I'm Very Bullish About Our Growth in India: Zoho's Sridhar Vembu The CEO and co-founder also said that the SaaS major saw 37% growth in India in 2022 while announcing the launch of Cliq Rooms, a smart conference rooms solution on Monday
By S Shanthi
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SaaS giant Zoho launched Cliq Rooms, a smart conference rooms solution on Monday, on the sidelines of Zoholics India, the company's annual user conference, in Bengaluru, along with adding new updates to the communication platform Zoho Cliq that aims to further boost its upmarket momentum.
In addition to this, the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) major announced that it saw 37% growth in India in 2022, which can be attributed to its diverse portfolio of products and suites. The top products driving this growth are Zoho One, Zoho CX suite (CRM and CRM Plus), Zoho People, Zoho Books and Zoho Workplace and the industries witnessing the adoption of Zoho in the country are IT Hardware, BFSI, manufacturing, education and retail.
Zoho also claims to have grown its partner network in India by 30% y-o-y. Further, the company has opened sales offices in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Hyderabad to support its rising upmarket growth in India, and also expanded its SI partner network.
"I'm very bullish about our growth in India, despite a global backdrop that has been challenging due to demographic shifts even before recent events," said Sridhar Vembu, CEO and Co-founder of Zoho Corp. He also spoke at length about Zoho Cliq. "Zoho Cliq is the most refined collaborative platform in the world. Zoho offers the operating system for business and we call Cliq the operating system for Zoho. The entire functionality of the Zoho suite is increasingly available through Cliq, with its beautiful messaging interface. This allows employees across a large organization (like Zoho Corp. itself) to communicate and collaborate, provide data in real-time to apps, and consume reports, all from the world-class interface, across the desktop and mobile platforms."
Headquartered in Chennai, India, Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 15,000 employees.
What Zoho Cliq offers
"With this launch, Zoho Cliq provides a robust platform that can enable employees to perform most of their tasks right from within the app, whether it is resolving a customer issue or approving expenses. This can help organizations, especially ones in the medium and large segment, improve both the employee experience and customer experience by bringing in the key functions from front-end and back-end apps into the Cliq interface," added Vembu. Zoho Cliq is one of the most used apps in Zoho One. As Cliq is maturing as a platform, it has seen a 30% increase in user migration from Slack and MS Teams in 2022, said the company.
According to a Statistica report, the revenue of the Indian collaboration software market is expected to be $275.50 million by 2028. The solution has been completely developed in India, and is a part of Zoho's R&D efforts in building a unified technology stack.
For a distributed workforce, Cliq offers a customizable interface that can be changed to different languages such as Hindi, Tamil, Kannada (with more languages coming soon), improving accessibility. Live translation is provided for various Indian as well as international languages that helps users interact with internal and external users from other regions.
Uncertainties ahead, says Zoho Chief
Vembu is bullish on India and its market. He shared that India has the potential to emerge as the biggest market for the company in the next ten years. However, he also feels that until the Middle East crisis is resolved, nobody can be sure of what lies ahead for the tech sector.
Last week, Vembu also said that the company saw a slowdown in growth in September across countries and products. "We saw a fairly pronounced slowdown in growth in September across countries and across products. Given the geographically and product-wise diversified nature of our revenue streams, I suspect the global economy is taking a turn for the worse," he said on X.
During the event, he again spoke about the current uncertainties. He said that the current developments in the Middle East, in addition to the Ukraine war and other uncertainties make business projections very complicated. He also shared that the Israel-Hamas war can create huge uncertainties and these are the things that could turn into something much worse.
