Zoho minces no words about its intention to become a major ERP application provider in the years to come, despite all the talks about the pending demise of enterprise software vendors because of the incursion of AI, agents and prompts.
Through smart bundling, value-based pricing and a comprehensive selling and partnering strategy, Zoho is optimistic about its ability to prevail in the all-important ERP applications market, which is projected to grow to $180 billion by 2029 from $143 billion last year.
In fact, Zoho is so confident that it has a shot in securing a healthy chunk of that market that it spent two days at a recent event in Austin, Texas, showcasing more than a dozen customers including upstarts like Swiggy Limited, the Doordash-equivalent in India, that have standardized on Zoho One, which encompasses ERP products for Inventory, Invoicing, Payments and Payroll.Zoho One has around 75,000 customers, which makes it Zoho’s most popular product
Another pillar of its ERP strategy lies in its laser focus on scalability through global customer acquisition and mission-critical investments in hosting, server and infrastructure development including open-source databases built specifically for its applications customers.
Zoho is one of the three enterprise software vendors in the world that offer all three internationally – enterprise applications, Cloud infrastructure and database. The other two are considerably bigger powerhouses Microsoft and Oracle.
While it has taken the former tens of billions of dollars to deliver a viable hyperscaler to go after AWS and the latter close to 50 years to perfect its database for transaction processing and querying in fault-tolerant use cases, Zoho is unfazed by the challenges.
After reaching a key milestone of its 30-year anniversary in 2026, Zoho has the added advantage of playing the long game since it is private and it appears that it has no plans to go public anytime soon. That position has insulated the vendor from unrelenting pressures from investors and activists that have proven to be both distracting and career-killing for CEOs of many publicly-traded software companies these days.
In fact, Zoho is bold enough to start building low-cost servers and open-source database technology to drive down the cost of ownership of running an enormous infrastructure to support its ever-growing base of users, now topping 150 million, compared with 20 million a decade ago.
In 2025, Zoho posted double-digit sales growth to exceed $1 billion with more than a million paying customers. Aided by partners and an onslaught of new ERP enhancements and other enabling technologies like payment processing and vertical solutions for manufacturing, retail and distribution, Zoho is capable of breaking the stranglehold of the likes of Oracle, SAP and Microsoft in the ERP market, said Sivaramakrishnan Iswaran, global head of Finance and Operations business unit at Zoho.
After launching Zoho ERP in India with eight modules from Billing to Spend Management and from Accounting to Tax and Compliance last year, Iswaran plans to kick off the global launch with 2026 shipment of such products as Zoho Payments and Zoho Card in the United States and other countries.
The progress Zoho has made in the ERP market has been incremental but deliberate. What started in 2011 with the release of Zoho Books for bookkeeping has evolved into a full-blown ERP suite under Zoho One for Ap/AR and GL, ecommerce, HR and payments, supply chain automation, and risk management, along with complementary products such as Dealer Management Systems that keep track of everything from car sales to insurance for automotive dealers. Other verticals Zoho is going after include retail point-of-sale systems and financial services with emphasis on loan origination system.
Packed with 55 different applications including ERP, Zoho One now serves more than 75,000 customers worldwide with an average of more than 22 apps used per customer. By comparison, those numbers stood at 58,000 customers and 20 apps being utilized, respectively in late 2023.
Customers attribute the vendor’s granular reporting capability at the stock-keeping-unit level, rather than just category, as well as its ability to accommodate an onslaught of regulatory and compliance requirements in different geographies where they operate as the key differentiators of Zoho ERP.
Another distinction, according to Vijay Sundaram, chief strategy officer of Zoho, is that the vendor is much more diversified than most enterprise applications providers with none of the major theaters(US, Europe, Asia, MEA and Rest of Americas) accounting for more than one-third of its revenues.
With partners contributing to nearly 40% of its revenues in 2025, Sundaram said Zoho is poised to disrupt the traditional enterprise applications for both CRM(its long-standing stronghold) and now ERP(a much bigger market to go after than the former).
NSI Solution, for example, is a Zoho-dedicated service provider that has built its digital transformation practice around Zoho One for CRM, Financial Management and ERP Services and Operations, especially for franchisors and franchisees across different verticals like janitorial supplies and fitness centers.
Through tight integration into the Zoho applications stack as well as Zoho Vertical Studio for easy configuration, NSI has been able to help franchisors on-board 70% of their franchisees, achieve 100% visibility into lead generation and hundreds of hours in monthly data-entry reduction after taking their Zoho systems live, according to Catherine Carignan-Turcotte, chief business development officer of NSI.
That is the type of partnership that is going to be more important in the age of AI than ever, Mani Vembu, CEO of ZohoDivision, said customers are no longer willing to take the risks of running and operating applications after years of getting accustomed to using Cloud applications.
Instead of investing their precious IT resources – which have been diminishing for years – in building their own agents, Vembu expects more customers are going to gravitate to those that can provide them with a system of record that they can trust, while offloading the development of agents to vendors and partners like NSI that can share the credit where the credit is due, but also share the blame if necessary.
That in turn could lead to the blurring of the lines between applications and platform, Vembu added, reiterating the key to success would require vendors to excel in both.
List of Zoho Customers
Source: APPS RUN THE WORLD Technographics Platform, February 2026
