Zoho Named Top-Tier Software Vendor by APPS RUN THE WORLD in the APPS TOP 500 Market Report

Zoho Strengths, Domain Expertise, and Key Differentiators

Zoho's strengths lie in its comprehensive suite of over 50 integrated applications, catering to various business functions such as CRM, finance, HR, and project management. Following its SMB successes, the vendor is moving upmarket.
Recently the vendor detailed its enterprise push by touting its successes in capturing the increased wallet shares of multinationals like poultry producer JBS, telecom heavyweight Telus and community leader Los Angeles Times.
By delivering functional-equivalent products at a lower price point, Zoho has made inroads into these big companies, displacing Asana, Atlassian, Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, ServiceNow and other rivals along the way. Executives at JBS cited a 96% saving when replacing ServiceNow with ManageEngine Service Desk for IT service delivery, on top of benefits like readily available documentation and world class implementation support that have culminated in an expanding relationship between the two entities for 15 years and running.
Its transparent pricing has also won over those that see similar savings ranging from 34% to 84% when choosing Zoho collaboration and project management tools over its closest competitors.
Ghalib Kassam, CIO of Los Angeles Times, said when replacing Salesforce with Zoho CRM, the only hurdle he had to overcome was to convince others at the newspaper to ditch the anachronistic belief that one would never get fired for buying IBM.
IFFCO, a UAE-based multinational with 15,000+ employees across 50 countries, transformed its travel and expense management with Zoho Expense. According to Jaroslaw Pietraszko, Group CIO, the company gained real-time insights thanks to Zoho Analytics, improved country-specific compliance, and reduced expense claim processing time from days to minutes.
That kind of support has translated into above-average growth for Zoho over the past few years. Zoho also outlined its expansion into key verticals such as dealer management systems for auto retailers and loan origination system for financial institutions.
Telus, the $16-billion telco in Canada, is running a suite of Zoho collaboration and CRM apps for its dealer network and company-owned stores, along with OEM partnerships with Zoho to drive cloud telephony through its business and consumer accounts.
Recently, Zoho also announced the US edition of Zoho Payroll, aiming to solidify its presence in the HR and back-office applications markets, after experiencing increased momentum with its advanced analytics and upgraded ERP tools like expense management.
If all these developments sound familiar, one looks further than Microsoft when its co-founder Bill Gates gave up his CEO position to become chief software architect in 2000 after building Windows into a ubiquitous platform for enterprise productivity, collaboration and ultimately knowledge workers on a global scale.
The parallel between Zoho and Microsoft is unmistakable given the all encompassing product strategies of the two and there really aren’t many software vendors that endeavor to offer everything that these two providers are capable of delivering all under the same roof – from Cloud infrastructure to enterprise apps and from storage to IT management, a distinction that has often been made by Zoho executives.

Zoho Recent Developments

In 2025 Zoho announced its own Zia LLM for large language modeling of AI solutions, coupled with the release of more than 25 ready to deploy AI agents, proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition models for speech-to-text conversion for English and Hindi, along with Model Context Protocol for the latest advances in integration and data extraction from third party apps.
Demonstrating impressive benchmarking data against competing approaches, Chief Evangelist Raju Vegesna said Zoho is laying the groundwork for a B2B AI journey that is shaping out to be long and arduous but rewarding, likening it to a marathon.
The announcements come on the heels of its latest branding campaign - To Build Anything That Truly Lasts, It Takes Time – as Zoho zeroes in on the concept of kaizen before perfection can be reached.
Zoho is now making available at no extra costs a slew of AI-enabled features from zero-touch reporting building to automatic content building WorkDrive that helps improve business processes for customer support and company-wide collaboration.
Additionally, Zoho is strengthening its hardware footprint through recent acquisitions, especially in strategic verticals like healthcare, manufacturing and energy, positioning itself as the solution play for a large swath of organizations from small businesses to multinationals.
In its latest AI update, Zoho unveiled Zia Hubs to boost Zoho WorkDrive by running the task of content management on autopilot, organizing and cross-referencing different formats and delivering them to users according to their prompts at a moment’s notice. Then it directs the relevant content in the right context to different projects and teams using Zoho Flow, even taking advantage of third-party apps such as DocuSign PDF, RingCentral call logs, and Zoom video files by placing them in Zia Hubs for attributable sourcing, inclusion and adaptation.

Zoho Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) Activities

Zoho Corporation has historically favored organic growth over mergers and acquisitions, focusing on in-house development and innovation. This approach has allowed the company to maintain control over its product ecosystem and ensure seamless integration across its suite of applications. While specific M&A activities have not been prominent in recent years, Zoho continues to expand its global footprint and product offerings through internal initiatives and strategic partnerships.
Recent acquisitions included Asimov Robotics for Health inspection and service robotics, Boson Motors for autonomous e-vehicles, Energy24by7 for Solar tech, Genrobotics for medical and healthcare robotics, Netrasemi for Fabless semi-conductor, and vTitan for Healthcare tech.

