Jason English event recap in SiliconANGLE
Enterprise software is a winner-take-all game, where also-rans are acquired or run out of business by a few dominant vendors that can lock in customers, demand their own price and grow at a disproportionate rate to the economies they serve.
At ZohoDay 2024 near Zoho Corp.’s latest tech center in McAllen, Texas, an audience of more than 100 analysts and influencers was humbly presented with artificial intelligence-driven process design and integration capabilities that could propel this software-as-a-service productivity vendor from its leadership in small to medium-sized business market into larger enterprises in several vertical markets.
Now that India’s government requires private companies to submit financials, we find that Zoho reported more than US$1.1 billion revenue in 2023. Although that may not be a blip on the radar of Salesforce Inc., much less Microsoft Corp., it is certainly impressive for the firm’s first disclosure, demonstrating a fast-growing user base for the company’s low-priced application suite.
Playing the long game
Zoho Chief Executive Sridhar Vembu (pictured, center, with Vijay Sundaram, left, and Raju Vegesna) kicked things off with an explanation of Zoho’s long game, a strategic reset of the typical sales-driven growth mentality of a software business.
As the story goes, much of the success of our current megalithic technology companies isn’t the result of innovation – it’s thanks to an imbalance between consumption and production. Governments and households are accruing more debt, while profitable tech companies are acquiring competitors, locking in customers and basically printing money for their shareholders and creditors, without reinvesting proportionally in innovation, or supporting the communities they live and work in.
The technology industry has made incredible strides in automation, data management and AI. Are these advances improving productivity and economic conditions, or simply cutting skilled labor costs and creating tedious administrative jobs? By enabling both technical and nontechnical resources to get involved in innovation, they are betting that having all hands on deck will keep software moving forward sustainably.
“Programmers have worked like artisans of old weaving code painstakingly by hand,” Vembu said in his presentation. “Machine looms are coming.”
To prove this, we heard from several customer panels…
Read the whole event roundup at SiliconANGLE here: https://siliconangle.com/2024/02/13/rethinking-business-software-zohoday-2024/
Click here to read the Chinese translation.
