Meeting the Zoho you don’t know at ZohoDay 2022

An Intellyx Field Report by Jason English

Zoho continues to accelerate in tempo, following its own drummer toward the ambitious goal of a comprehensive ‘operating system for business’ as it unveiled new capabilities and customer success stories at their strategic analyst summit, ZohoDay 2022 in the private firm’s new second home in Austin.

Having lived in Texas most of my life, I was prepared for the July heat to exceed 100F, but that’s pretty much like the rest of the Northern Hemisphere right now. What I wasn’t prepared for were the wide-ranging business use cases, customer successes and unique company culture on display here.

Landing with CRM, expanding to everything

Most people are familiar with Zoho CRM, which disrupted the SMB sales automation market with a free-to-try, cheap-to-buy option starting in 2005, and an additional suite of office and collaboration tools that eliminated the lock-in of higher-per-seat priced offerings from vendors like Salesforce and Microsoft. (Note, I’ve personally used Zoho CRM and Marketing Suite at three different small companies, including Intellyx.)

Expanding from there into a full office and collaboration suite, the company released a Zoho One all-you-can-eat offering in 2017 that as an answer to O365 or Adobe Cloud – only this suite now encompasses more than 80 separate products under one account management banner.

“We use Zoho for everything – CRM, Support, HR, Finance – and we get so much automation that we can just focus on growth and our customers use Zoho to communicate with us,” said Adi Mula, CEO of FoodHub. “Out of the box you can do everything you want, you have customization, you have integrations, and access to a marketplace for other tools.”

Since this was a private analyst event, the newest releases were labeled “confidential” – even though you could look at any list of business productivity and automation tools and see that they are steadily filling in any remaining blanks. In order to do that, Zoho has its own alternate  underpinnings to prevent proprietary concerns from getting in their way: analytics, automation, a development language, networking, messaging and privacy protocols, email, even its own Ulaa browser.

Venturing down a private path

Zoho is also an outlier in company structure – unlike other cloud-based platform providers who are constantly taking on capital investment or IPOs and pumping sales and marketing to drive top-line MRR/ARR numbers, they carefully maintain their own R&D-to-profitability ratios.

“Venture funding is a trap – SaaS players can bet burned by public cloud costs and lose margins, when labor and infrastructure costs go up faster than prices,” said Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu. “You’ll see a lot of shotgun weddings and Frankenstein product bundles from PE companies ‘mining’ customers to extract value “

Customers cited this private structure as an advantage that prevents investments in Zoho from becoming subsumed by acquiring companies’ concerns.

“We used to be on spreadsheets and constantly playing catchup – and now we’ve been “Zohomatizing” all of our processes,” said Elie Katz, CEO of National Retail Solutions. “I can’t express how much Zoho has created new opportunities every day and touches every aspect of our employees and customers.”

Even when pressed, leaders wouldn’t talk about specific company revenues, beyond a hockey-stick chart of relative growth rates over the last 10 years or so, aided by user base growth within more than 500K customer accounts, accompanied by very low departure rates.

At most software conferences, I’m a bit befuddled when big enterprise software companies announce alliances with direct competitors. Major vendors and hyperscalers always agree to play nice in order to avoid customer churn.

While there were many integration points with other software vendors mentioned, Zoho’s partnership strategy is focused almost exclusively on MSP and SI channels – almost two-thirds of their revenue growth is driven by resellers building solutions using their software by combining low-code tools like Zoho Creator with other horizontal apps in the portfolio, or integrating their platforms with other vendor platforms for business customers.

One-of-a-kind company culture

We closed our main day sessions with a visit to Zoho’s new ranch just outside of Austin for a “Zoho-down.” Fortunately, a few mister fans and shade trees did a lot to ameliorate the Texas heat.

Most Zoho resources will still work remotely, but their culture of “local-sourcing” means employees won’t just develop this land as a meeting and research campus, they are actually growing organic farming operations here, and donating surpluses to food banks.

The company also employs hundreds of developers in rural offices around its Chennai headquarters and throughout India, and runs village schools to train future developers from women of all ages. 

Their R&D focus isn’t limited to software – they are investing in healthcare, factory production robotics, electric motorcycles and even a Boson driverless farm vehicle. 

The Intellyx Take

Zoho is humbly charting its own course without the hype, by continuously releasing a massive platform of self-service tools that can be grasped by individual entrepreneurs, while supporting many small businesses that have grown into larger-scale enterprises in most aspects of running a business.

I didn’t miss the usual PR spin and chest-pounding displays of market domination that typify most software vendor shows, but I do wish I could have written about more of the business plans and product advances they have on tap.

Much like the ornately hand-carved cube and custom-designed items that were prepared for attendees, everything about my first experience meeting with Zoho executives and customers would be hard to replicate in any other time and place.

 

©2022 Intellyx LLC. Intellyx retains editorial control over this article. At the time of writing, Zoho Corporation is an Intellyx subscriber. Zoho covered Intellyx’s travel costs to attend the event as analysts, a common industry practice.