom’s Financials

Revenues for the fourth quarter grew 369% to $882.5 million, shattering the market’s forecast of $810.56 million. Excluding items, Zoom reported an EPS of $1.22, again beating analysts’ estimate of $0.79.

Among key metrics, Zoom now has more than 467,100 customers with over 10 employees, a growth of 470% over the year. Customers contributing over $100,000 in trailing twelve-month revenues grew 156% to 1,644.

For the fiscal year, Zoom reported revenues of $2.7 billion, growing 326% and an EPS of $3.34.

It forecast revenues of $900-$905 million for the first quarter of FY22 with an EPS of $0.95-$0.97. It expects to end the fiscal year 2022 with revenues of $3.76-$3.78 billion and an EPS of $3.59-$3.65. The market was looking for revenues of $904.12 million and an EPS of $0.98 for the Q122 and revenues of $3.83 billion and an EPS of $3.72 for FY22.

Zoom’s Growth Focus

Zoom recently released a new set of software-hardware integrations to launch Zoom Rooms. Zoom Rooms will help organizations safely transition back to the office while allowing them to maintain a remote working capability. Many organizations adopted a virtual working environment in response to the pandemic. But after more than a year of working remotely, some organizations and employees are wanting to make this a permanent routine. Zoom Rooms will allow the organizations to remain connected with their employees, irrespective of where they work out of. Some of the features included are dashboards of real-time people count data and a contactless virtual receptionist mode to help facilitate the transition to hybrid work.

Zoom is also seeing strong traction for Zoom Phone. Earlier last month, it announced that it had sold one million Zoom Phone seats in less than two years of its launch. Zoom Phone is a core product within Zoom’s unified communications platform that already includes Zoom Meetings, Zoom Chat, Zoom Rooms, and Zoom Video Webinars. Zoom Phone offers enterprise-grade features such as centralized management, contact center integration, and global call routing, rolled into a single offering that provides improved user experience with a simplified pricing for straightforward global implementation.

Zoom’s Developer Ecosystem

Meanwhile, Zoom continues to upgrade its platform to make it simpler for developers. It recently released a new SDK to enable developers to build their own video-based applications and websites on top of Zoom’s platform. It will make it simpler for developers to incorporate Zoom’s video and audio features directly into their apps. Zoom wants developers to begin to utilize Zoom’s chat functions in different settings ranging from social media and gaming platforms to virtual retail apps. It wants to get developers to drive customer engagement and provide new opportunities for revenue without being tied to the Zoom Meetings user interface. For instance, a recent use case is that of Lingmo, a cloud-based AI translation software provider that leverages Zoom’s Video SDK to provide instant translated captions for meetings.

Zoom’s developer toolkit currently includes APIs, SDKs, Chatbots, Webhooks, and distribution for applications and integrations. The latest release also includes detailed performance analytics that provide developers with insights into the performance and usage of their applications on the Zoom App Marketplace. Developers can analyze user and account level subscription counts, active user and active account metrics, API usage volumes. Over the coming months, Zoom plans to release even more updates to improve the application and integration capabilities.

Over the past few months now, I have been talking to and covering many of the PaaS players, their PaaS vision, and strategies. While companies do talk about their developer tools and communities, they appear to shy away from sharing associated detailed metrics. I think Zoom, and others like it, should share details to help make a more meaningful analysis of the cloud potential. Read more about the critical metrics needed for this assessment here: Cloud Stocks and PaaS: Reporting Developer Ecosystem Metrics.

Its stock is currently trading at $319.95 with a market capitalization of $93.97 billion. It was trading at a 52-week low of $108.53 in April last year. It had soared to a record high of $588.84 in October last year.