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No China origin, will invest and hire more in India: Zoom

New Delhi, July 6 (IANS) Facing social media onslaught over it being a Chinese company, US-based video meet platform Zoom on Monday that they are clear about its identity and plan to significantly invest and hire local talent in the country over the next five years.

Velchamy Sankarlingam who is President of Engineering and Products at Zoom said India is and will continue to be an important market for Zoom.

“We do recognize that as we continue to introduce ourselves to the Indian market, there has been some confusion about the facts as it relates to Zoom. We want to work through these,” said Sankarlingam who joined Zoom in May from enterprise softare major VMware.

He said that some of the misconceptions are disheartening, especially those about Zoom and China.

“Zoom has been clear about its identity: Zoom is a US company, publicly traded on the NASDAQ, founded and headquartered in San Jose, California. And like many global technology companies, Zoom has offices in China operated by subsidiaries of the US parent company,” emphasized Sankarlingam who spent more than nine years at VMware.

The popular video conferencing platform Zoom was left stunned last month after the Indian intelligence agencies red-flagged it along with Chinese apps over safety and privacy issues of users.

Later, when the Indian government banned 59 Chinese apps over national security concerns, Zoom was also targeted on various social media platform for being Chinese.

According to Sankarlingam, they look forward to engaging with more stakeholders in India in the coming months to support key priorities such as Digital India, StartUp India, and Skills India, as well as introducing them to Zoom.

“We will expand our footprint and hiring more top talent in the region,” he added.

Zoom’s presence in India is represented on the ground by an office in Mumbai, as well as two data centres (one in Mumbai and the other in Hyderabad).

Three of Zoom’s top executives are of Indian descent: Aparna Bawa, Chief Operating Officer; Sunil Madan, Corporate Chief Information Officer; and Sankarlingam.

“These characteristics are why many global technology companies, including my former employer VMWare, choose to invest in India as a key regional operational hub, and we are looking to expand our service to as many of India’s 1.3 billion people as we can reach,” said Sankarlingam.

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Opening a new front in the civil rights campaign in the US, California has filed a case against technology company Cisco alleging discrimination against a Dalit employee. Amid the national protests against racial discrimination, the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing (DFEH) filed the case on Monday in a federal court in the Silicon Valley naming the company and two former managers as defendants seeking to bring caste discrimination under the umbrella of unlawful discrimination banned by civil rights legislation enacted in 1964 that does not specify caste. The landmark federal Civil Rights Law specifies only race, color, religion, sex and national origin. DFEH alleged that “managers at Cisco’s San Jose headquarters campus, which employs a predominantly South Asian workforce, harassed, discriminated, and retaliated against an engineer because he is Dalit Indian.” The court papers seen by IANS said that the Dalit employee’s team was made up entirely of “higher caste” Indians who came to the US as adults and “imported the discriminatory (caste) system’s practices into their team and Cisco’s workplace”. The Dalit employee and the manager who supervised him are both IIT graduates who attended it at the same time, the complaint said, without specifying the institution. In addition to Cisco, court documents list Sundar Iyer, a “distinguished engineer at Cisco,” and Ramana Kompella as defendants in the case. The person allegedly discriminated against is described as a principal engineer but is not named and is shown in court documents as “John Doe,” a pseudonym used in the US legal system to protect identities or when a person’s identity is not known. The complaint said that Iyer told others in the company that the person allegedly discriminated against was a member of the scheduled caste and when he confronted the supervisor and complained to the human resources the supervisor and complained to the human resources department, a series of retaliation occurred. Full report on our website. Link in bio. #race #casteism #discrimination #color #cisco #california #dalitlivesmatter #dalit

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