Zoom became a marquee cloud customer for Oracle when the duo paired up last April, with the deal signaling a big win for the firm, which has lagged behind its cloud rivals.
Oracle cofounder and executive chairman Larry Ellison admits, however, that there have been some stumbles along the way.
When Oracle first started working with Zoom, it was good at "responding quickly to give capacity" as usage of the video service skyrocketed because of the pandemic, Ellison said at Oracle CFO Live, a virtual event for CFOs on Tuesday.
But as time went on, Oracle ultimately didn't anticipate just how significant the "incredible upward spike" and "hyper-growth" would be, and it wasn't able to completely meet that additional capacity, he said.
"We got part of it right, but it was so extreme," Ellison said at the event, that Oracle was unable to meet the capacity demands.
Oracle detected the capacity issues quickly though, he said, and so projected early on it would not be able to meet the demands.
"That was just a complete change in demand in our business," Ellison said. "We never thought it would go as high as it really did."
Within the span of two months, Oracle reworked its supply chain, he said, allowing it to deliver additional capacity and remedy the situation for both Zoom and its other customers. Oracle has been able to respond to hypergrowth since then, he added.
In addition to Oracle, Zoom also uses cloud services from Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, as well as its own data centers. In November, AWS — which has worked with Zoom since 2011 — announced that it was Zoom's preferred cloud provider.
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