Meet the Tamil Nadu-born techie who is helping Zoom connect the world

Velchamy Sankarlingam, who heads the firm's engineering and product dept, reports directly to CEO Eric S Yuan, who was his colleague at WebEx

Video telephony company Zoom has seen unprecedented demand for its platform as the world battles the Covid-19 health crisis. The California-based firm has responded quite well to this surge by providing continuous support to users including businesses and individuals. And one of the top executives of the company who is playing a key role in this mission to provide unparalleled experience to users is Velchamy Sankarlingam, a Tamil Nadu-born techie who now heads the company’s engineering and product function. 

As a president at Zoom Video Communications Inc., the owner of the popular video-conferencing app, Sankarlingam’s role is to oversee the company’s engineering, product, and dev ops teams. His role is crucial at a time when Zoom has scaled impressively to meet the demands placed on it by the global health crisis and is making a meaningful difference in the work and lives of all that use it. Eric S Yuan, the CEO of Zoom had recently said that given the scale at which Zoom operates and the importance of the communications happening on its platform, there is no time for delay and no room for error. 

Sankarlingam who joined the San Jose-based company this year reports directly to Yuan, who has known him for years. One of the most important factors in his decision to join Zoom, he says, was the opportunity to work with Yuan who was his colleague at WebEx. Yuan has also been quite open in admiring Sankarlingam’s “incredible ability to relate to people and his deep understanding and experience in building and implementing secure and scalable collaboration technology”.

Sankarlingam was born in India and grew up and studied in the town of Virudhunagar, Tamil Nadu. He also studied at Montford School, near Salem in Tamil Nadu. He now lives in the United States.

An alumnus of Anna University, Sankarlingam was responsible for all infrastructure at VMware, including building and operating one of the largest private clouds. He was also responsible for helping VMware transform to software-as-a-service and the development of all business applications at VMware. Before joining VMware, Sankarlingam was vice president of engineering and operations at Cisco where he was responsible for engineering and operations of Webex. Prior to that, he held vice president positions at Webex (acquired by Cisco) and Presenter.com (acquired by Webex). He was responsible for building technology teams at Webex and VMware. His role now includes building such teams at Zoom as well.

Sankarlingam also worked at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture), IBM, Network Computing Devices, and Standard Microsystems. He is also on the board of Bellus3D, a Silicon Valley startup that offers personalized 3D printable mask fitter frames to improve seals on face masks.

Zoom competes with the collaboration platforms of tech giants such as Microsoft, Google and Reliance’s JioMeet. It has a huge opportunity to help scale the business, including in the international market. One of those markets which is incredibly important both to Zoom and Sankarlingam is India. 

The company recently said that it will expand its presence in India by opening a new technology centre in Bengaluru. It would also hire key talent over the next few years. This commitment represents a growing strategic investment in the country. Zoom already has one office in Mumbai (expected to triple in size) and two data centres in Mumbai and Hyderabad. These data centres have grown capacity 3-4 times in the last few months. This growing presence is in direct response to Zoom’s increased level of adoption by users across India.

Sankarlingam says, Zoom sees great potential in the Indian business community as prospective customers. These range from large multinational brands with Indian operations and subsidiaries to micro, small and medium enterprises looking to expand, as well as home-grown start-ups. He also says that Zoom takes security and privacy incredibly seriously. The firm this year came up with a 90-day plan, where it released over 100 new features focused on privacy, safety and security. It also started building an end-to-end encryption offering for all users.

Video conferencing market size is set to exceed $50 billion by 2026, according to a report by Global Market Insights, Inc. With the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic and disruptions in large gatherings, demand for remote training is increasing, eventually driving the video conferencing market demand, said the report.

Several global enterprises including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Hitachi, and Amazon have made mandatory work-from-home policies to prevent the spread of coronavirus. The rapidly increasing cases of the virus has necessitated the demand for video conferencing software as business travel, educational institutes, conferences were cancelled globally, said the report by Global Market Insights.