Zoho Rides The Wave of Low-Code Development With Creator

After years of blistering growth by securing hundreds of thousands of customers, Zoho is showing no signs of slowing down by adding 100,000+ new customers in 2021.

Usability, aggressive pricing, and a laser focus on its versatile platform (Zoho Creator) backed by a robust infrastructure (10 data centers) that supports more than 50 Zoho applications are some of the key attributes of Zoho.

Riding on the wave of low-code development tool, Zoho Creator has grown 30% last year, briskly securing 14,000 paying customers in 2021. Much of the growth is derived from companies using Zoho Creator to automate and improve business processes such as inventory management, document or record management as well as back-office financial transactions.

At its core is the Zoho platform that delivers both infrastructure and platform services like compute, storage, search, business intelligence, messaging, IT service management as well as a raft of developer tools for customers to accommodate their own industry-specific requirements by layering their business processes and workflow on top of Zoho applications.

Recently, Zoho released the 6th version of Zoho Creator Platform, a PaaS solution that supports developers of all skill levels to build, manage, integrate, and analyze for a complete low-code experience, enabling 10X faster deployment than any other solution on the market, according to company executives.

Democratizing access to low-code development tools allows the IT and business users to work in tandem, to create and deploy apps that are highly customized while minimizing common interoperability, permissions, and governance challenges.

“With this update, Zoho’s Creator Platform combines application development, integrations, process automation, business intelligence, and analytics into one single platform while simultaneously enabling IT teams to effortlessly manage security, compliance, and governance challenges,” says Raju Vegesna, Zoho Chief Evangelist. “Now, organizations can leverage a unified solution for all of their low-code needs, extending the ability to innovate to every employee.”

Zoho Creator Platform Latest Release features include:

With some 10,000 employees around the world, Zoho now poses a serious threat to CRM incumbents like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk as well as other Wall Street darlings or unicorns that need to satisfy institutional investors, private equity firms or VCs by promising unsustainable growth at all costs. As heavyweights like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and Oracle are spending billions on world-class network infrastructure as the prerequisite to dominate the Cloud, Zoho can do it for a lot less since it focuses primarily on its 75 million registered users, specifically the 600,000+ paying customers. As more of these registered users are converted to paying customers, they can scale out to meet their future needs with Zoho’s low-code development platform Zoho Creator.

Zoho is also gearing up to chase a bigger market – namely ERP with Zoho One by going after Intuit QuickBooks, Sage, and Xero which has about 10 times the installed base of Zoho. Last year Intuit introduced QBO Advanced by dangling steep introductory discounts and Live Help, essentially an online assistant to help with accounting issues. However, channel conflicts could render such Live Help ahead of its time. Still, Zoho, in its quest to become a full-stack provider from CRM and ERP to IaaS and PaaS must come up with a coherent strategy to compete with Intuit, Sage and Microsoft, all of which offer a much bigger channel ecosystem than Zoho.

In 2021, Zoho succeeded in displacing Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and SAP systems among midmarket organizations searching for a viable, simple to run and less costly alternative to these familiar brands, according to customer purchase records derived from our Buyer Insight Master Database. However, in order to make its upmarket strategy successful, 2022 will be a turning point for Zoho to commit not just professional services and support resources, but also sustain and extend its existing APaaS offerings for enterprise accounts.

Here are some of the companies that have adopted Zoho Creator as excerpted from our Buyer Insight Master Database:

Source: Apps Run The World, April 2022