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.
Recently McAllen played host to a Zoho event where it attracted hundreds of analysts, partners and customers to discuss why it matters to stay true to corporate social responsibility as it embarks on its long game to win over key constituents from customers to employees and from community leaders to citizen developers.
Zoho’s long game is not radically different from the unwritten social contract that any sound business should be entering into with the community that it serves with the shared objective of achieving mutual benefits for all the parties involved. What’s different about Zoho’s approach is its scale and its ability to leverage technology to make things cheaper, easier and faster for everyone at the grass-roots level.
One of the biggest reasons for choosing to expand in McAllen is its proximity to Mexico where Zoho has already established a growing presence among customers south of the border. At the same time, low cost of living and the ability to attract local talent have made the moves throughout Texas including Austin, McAllen and San Antonio a priority for Zoho to become entrenched locally by harnessing community support, while scaling to exploit opportunities overlooked by its competitors.
During the two-day event, Zoho made it clear that it wanted to dominate both ends of the spectrum, selling its popular Zoho One applications suite in high volume to small and midsized businesses while moving aggressively into enterprises that gravitate toward its easy to use and low-priced solutions for hundreds or thousands of their users.
Puma, for example, has hundreds of its users running expense reporting and purchasing request applications from Zoho even though the apparel maker runs SAP as its primary financial management systems. Mark Hawkins, director of digital solutions at Puma SEA/India/Oceania, expects the apparel maker to expand its use of Zoho to include its CRM modules as well.
IDT Corporation, a Newark, NJ- based communications provider with more than 1,200 employees, attributes the increased use of Zoho CRM the catalyst of saving thousands of man hours managing a slew of functions from automating sales frontends to boosting incentives for its service operations based on positive customer feedback. Meanwhile, the number of users at IDT has risen from 10 to 750 over the past few years all running Zoho applications to handle many facets of customer interactions from onboarding to training.
Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu said one of the major reasons customers big or small are favoring Zoho is the backlash against SaaS point products with functionality gaps that could have been easily bridged by a holistic solution like Zoho One that is affordable, intuitive, and scalable to accommodate their evolving needs.
Vembu said Zoho has also made significant inroads into both financial management applications, in addition to collaboration tools like WorkDrive that present serious challenges to Microsoft Office and Dropbox with comparable capabilities while differentiating Zoho by paying close attention to safeguarding user privacy.
At the event, Zoho also outlined its ambitions to invest heavily in HR applications including new modules for compensation management, while broadening its payroll support across at least 21 states in the US. Its fledgling ecosystem of 2,400 partners including 800 affiliates are also helping Zoho expand into new verticals such as retail and banking, while aligning closely with an army of influencers and domain experts like accountants by reinforcing each other’s strengths in order to catapult Zoho into a viral attraction with widespread following.
Zoho’s long-time customers are bullish about its prospects. Sean Rivers, director of technology at mobile developer Relay in Apex, NC, said his company decided to standardize on Zoho One from the very beginning as the tasks of managing its customers became more complex demanding all-encompassing approach that delivered 360-degree view of its sales operations, as opposed to choosing a myriad of different packages that required too much handling.
“Zoho One gives us everything that we need and it’s fully integrated. Without that, we’d have to negotiate separately with best of breed point providers, that would have paralyzed us”, Rivers said.
Jason Yoffy, director of product of RJG, in Traverse City, MI, considers the decision to standardize on Zoho One the Aha! moment when the plastics manufacturer realizes that it now has 45 purposely built applications all ready to deploy at its own pace covering everything from ticketing to forms and from CRM to analytics. Yoffy added Zoho One allows an adaptable company like his to “take it in chunks and let the company gradually adopt the full application suite.’’
Zoho, which started out as a provider of network management and ITSM tools namely ManageEngine in the 1990s, has now signed up more than 100 million users worldwide including many in the SMB space, up from 30 million in 2018, by supporting them with a complete suite of over 55 applications from CRM to email and from financial management to collaboration.
In many ways, Zoho is aiming to flip the script by preaching to the choir in the US, which not too long ago took pride in being the land of plenty, a call that became increasingly hollow with mounting social ills and widening gaps between the haves and have-nots.
Trumpeting its inclusive mindset that aims to spread social benefits through wider use of software development and consumption in a balanced and ethical manner to far-flung places like McAllen, Zoho takes its mission seriously and perhaps that in itself is the end game.
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