Zoho Customers in ARTW Customer Database

Leveraging a rigorous data-centric research methodology, APPS RUN THE WORLD asks the simple question: Who’s buying Zoho applications and why? And we provide the answers – supported by decades of research – to our clients around the world. Our Customer database has over 100 data fields that detail company usage of Zoho and other enterprise apps by function, customer size, industry, location, implementation status, partner involvement, Line of Business Key Stakeholders and IT decision makers contact details. List of Verified Zoho One, Zoho CRM, customers.

Zoho Key Enterprise and Cloud Applications

Zoho One, Zoho CRM,

Zoho Revenues, $M:

Zoho Revenue Breakdown By Type, $M:

Zoho Enterprise Applications Revenues By Functional Markets, $M:

Zoho Enterprise Applications Revenues By Verticals, $M:

Zoho Revenues By Region, $M

Zoho Direct vs Indirect sales

Zoho Customers - Breakdown by Geo, Size, Vertical and Product

List of Verified Zoho Customers

No. of Zoho Customers: 900000

No. of Zoho Enterprise Applications Customers: 900000

No. of Zoho Cloud Customers: 900000

No. of Zoho Cloud Subscribers: 1.5 million users

Zoho has more than 900,000 customers worldwide and recently its subscriber base has exceeded 120 million. Its customer base ranges from small businesses to large enterprises, with a significant presence in sectors such as construction, healthcare, manufacturing, and aviation. The company's emphasis on localized services and support has enabled it to cater effectively to regional markets, fostering strong customer relationships and loyalty.

Zoho Market Opportunities, M&A and Geo Expansions

The multi-pronged approach to expand Zoho starts with its core competency in delivering affordable and simple to use tools for small and midmarket customers. Zoho is designed to solve their customer-facing, back-office and IT service management requirements all running on the Zoho platform without the involvement of extraneous infrastructure and hands-on privacy and compliance stipulatons espoused by other tier-one technology providers.
The company has developed a range of applications, including Zoho One, an integrated suite of business applications, and Qntrl (formerly Orchestly), a workflow orchestration platform that enables businesses to design, automate, and analyze their processes. With a user base exceeding 120 million globally, Zoho continues to focus on innovation and customer-centric solutions. The company's expansion into new markets including its push into the upmarket and strategic verticals like car dealerships position it as a long-term player that favors consistent and persistent delivery of useful products at a reasonable price point.

Zoho Risks and Challenges

Challenges remain for Zoho as it goes upmarket and seeks to become more specialized in key verticals.
First its value-based approach will be coming up against a host of wall gardens being erected by incumbents like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP. As much as many enterprises are wanting to replace their legacy and outdated systems with Zoho for reduced IT spend and efficiency gain, some might balk at the last minute because of high switching costs.
Case in point is that regions where Zoho have scored above average growth over the past few years are typically those that are more price sensitive, whereas the hotly contested Europe and the US markets have fared less well for the vendor.
Second is the question whether Zoho is committed to broadening its vertical apps to cover complex tools like enterprise asset management, core banking, or even product lifecycle management and engineering applications that are not necessarily attributes that customers would associate with Zoho.
Still, Vijay Sundaram, chief strategy officer of Zoho, is philosophical about its prospects in crowded markets such as the US where he takes a long view in order to weather the polarized political climate punctuated by an increasingly protectionist stance in favor of indigenous suppliers of goods and services.

Zoho Ecosystem, Partners, Resellers and SI

Zoho has strategically expanded its global footprint through robust partnerships and infrastructure investments, reinforcing its commitment to delivering comprehensive business solutions.
Zoho's partner network has been instrumental in its global reach, comprising over 1,000 partners, with approximately 150 managing the majority of client implementations, particularly in regions where Zoho has limited direct presence.
Recently, Zoho has been investing heavily in its affiliate programs to attract affiliates, typically professional services companies not typically tied to a specific technology platform. One way to grow the affiliate program is through the Thrive program, which offers incentives such as points for tasks and reward customers based on their engagement or purchases. It also encourages customers to leave reviews, reward them for their input, and turn customer experiences into brand advocacy to build trust and loyalty. The VIP program features segmenting customers based on loyalty and engagement levels and offer tiered benefits to reward the most loyal customers with exclusive perks and incentives.

Research Methodology

Data used in research reports are derived from publicly available documents, continuous surveys of applications vendors, customers, resellers, Independent Software Vendors, systems integrators and other verifiable sources.

Vendor shares and market forecast results are based on a combination of existing databases as well as demand side and supply side research conducted throughout the year with validation from vendors, customers, channel partners and documentations such as earnings releases and 10Q and 10K filings, vertical industry studies, regional and country-level statistics from public and private institutions(i.e. colleges, universities, government agencies and trade associations).

For additional information on our methodologies, here's the link: