Zoho Announces New Launch, Updates And Data Centers In India

At a mega event in Chennai on Tuesday, Zoho Corp announced major updates to Zoho One, its applications suite designed to run businesses on cloud.  Zoho One launched exactly a year ago has now added a new set of capabilities that bridge the gap between different departments and roles within an organization. The company also announced the launch of two data centres, one in Mumbai, which is the primary data center and the other or the secondary data center in Chennai – both these data centers will be operational from August this year and will target the Indian business.

Zoho One is a bundle of more than 40 business and productivity applications rolled into one suite along with complimentary mobile applications.

Speaking about the new updates under the Zoho One umbrella, Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho Corp said, the update includes, Zia, the AI-powered assistant first introduced by Zoho CRM in 2016, will now be extended to Zoho One. It will respond to user queries by combining information from multiple apps. Also Zoho One’s new Analytics delivers a deeper, more contextual picture of business operations by blending data from apps across the suite, enabling users to create their own custom reports and dashboards to blend data from different business apps and do cross-functional analytics. For example, a CEO or Sales VP can see not just the revenue numbers for different accounts, but also the number of support tickets pending and, the first response and resolution times, all in one place.

Zoho has also update its unified Search feature can execute across multiple applications, bringing back richer results that significantly reduce the time and effort needed to find the right data. The new Zia Search lets users search across all their Zoho apps instantly, dramatically improving information access within an organization. 

“Zia for Zoho One, the new Dashboard, and Zia Search are organization-wide tools designed to give our customers deeper understanding of their businesses,” said Vembu, “This kind of unified data ecosystem is only possible because all of Zoho’s 40+ applications have been built from scratch, over the last two decades, on the same technology base.”

Finally, Zoho launched Backstage, an end-to-end event management tool that allows organizers, corporations, and non-profit agencies to plan, promote, and run enterprise events ranging from large-scale meetings to conferences and trade shows.

“Planning and running an event is a complex operation that has traditionally required different tools for each stage of the process—a website builder, a mass emailing solution, scanners for checking in attendees, and a stand-alone app for audience engagement,” said Vembu. ”Backstage embraces event management from start to finish by offering a unified online platform that allows organizers to market the event, fill seats, and engage audience all from within one product. Rather than getting bogged down in the complexities of the tools being used, this holistic event management system lets organizers focus on what matters: putting on a great event.”

According to Vembu, “In the last one year, more than 12,000 business worldwide have become Zoho One customers; 36% of Zoho One users are from India. The average Zoho One customer enables 16 applications for their business, often replacing software from different vendors, preferring instead to run their business from a single cloud platform. We have added five new apps to Zoho One in the past year—Cliq, Zoho Sprints, Zoho PageSense, Zoho Flow and Zoho Backstage—at no additional cost.”

Jay Krishnan, CEO, T-Hub, one of India’s largest incubator for startups and is located in Hyderabad and a Zoho customer said, “For an ecosystem player like us, managing tens of projects for hundreds of business requirements to meet the expectations of our stakeholders runs into thousands of requirements that could potentially take as many hours of operating bandwidth and spend. An integrated product suite like Zoho One has truly helped ease our ever-changing requirement list. It has been an enterprise-class product from a world-class player,” adding that currently over 300 plus startups that make up our community are powered by Zoho One.

Another valuable customer, Shayak Mazumder, CEO, Eunimart, explained his success with Zoho. He said, “When we started Eunimart, just like any other early stage business, we searched the entire market for any software that could help tie all my different customer facing and internal functions into one seamless flow. Unfortunately, all the different solutions we came across either did not have the breadth of solutions needed for a complex business model like Eunimart, or were built for large businesses and were too expensive for us.”

He believes that Zoho was a lifesaver as their business processes were becoming unmanageable with the growing number of customers. “The easily manageable workflows, ability to build custom models and create custom solutions was exactly what we needed. Our internal team, with the help of a Zoho partner, has managed to automate almost all of our business, enabling us to achieve 30% increase in productivity and largely increased customer satisfaction.” 

 ”The adoption of Zoho One has exceeded our expectations, and we hope to continue this momentum into its second year. The stats clearly show that customers will use multiple apps from a single suite, if those apps work together more deeply than a patchwork of products from different vendors,” said Vembu.

“We see customers combining data from different Zoho and third-party apps—like email campaigns, CRM, customer support, and accounting—to generate new insights and make better decisions. Zoho One has already replaced more than 650 different products, and that number will only grow as we release even more new apps,” he informed.

According to the company, Zoho One is available for Rs. 1,000 per employee per month. Businesses must purchase a license for every employee in their organization to get this pricing.