Zoho Corp. Acknowledged as a Key HR Software Provider by APPS RUN THE WORLD in the HCM Top 500 Market Report

Zoho Corp. Strengths, Domain Expertise, and Key Differentiators

The rapidly expanding vendor, Zoho, offers a diverse range of products, including Email Hosting, Document Management, Office Suite, Project Management, and various business applications such as accounting, CRM, HCM, campaign management, and customer support. At the heart of its offerings lies the Zoho platform, which provides infrastructure and platform services like compute, storage, search, business intelligence, messaging, and IT service management. Additionally, Zoho offers a plethora of developer tools, empowering customers to tailor their solutions to meet industry-specific requirements by integrating their business processes and workflows with Zoho applications. Customers attest to significant operational enhancements when utilizing Zoho One, which facilitates improved customer relationship management and employee productivity through seamless information sharing and collaboration.

In 2019, Zoho upped the ante by delivering telephony, identity, and single sign-on as well as provisioning and access management to Zoho One customers for free, raising the bar on how enterprise solutions should be scaled and delivered.

After years of blistering growth by securing hundreds of thousands of customers, Zoho is showing no signs of slowing down by adding 80,000 new accounts in 2018. Usability, aggressive pricing, and a laser focus on its versatile platform that supports all Zoho applications from the ground up are some of the key attributes of Zoho.

Despite such built-in features that are being added and enhanced continuously, Zoho has made its value proposition competitively priced with many accounts paying a few hundred dollars per user per year, much more palatable than what on-premise ERP products would call for.

Zoho Corp. Recent Developments

In February 2024, Zoho launched CPQ as an integrated public feature, offering customized quote management capabilities essential for effective sales management. Previously available as a public early access feature from March 2023 to January 2024, CPQ became widely accessible to streamline the quoting process and enhance sales efficiency for businesses all around the world.

In May 2022, Zoho launched Zoho Marketing Plus—the unified marketing platform for marketing teams. In March 2022, Zoho launched its newest version of the Zoho Creator Platform supporting every level needed for a complete low-code experience, including building, managing, integrating, and analyzing.

In October 2021, Zoho Corporation introduced new apps and services in Zoho One, the operating system for business. The new release empowers businesses to solve disjointed data challenges and close communications gaps across silos, so organizations can become more productive, adapt more quickly to changing business conditions, and become poised for growth.

In August 2021, Zoho Corporation announced Canvas for Zoho CRM, a one-of-a-kind design studio for CRM personalization. Canvas enables businesses to create their own CRM interfaces that are better suited to the role of each employee, without IT or developer involvement. It helps simplify complex CRM implementations into streamlined and contextual employee-facing experiences. With Canvas, Zoho's customer experience platform continues to focus on building a system of experiences that simplifies the experience economy for brands and every stakeholder. From planning and creating diverse customer experiences to delivering and evolving them for the future, Zoho CRM helps organizations of all sizes enable employee productivity, improve stakeholder collaboration, and increase customer success.

In May 2021, Zoho Corporation, put on the market a new version of its expense reporting software, Zoho Expense, that includes advanced capabilities to help mid-market businesses bring about efficiency in its T&E process, and control costs while recovering from the effects of COVID-19. With the new version of Zoho Expense, businesses can seamlessly manage their travel, gain more visibility and control of their company's global spend from a single place. The new version of Zoho Expense is specifically designed to provide complete visibility on all costs incurred by the company across offices. With a chat bar built into the system, teams can communicate in real-time during the T&E process. Zoho Expense also allows businesses to have the flexibility to quickly implement changes in their travel and expense policy with customizable approval workflows. This means that businesses can rest assured that their compliance obligations are fulfilled in the event of an audit.

In May 2020 Zoho unveiled Bigin, a new pipeline-centric CRM software designed specifically for small and micro business owners. Bigin by Zoho CRM offers a simple solution for millions of small businesses to keep track of their customers and improve customer relationships without having to worry about high costs or complicated features.

Bigin is a pipeline-centric CRM solution focused on small businesses that do not need an elaborate, end-to-end CRM. If businesses outgrow Bigin, they can upgrade to Zoho CRM with ease. Bigin is also an ideal fit for freelancers and individuals who want to manage their personal business pipelines online. Zoho CRM, on the other hand, is focused on growing businesses of all sizes, especially enterprises that are looking to utilize the larger CRM platform for their advanced business needs.

Some of Bigin's features in better and faster user onboarding, multiple pipelines for customer operations, Bigin's built-in telephony, which lets users choose from a range of popular telephony providers in the Zoho Phonebridge marketplace, better workflow automation, real-time notifications and analytics and fully mobile.

In 2019, Zoho bolstered its flagship product Zoho One, which is considered the operating system for modern enterprises. The fast-growing Cloud vendor is adding more value-added services such as telephony, identity, and single sign-on as well as provisioning and access management, enabling customers to consume more of its applications from CRM to search and from ERP to real-time collaboration. Some of its customers standardizing their operations on Zoho One now run an average of 18 applications – mostly CRM-specific modules for sales force automation, analytics, financial management, invoicing, and campaign management.

