In short: Terranova's contrarian software pick, in a two-name aside with AppLovin: "Zoom Communications — take a look at that. That stock reported; because of positioning, a little bit of a pullback. Take the other side. You want to be long there because of the Anthropic relationship."
Zoom's shares slipped after its last results, and Terranova says that dip is about positioning — investors rotating out — rather than about the business, so he wants to take the other side and buy it.
His specific reason is Zoom's relationship with Anthropic, the AI lab behind Claude. The bet is that a company everyone had written off as a pandemic leftover becomes a distribution channel for AI features inside meetings and workflows, which would restore a growth story to a stock priced as if it had none.
In short: Enterprise momentum returns — on a business still growing 5%. Q2 revenue +5% Y/Y to $1.28B ($10M beat) with non-GAAP EPS of $1.55 ($0.07 beat). Enterprise revenue accelerated to 8% growth, its fastest pace in three years, and is now 62% of total revenue; Online grew just 1% with monthly churn roughly steady at 2.9%. AI is driving the enterprise expansion: licensed monthly active users of AI features +125% Y/Y, Zoom Virtual Agent customers +256%, the Customer Experience suite growing at a high-double-digit rate with AI included in 9 of Zoom's 10 largest CX deals, and Zoom Phone taking share — "all 10 of its largest deals involved competitive replacements." Beyond meetings: Workvivo crossed $100M in ARR and the Common Room acquisition adds buyer intelligence to Zoom Revenue Accelerator, with the goal "to connect collaboration, customer service, sales, and employee experience through a common AI layer." FY27 revenue guidance raised $23M to $5.090B at the midpoint and adjusted EPS from ~$5.98 to ~$6.10; "Q3 guidance was less exciting, with revenue roughly in line with consensus and EPS slightly below." Bottom Line: "But Zoom is still a roughly 5% grower overall. The next step is proving that these newer AI and CX products can become large enough to meaningfully accelerate the top line." A disclosed author holding.
Zoom is trying to stop being a video-meeting company. The meetings business is mature and its consumer half barely grows, so the strategy is to sell adjacent products to the same customers: a phone system, a customer-service suite, an employee-communications app, and AI features layered across all of them.
This quarter gave the best evidence yet that it is working, at least at the enterprise end. Business revenue grew 8% — its fastest in three years — and is now 62% of the company. The AI usage numbers are large: customers using AI features more than doubled, and customers of the Virtual Agent (an AI that handles support conversations without a human) grew more than three and a half times. AI was involved in nine of the ten biggest customer-experience deals, and every one of the ten largest phone deals was won by displacing a competitor, which is the cleanest form of proof that the product is good — someone chose to leave a working system.
The problem is arithmetic. All of that sits on top of a company growing 5% overall, because the consumer half grows 1% and the base is large. Even Workvivo crossing $100 million of recurring revenue — a genuine milestone — is about 2% of Zoom's revenue. The full-year forecast rose by $23 million on a $5.09 billion base, and the next quarter's guidance was unremarkable.
So the view is neutral: the direction is right and the evidence is real, but the new products have to become several times larger before the headline growth rate changes. The author owns it. Analysis, not a recommendation.
In short: Host-supplied example from Oakley's own newsletter of the round-trip pattern — "Zoom rose 700% between December 2019 and October 2020 and then surrendered that entire gain by December of 2022." Context for the semiconductor warning, not a view on the stock.
8:00You pointed out how Zoom rose 700% between December 2019 and October 2020 and then surrendered that entire gain by December of 2022. DocuSign went from $44 in 2019 to $36 in 2021 and then also gave all that back practically. Peloton that was a big one rising from $24 to 158 before collapsing.
In short: Terranova's second software exception: "I trust the move in Zoom Communications, which has the relationship with Anthropic" — a name whose rally he attributes to a concrete AI partnership rather than a short squeeze.
Zoom is the video-meeting company. Joe Terranova names it as one of only two parts of the software rally he trusts, specifically because of "the relationship with Anthropic" — a concrete AI partnership rather than a rally driven by traders covering bets against the stock. In other words: he wants a named reason for the move, not just a bounce off oversold levels.
In short: Bryn's blunt enterprise-loser call: "Zoom should not exist as a publicly traded company with a $28 billion market cap because there's Teams" — even mediocre Teams is bundled into Microsoft's install base.
Zoom is video-conferencing software. Bryn Talkington's blunt verdict: "Zoom should not exist as a publicly traded company" at its ~$28 billion value, because Microsoft Teams — even though she calls it "mediocre" — comes bundled free inside Microsoft's software that companies already pay for. When a good-enough competitor is included at no extra cost with a product everyone already has, the standalone version struggles to justify itself.
She uses Zoom as her clearest example of an "enterprise loser" in the AI/software shakeout — the kind of name whose niche gets absorbed by a bigger platform.
In short: "In a very difficult spot" — "so much bundling risk" from Microsoft Teams and similar offerings.
Zoom is video conferencing, and Carlson sees it "in a very difficult spot" for the same reason as DocuSign: bundling. Microsoft Teams and similar tools come included with software companies already buy, so Zoom's core feature is increasingly something rivals give away as part of a larger package.
That commoditization risk is why it's in his "avoid" column — the product may survive, but investors may keep assigning it a low multiple.
19:30What they do is not technically difficult anymore. A lot of smaller businesses can create the same thing and bundle it into their products. And I think that's a real concern for DocuSign. We also have the same thing with Zoom. I just see that Zoom is in a very difficult spot. There's so much bundling risk with it with Microsoft Teams and all these different companies that offer very similar features.
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