The American service Zoom began to disable access to paid accounts for Russian universities. This is reported by Vedomosti with reference to interlocutors among the developers of video conferencing services and to a source in a domestic integrator.
According to the interlocutor, the developer was approached by a large university, to which Zoom turned off the license paid until November. The name of the university is not disclosed, but, according to the public procurement portal, among large educational organizations, only the Russian State University of Justice for its branch in Kazan signed a contract to use the service until the end of November. Another interlocutor said that the service also denied service to the Russian State Social University and the Orenburg State Medical University. Students use Zoom to participate in research conferences and community meetings.
Different tariffs allow universities to simultaneously connect up to 300 or up to 1000 users to video conferences, manage memory storage and hold online events lasting up to 24 hours.
Renat Lashin, Executive Director of the Domestic Software Association of Software Developers, recalled that one of the Russian distributors has already been banned from selling licenses for the public sector. According to him, now universities are afraid to switch to new domestic services, although the country has enough of its video conferencing solutions. Lashin believes that today the competition between Russian developers and technological classes of solutions comes to the fore. If Zoom leaves Russia, nothing bad will happen, the expert concluded.
The media previously reported that the American company Zoom Video Communications offered Russian government agencies to directly request the purchase of a paid license from the video conferencing service. Before that, it was reported that the company banned Russian distributors from selling the paid version to government agencies and legal entities with government funding. The company did not explain the reasons, but even then it was assumed that the restrictions would also affect universities.
Last year, Zoom Video Communications' Q2 revenue topped $1 billion for the first time. The service's Q2 2021 revenue increased 54%. The company's revenue quadrupled in 2020 due to the need to use video conferencing during the pandemic.