In 2019, Zoho also made developers focus on one of its top priorities by delivering an array of tools and infrastructure technologies for tens of thousands of developers around the world. These developers can optimize their Zoho implementations through Zoho Catalyst, a full-stack serverless platform for rapid rollout of microservices and applets designed to automate tasks like forms submission.

Zoho Corp. Customers in ARTW Customer Database

Leveraging a rigorous data-centric research methodology, APPS RUN THE WORLD asks the simple question: Who’s buying Zoho Corp. 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 Corp. 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 Corp. Key Cloud and HCM Applications

Zoho One, Zoho CRM,

Zoho Corp. HCM and Cloud HCM Applications Revenues, $M:

Zoho Corp. Revenue Breakdown by Type:

Zoho Corp. HCM Applications Revenues By Sub-Functional Markets, $M:

Zoho Corp. HCM Applications Revenues By Verticals, $M:

Zoho Corp. Total and HCM Applications Revenues by Region:

Zoho Corp. Direct vs Indirect sales

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

List of Verified Zoho Corp. Customers

No. of Zoho Corp. Customers: 750000

No. of Zoho Corp. HCM Applications Customers: 25000

No. of Zoho Corp. Cloud HCM Customers: 750000

No. of Zoho Corp. Cloud HCM Subscribers: 105 million

Zoho has more than 700,000 customers worldwide and recently its subscriber base has exceeded 100 million. Zoho announced that they have 300,000+ CRM customers, 25,000+ HCM customers and 500,000+ Collaboration customers.

Among their new customer wins in 2019 are, SpiceJet, Star Health and Allied Insurance, India Infoline Limited, UMA Ultimate Medical Academy, Sanmar, TVS Automobile Solutions, Browns Jewellers, Meril Life Sciences Pvt. Ltd, and Agappe.

Among Zoho customers are HP, Sony, Lenovo, Pixar, DHL, PayPal, IKEA, Alstom, BBC, APEX Digital, JetHub, Anderson Sales Advantage, ActionCoach, Milagro Advisory Group, Bharath Beedi Works, TECO Pneumatic, Natural Hero, Proteomics Consult, MicroLOGIX, Pepperstone Financial, ArcSource, Ondimar.com, T3 Direct Marketing, and others.

ManageEngine is used by customers worldwide. One of ManageEngine’s products WebNMS offers Network Management Framework with over 25,000 carrier deployments worldwide.

Zoho Corp. Market Opportunities, M&A and Geo Expansions

After gaining ground in SMB space, Zoho is moving upmarket with a slew of offerings for enterprise customers. Having amassed more than 100 million users, Zoho has loftier goals than just dominating many segments of the enterprise applications market. With operations all over the world, Zoho, the Chennai, India-based vendor is now training its sights on the strategically important US market by expanding in tier-two cities like McAllen, TX, after establishing offices in many parts of the country like Austin and San Francisco. Currently, Americas accounts for 47% of its more than $1 billion revenues with the US representing three-quarters of that.

In June 2021, Zoho has announced Bigin, its pipeline-centric CRM for small businesses, has surpassed 7500 customers in under a year while releasing new features including an industry-first mobile pipeline view. Bigin's new version also includes enhanced capabilities to help small businesses foster their customer relationships while recovering from the effects of COVID-19. Since Bigin's launch one year ago at the beginning of the pandemic, the product has reported a 40% average increase in total revenue every quarter with a total customer base of above 7500. Bigin has had an average of 32% increase in monthly new customer acquisitions since May of 2020. As Bigin continues to grow, there will be new enhancements later this year including advanced workflow automation, support for multiple global currencies, and simple process automation tailored for small businesses.

In May 2021, Zoho Corp. has extended its technology platform to government bodies, hospitals and NGOs in India providing Covid relief, in order to help them streamline and manage their operations more efficiently. The company has also set up a dedicated helpline and a team to assist those who want to utilise Zoho's platform to build a customised solution. As part of this initiative, Zoho has worked with a few NGOs as well as government departments, including Tamil Nadu State Covid War Room, to develop tech solutions for managing their relief work. The company has also urged other technology providers to offer their expertise in helping frontline workers.

In one of its biggest expansion moves, Zoho has built a 375-acre headquarters in Austin, Texas, which could create hundreds of new positions in development, sales, and support over the next few years. The plan to move its US headquarters to Austin from Pleasanton, CA, underscores Zoho’s increased commitment not just to the US market, but also the entire Americas region. Zoho has already invested heavily in Latin America including scores of new resources in Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. Customers in Latin America being surveyed by ARTW report easier access to quality information as they benefit from such intuitive collaborative tools.

