Zoom hires Indian-origin Velchamy Sankarlingam as head of engineering

Zoom hires Indian-origin Velchamy Sankarlingam as head of engineering

At Zoom Inc, Sankarlingam will oversee the company's engineering, product, and development operation team. He will be directly reporting to Zoom CEO Eric S Yuan

Zoom has hired Velchamy Sankarlingam as President of Engineering and Product.

Zoom Video Communications, Inc has appointed Indian-origin Velchamy Sankarlingam as the new president of engineering and product. His appointment will be effective on June 12.

After working for more than 9 years in Sankarlingam VMware, a traded software company,  Sankarlingam has joined video chat app Zoom. At VMware, Sankarlingam was senior vice president, Cloud Services Development and Operations. And, before VMware, he was VP, engineering and technical operation at WebEx.

At Zoom Inc, Sankarlingam will oversee the company's engineering, product, and development operation team. He will be directly reporting to Zoom CEO Eric S Yuan.

According to the LinkedIn profile of Sankarlingam, he is experienced in hardware, software, and service industries in engineering and management areas. He also has an advanced degree in  Engineering and Management.

Sankarlingam did his BE in Electronics and Communication from Anna University. Thereafter, he finished his MS in Computer Science from Northern Illinois University from 1989-1990. He also did MS in Business and Policy from Stony Brook University between 1993 and 1995.

Recently, the Zoom app has faced a lot of backlash from many countries, including India for a range of privacy issues, including sending user data to Facebook, and wrongly claiming the app had end-to-end encryption.

However, the video conferencing app is still very popular. The use of Zoom has soared to 300 million daily meeting participants in April 2020 from 10 million back in December.  

Meanwhile, Zoom is attempting to improve its security measures ever since it vowed to fix its "biggest trust, safety and privacy" issues in April.  In its latest blog post, the company has urged its users to update the app and web client before May 30 as it enables Galois/Counter Mode (GCM) encryption for all the Zoom meetings.

GCM or Galois/Counter Mode encryption is an algorithm for authenticated encryption of data that assures the genuineness of the confidential data.

In a blog post, Zoom mentioned that "From May 30 GCM encryption will be fully enabled for all meetings". It added that all Zoom clients and Zoom Rooms should be on version 5.0 or higher of the app in order to join any meeting.

The support for enhanced GCM encryption was added with Zoom 5.0 in April and this will be implemented system-wide from May 30.