Zoho Celebrates the Five-Year Anniversary of Zoho One, Announcing Record Growth and Upmarket Momentum

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company headquartered in Chennai, announced that Zoho One has achieved a new milestone, now supporting 50,000 organisations across more than 160 countries. Over the past two years, the platform has grown 150%, with 37.5% of new Zoho One customers coming from mid-market and enterprise businesses. License upgrades by customers who adopted Zoho One five years ago have increased by 92%, contributing to this milestone growth. These figures spotlight the market’s move away from more static legacy applications and toward end-to-end solutions that empower organisations to be agile scale, and adapt to changes in their industries.

In India, Zoho One has seen 64% growth in the last two years. Over 45% of the demand was driven by Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, indicating the increase in digitisation of businesses in non-metros. The key sectors contributing to the growth are IT and professional services, BFSI, retail and wholesale, education, and real estate and construction. The most-used applications are Zoho CRM, Zoho Cliq (team chat), Zoho Meeting (web conferencing), Zoho WorkDrive (document storage and collaboration), Zoho Projects (project management), and Zoho Analytics (business intelligence and insights). During the pandemic, the usage of collaboration apps such as Cliq and Meeting increased significantly.

“Siloed systems cause business silos,” said Hariharan Muralimanohar, Head of Marketing, Zoho One. “An integrated organisation, therefore, is typically a reflection of integrated systems underneath. This is what we see with our own customers. Nearly half of Zoho One customers use 20 or more apps across functions, integrating their organization and reporting higher returns. With Zoho One, we set the tone for the rest of the industry on what a platform, or rather an operating system for business, could be. We will continue to lead the way.”

Zoho One launched in 2017 as a first-of-its-kind suite including 35 integrated applications. Today, Zoho One is the Operating System for Business—a comprehensive, scalable platform comprised of 45 unified applications along with end-to-end services including AI, business intelligence, contextual communication, and unified search, allowing businesses to run every aspect of their organization—from sales and marketing to finance, HR, and analytics.

Singular Breadth and Value

Over the last five years, Zoho One has added 10 new apps and countless services in dialog with businesses to meet their evolving needs, while acutely reducing customers’ total cost of ownership in adopting and maintaining the platform. Zoho One offers the broadest, most integrated platform in the market, providing diverse businesses the tools to serve customers (marketing, sales, and support apps); run operations (finance, recruiting, and related HR apps); collaborate efficiently (office suite, mail, personal productivity, and collaboration apps); and customize the solution (low-code app and microservice development, and integration building apps). It has the scope and power to run any business out of the box while carrying the tools necessary for organisations to customise the solution.

Customers like IIFL, Meril Life Sciences, Tata Play Fiber, FynDNA TechCorp, and Fyers have added more licenses and increased the usage of apps and services. Customers have also reported higher returns with increased usage. For example, Rain for Rent, reported 610% returns, while Lubrication Engineers reported a 1:10 cost-benefit ratio, IBRS saved one-third of their software costs.

End-to-End Unification

Zoho One is built entirely in-house, on a single technology stack, resulting in a truly unified, end-to-end platform with hundreds of integration points across its applications.  Consistent, ground-up unification provides businesses with a deeper connection between sales, marketing, customer support, accounting, human resources, and other functions. Zoho One brings context to communication and collaboration among colleagues, customers, and vendors, enabling easy access to relevant information stored across different applications in the platform. Achieving this level of interoperability, seamless data flow, and context traditionally requires expensive and expansive IT involvement, with no guarantee of success. Zoho can deliver end-to-end unification by owning and operating its entire technology stack, including 12 data centers strategically located across North America, Europe, Australia, and Asia.

Tata Play Fiber has benefited from Zoho One’s unification offering. Before implementing Zoho One, Tata Play Fiber used multiple apps from different vendors that did not work with each other, leading to data silos. The management needed a consolidated view of their business operations. With Zoho One, all third-party apps could be integrated to create a unified experience across teams and functions. Zoho Creator was used to building a customer dashboard that consolidated customer information across Zoho, third-party, and custom apps. Because of the time saved, they could reduce the average response time for their customer service from 8 hours to 2 hours.

Integration with Third-Party Systems

Zoho One’s upmarket growth is made possible by the platform’s capacity to tightly integrate with third-party solutions without causing data and operational silos or impacting the efficiency of the existing system. Zoho One applications integrate with hundreds of leading third-party solutions, preserving customer choice and flexibility, and managing complex systems, large amounts of data, and dispersed teams.

Leveraging Zoho One platform, Meril Life Sciences launched Covifind, a Covid-19 home testing kit during the pandemic-induced lockdowns. They were able to bring the product to market while working remotely. Zoho One was used to setting up marketing and lead management processes for Covifind. Similarly, PartsBaba could create an online store as the pandemic struck. The company used Zoho One to create and disseminate digital courses to promote self-reliance.