Zoho has also made significant inroads into EMEA and its home base in Asia. The global expansion comes on the heels of the growing adoptions of Zoho One with thousands of new customers being added around the globe. Zoho has also made great strides with its AI strategy after embarking on dozens of projects from handwriting recognition to language predictor, and from trend detection to sentiment analysis. Another new area comes in the form of Orchestly, a low-code development framework that allows any employee in different lines of business – not IT power users or developers - to model business processes using workflows simply by point and clicks.

Raj Sahblok, president of Zoho, is now in charge of taking Zoho upmarket by hiring a team of solution consultants who can identify pain points and implementation challenges of large enterprises – mostly entities with hundreds or a few thousand employees and up to $1 billion in revenues. In 2019, Zoho has displaced Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP systems at midmarket organizations searching for a viable, simple to run and less costly alternative to these familiar brands.

In order to make its upmarket strategy successful, 2020 will be a turning point for Zoho to commit not just professional services and support resources, but also branding and distinctive ecosystem to nurture, capture and showcase lighthouse enterprise deals. Similar to Salesforce, Zoho has been positioning itself both as a platform and an application provider.

Zoho saw a 39% jump in enterprise applications revenues to reach $520 million in 2018, according to our estimates. About 45% of its product revenues come from a growing portfolio of CRM applications. It also sells BI, Collaboration, ERP, and IT Help Desk products.

Over the past five years, Zoho has been growing consistently at 30%+ annually both in terms of the number of registered users and paid customers. If its momentum continues, Zoho could be fetching more than $1 billion in product revenues over the next few years.

What works to Zoho’s advantage is its full-stack approach, something that has become increasingly foreign to Salesforce’s customers following its buying spree. Like death and taxes, some long-time Salesforce customers may have to endure the growing burden of adding Lightning, Einstein, Mulesoft, and now Tableau to a bloated platform that could entail skyrocketing subscription fees. Zoho One’s $30 per user per month pricing does appear more palatable to many. Still, nobody gets fired for choosing Salesforce. Thusly it’s incumbent upon Zoho to prove that it is a safe and smart choice.

Zoho Corp. Risks and Challenges

For Zoho, the next phase of growth depends on its ability to juggle multiple market components. Showcasing its technology prowess, Zoho has made its all-inclusive platform strategy the key selling point for its customers – eliminating any need for integration or inconsistent user experience. While this by no means is a proprietary or customer lock-in strategy, open integration to other tools from Salesforce to Intuit QuickBooks may be needed for Zoho to broaden its appeal. That’s why Salesforce is paying a princely sum for Mulesoft.

Zoho’s API integration strategy is something that many of its customers will start demanding as it scales up to cover larger accounts that will continue to operate in a heterogeneous environment for a long time to come because of the different moving parts required to run and sustain their business, or industry-specific domain expertise.

Another issue has to do with Zoho’s firm position on operating its infrastructure and not relying on other IaaS providers. While this gives Zoho complete control over the online experience of its customers, it also gives ample reasons for Zoho to benchmark its SLA against that of AWS, Azure, Google, or any other Cloud provider for that matter. Still, the hybrid cloud approach resonates with customers as many are still at the early stages of their Cloud migration journey. With Zoho going after larger enterprises, backup and disaster recovery support will only become more demanding.

The need for Zoho to have a ready list of backup partners and IaaS options could become a more pressing issue as the vendor starts delivering its solutions to customers that operate in many countries beyond its availability zones.

Zoho Corp. Ecosystem, Partners, Resellers and SI

Zoho consulting partners offer sales, management, and implementation services for Zoho solutions. They provide direct training and support to help clients maximize their technology investments.

In November 2020, Zoho announced a strategic alliance with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to provide superior Customer Relationship Management, IT Service Management and e-Commerce solutions to solve problems for large businesses. This alliance partnership brings together the breadth and depth of Zoho's product portfolio with TCS’ decades-long experience and domain expertise in technology-led consulting and business integration services. Together, Zoho and TCS will drive growth for global organizations through stronger technology alignment with business goals, more transparency across solutions, and greater operational efficiency.

As one of the first Cloud-based collaboration software vendors with a loyal following and a steady stream of recurring revenues, Zoho has shaken up the small business market. Zoho currently sells directly through its sales force and website. Additionally, it has 1,000 partners with 150 that handle the bulk of implementations for clients in locations where Zoho has limited local presence and support.

Zoho opened 20 offices, mostly in non-metro locations across India, US, Canada, and Africa.

As Zoho continues to expand around the world, its reliance on partners will increase. In 2018, Zoho partnered with MariApps Marine Solutions, a leading marine industry digital solutions provider, to offer Human Capital Management (HCM) automation solutions to the marine sector. Under this partnership, Zoho people are integrated with MariApps' PAL ERP solutions. The first customer of this integrated solution was Bernhard Schulte group of companies.

Zoho Expense is integrated with QuickBooks Online, the online version of Intuit's popular accounting software for small businesses. The two applications work together and share data to help businesses simplify the reporting and accounting of employees' business and travel expenses.

Zoho Corp. Cloud Platform (PaaS) and Infrastructure (IaaS) Details

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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: