by Thomas Wieberneit | Apr 4, 2025 | Blog, Case Study, Sponsored |
During ZohoDay2025 I had the pleasure of having a conversation with Udit Pahwa, CIO of Blue Star Ltd. Blue Star is a nearly 80-year-old company, based in India, which is a leader in cooling solutions for both the residential and commercial market. The company offers a variety of cooling products, including deep freezers, air conditioners, and chillers. Solutions are provided through direct sales, channel sales, or a combination of both. Blue Star went through a series of five CRM proof of concepts, evaluations and implementation attempts with limited success before settling on Zoho CRM. Blue Star certainly has been a “burnt child” at that time. The main reason for Blue Star deciding for going with Zoho CRM is that Blue Star did not want to go for what Pahwa calls a canned solution. Zoho offered the willingness and ability to co-create a solution that is tailored to Blue Star’s needs. “They’re ready to tailor it for us. That was a big advantage” he says. Before embarking into this sixth implementation, Blue Star performed what Pahwa calls an introspection to find out why there was no adoption but, in fact, resistance. He says that “what we came to know is any CRM for a sales guy is looked upon as moral policing”. This is not terribly uncommon and can be addressed. Blue Star chose to work with a comprehensive set of three levers to drive adoption. Here you can watch the full conversation with Udit Pahwa, The company started with executive sponsorship and a top-down approach in a division that had what Pahwa calls a “visionary leader who was also...
by Thomas Wieberneit | Feb 24, 2025 | Blog, Case Study, Sponsored |
ZohoDay 2025 offered the possibility for some good conversations with Zoho enterprise customers about their journey with Zoho. Another in-depth conversation I had during this event was with Adrian Castellanos of Selectra. Selectra is a French company that was founded in 2007. It specializes in helping customers, mainly consumers, compare and move between energy providers. From this segment, the company has expanded into other segments, with the mission to make the managing of utility bills simpler, cheaper, and greener. The company has more than 2,000 employees and is active in 17 countries across Europe, APAC and America. As Selectra’s business model is highly digital and fast moving, it requires strong, ideally real-time analytics capabilities to provide its services. Due to operating in different countries and different verticals, reporting processes have been based on Microsoft Excel, with these Excels differing across countries and even across verticals. Castellanos says that Selectra had “3 different countries, each one with several verticals. And the reporting was Excel. We had Excel for everything. Each department had their own Excels, their own reports. And you had managers spending two, three hours each week to update all their reporting. If they had to create a new one, they could spend one week doing only that. People that were more valuable doing their actual managers roles or if they were working with interns. Okay, it was the intern. But the interns need to learn the real work and not just the reporting. So, we require something. Hey, let’s automatize this. We are losing too much time. We are losing uh work hours uh each week just to...
by Thomas Wieberneit | Feb 11, 2025 | Analysis, Blog |
Zoho held its annual ZohoDays outside of Austin in the beautiful Horseshoe Bay resort. While this is a good way away from Austin proper, it also gave the opportunity to have long and good conversations with Zoho execs, customers and fellow analysts outside of the conference and meeting rooms. And guess what, this is exactly what happened. Big time kudos to Sandy Lo with her amazing team for organizing this and of course also to all the Zoho execs, including the newly minted Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s new CEO Mani Vembu, Tony Thomas, Raju Vegesna, Vijay Sundaram and many more, who all were more than willing to share information and, even more importantly, get feedback. The latter is not something that we analysts take for granted. Besides the usual – and important – state of the business update by Vijay Sundaram, the event revolved around three main topics · AI · Enterprise and partner strategy · Industry strategy As Zoho is privately held, we are not given details, nor at liberty to divulge as much as we learned. So, suffice it to say, that Zoho grows healthily in the value chain from unpaid users to customers, to revenue to retention. The company announced having hit the milestone of $1bn US in revenue already in 2022 and is growing healthily in all of these categories while being healthily profitable. With this out of the way, let’s have a look at the main topics. Artificial Intelligence Artificial Intelligence is one of the main reasons for Sridhar Vembu focusing on technology. He was very hands-on...
by Thomas Wieberneit | Sep 12, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The News On September 12, 2024, Zoho released a new, AI-rich version of Zoho Analytics that brings self-service BI to any persona in business. The release added more than 100 features and now offers powerful AI and ML capabilities. These enable diagnostic insights, predictive analytics, and automatic report and dashboard generation. “Additional advancements to Zoho Analytics include a custom ML model-building studio, seamless integration with OpenAI, and third-party BI platform extensions. The new version of Zoho Analytics has added power, intelligence, and flexibility to serve a broader range of businesses and users than competitors in the market.” The Zoho BI and Analytics Platform now offers more than 500 connectors to other systems, including streaming analytics. Overall, the new release offers new capabilities across four main categories: Data Management Hub: Zoho Analytics has expanded its data management capabilities, ensuring more accurate and applicable decision-making and deeper insights to accelerate business success BI Infusion with Generative AI: Zoho Analytics has introduced Generative AI capabilities across the BI platform to accelerate the adoption of insights for a broad spectrum of user personas. Data Science and Machine Learning (DSML): Zoho Analytics now features the DSML Studio, allowing users to simply and quickly build custom machine learning models, which, for example, analyze or predict customer churn. n of insights for a broad spectrum of user personas. Platform Extensibility: Zoho Analytics is more deeply extensible, allowing businesses to sync and standardize data stored across multiple tools and platforms for comprehensive analysis and insights. Zoho Analytics is a composable platform on which any analytical solution can be built. Alun Rafique, CEO and Co-Founder of Market Dojo...
by Thomas Wieberneit | Jun 28, 2024 | Blog, Case Study, Sponsored |
Zoho is well-known as a technology vendor for the SMB market. The company has products that support the whole range from single proprietors to larger companies. This range in itself is remarkable. For some time now, the company is diligently working on moving upmarket and to also support enterprises. This is not in the least, as with a growing customer base, more and more existing customers grow into the enterprise segment. The transition from SMB to enterprise is far from trivial. Sales models change, messaging, consulting approaches, support infrastructure, even the demand for the size and structure of the ecosystem are different in the enterprise sector. So, how does Zoho fare? To find out, I had a conversation with Parl Johnson, “Chief Nerd” at Nuvia Smiles. You can find our complete conversation on YouTube. Interview with Parl Johnson, Chief Nerd at Nuvia Smiles Nuvia Smiles is a dental implant company and currently has 1,500 Zoho seats. The company has more than 30 locations across the United States. Its specialty is to provide a 24-hour turnaround time to get permanent teeth into the patient’s mouth. This way, they do not have to wait long periods of time to get dental replacements. This requires a very rigorous process and having a lab at every location. Decision making is highly decentralized to support this fast process. The challenge with this degree of decentralization is that there are many disconnected applications and with that also very decentralized data. Nuvia Smiles identified 80 different applications with a scope of consolidation across the 30 locations. While this initially facilitates fast growth, it can become a...
