Zoho – ready for enterprise prime time? What do customers say?
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...
Zoholics 24 – exciting news from the Zohoverse
Zoho’s annual main customer event Zoholics took place in Austin, TX last week. The company presented updates to products and strategy and gave partners the opportunity to present themselves on a big show floor. In parallel to the event, Zoho published some interesting news about product enhancements in four areas, namely security and privacy, CRM for Everyone, collaboration, and platform tools. In addition, Zoho reaffirmed its AI strategy. Of course, CEO Sridhar Vembu set the scene in his usual humble, yet no-nonsense way. He detailed out, why Zoho is truly different. Zoho’s strategy of transnational localism with a clear focus on investing into employees is well known by now, and we see it working. Explaining the strategy with another twist, Vembu laid out five principles that will continue to be essential for every business software vendor to thrive: Investing in a full product portfolio with breadth and depth Offering attractive bundles that have deep value Investing into exceptional service and support Improving interoperability with more prebuilt integrations Getting close to the customer with a strong local partner ecosystem With 55 tightly integrated apps and growing, value-oriented bundles, and a thriving ecosystem, Zoho is certainly on a strong way following these principles. Another topic is the way applications get built by software developers. Vembu compares developers to artisans and postulates that software development will become ten times more efficient with the help of generative AI. The developer’s role will change to become far more one of a scientist, leaving the mundane tasks to the system. This way, the whole development cycle as such changes considerably, also enabling vendors to deliver...
How to zohotize a global business
About two years ago, I had the pleasure of speaking with Elie Katz of National Retail Solutions, NRS, about how he and his team “zohotized” NRS. During this year’s ZohoDay24, I was happy enough to continue this conversation with Rene Selemi, director of retail operations at IDT Corporation, the parent corporation of NRS. IDT is a global provider of communications and payment services, headquartered in Newark, New Jersey. The company employs around 1,700 people. You prefer to watch the interview? You can do it right from here. IDT started to use Zoho around 7 years ago for its internal startup NRS. The scope was customer care with the objective of enabling the business to respond to quick and effectively to customers. IDT and NRS originally settled on Salesforce but after using it for about a year decided to move away in favor of Zoho as it was a better fit and faster to implement. Says Selemi “We had Salesforce for a while for about a year, but at the end we decided to go away from Salesforce and actually implemented Zoho. [..] It was a better fit [and] it was quick to implement. That was number one. We did it when minimum resources and we did it very fast.” This is very much in line with what Elie Katz told me two years ago: “the other implementation still did not yield results for his business in spite of mounting bills”. The two main criteria that IDT worked and works on, are functional fit and cost. What started as a point solution has become the backbone for NRS since then...