Zoho aspires to deliver the operating system for businesses with the goal of driving customers' margins by unifying business operations on one single technology platform. The most important part for delivering this vision is Zoho One. 

Zoho One is Zoho's premier bundle of business applications. Currently, Zoho One consists of around 55 applications that support sales, marketing, email and collaboration, helpdesk and customer support, finance, HR, analytics, and business processes. Of these, customers use on average 22. 

Zoho One can be licensed as an all-in-one platform but also be part of a journey that starts at first licensing one application, then more and then moving to Zoho One directly or via licensing one of the other suites (such as CRM+, Projects+, Finance+, or Workplace, and others).

The most used applications in Zoho One are CRM, Analytics, Books, Meeting, and Workdrive.

At the time of writing this, Zoho One has around 75,000 customers, which makes it Zoho's most popular product. The largest customer has around 32,000 employees. Customers are distributed worldwide in more than 160 countries, with the highest numbers in the United States and the European Union. 

Organizations that have implemented Zoho One are from a variety of industries, although the top five industries are the high tech, professional services, Real Estate and Construction, Retail, and Banking/Financial Services/Insurance industries.

On November 18, 2025, Zoho announced many enhancements to the suite. The enhancements are focusing around three key areas:

·       Experience

·       Integrations

·       Intelligence

The biggest enhancement in the experience category is that Zoho essentially removes the boundaries between the 55 apps that are part of the suite with a concept that the company calls “spaces”. The objective of spaces is to unify parts of the overall user experience and thereby increase user productivity. A space groups a number of apps that are relevant for one or more purposes via a horizontal toolbar. It provides users with apps that are necessary to achieve business objectives in one single place. Spaces can be personal, e.g. for increasing one’s individual productivity, organizational, or departmental. Zoho delivers a number of customizable spaces. Customers can create their own spaces to better serve their needs and processes. 

Similar to this, boards remove analytical boundaries between the apps. A board is essentially a dashboard that can work across data from different applications. A good example for this are tasks, that can live in different applications and that can be brought into one single UI that allows contextual filtering via a board.

Similar to the boards, and to further facilitate the navigation and use across Zoho One, Zoho implemented an action panel and a quick navigation option, with the action panel aggregating action items across apps and the quick navigation speeding up navigation across applications.

Last, but not least, Zoho added Vani to Zoho One. Vani is a visual team space that enables teams to collaborate on documents and tasks.

On the integration side, Zoho now offers a view into all Zoho-to-Zoho integrations in one spot and offers to unify application-specific portals into one single portal that offers a central workplace across them. This portal covers Zoho applications, external applications, and custom-built applications. In addition, Zoho offers what the company calls pragmatic integrations. Pragmatic integrations allow to centrally configure integrations across Zoho One to external services, with domain verification being the first example. Last, but not least, Zoho introduces “outcome-based” integrations, which are basically cross-application workflows. With outcome-based integrations, customers can create cross-application workflows via a Zoho-provided wizard. This wizard takes care of the backend integrations while customers can concentrate on achieving the outcomes they want to see. This gets supported by an MCP server that exposes around 200 Zoho and third party apps ready to act as agents and MCP clients. 

In addition, Zoho unifies intelligence across Zoho One. AI capabilities across the apps are now available via Zoho One. Zia Hubs got enhanced to get its own space in Zoho One and supplementary workflows that make company data utilized. Zoho’s Ask Zia will soon be available in the bottom toolbar, allowing prompt-based searches across apps and providing contextual intelligence to guide decision making. 

Last, but not least, Zoho added a number of more technical enhancements, ranging from enabling customer-defined encryption, directory stores, cloud LDAP, cloud RADIUS and more. 

Analysis  

Zoho positions Zoho One as the operating system for businesses. While this is a bold statement, it was already largely true before this release. Still, since 2023, Zoho One has evolved a lot in terms of breadth and depth of its functional coverage without Zoho making much fanfare about it. The increasing number of customers (75,000, up from around 40,000 in 2023) and the fact that customers on average use 22 of its applications now are testament to the suite’s success. Zoho One certainly hits a sweet spot, also with its attractive pricing.

Want to know more? Read my full report here.

During the truly remarkable (pun definitely intended) TrulyZoho event I, of course had the chance to talk to some customers. One of these customers was Amit Rai of Tata Fiber, an Indian ISP. As the name suggests, Tata Fiber provides internet services through fiber. The company was founded in 2016 and started commercial rollout in 2018, so is a kind of start-up.

Amit is the Chief HR Officer of Tata Fiber, but also led their digital projects and is now heading business development for the company. 

He happily agreed to a conversation about the relationship between Zoho and Tata.

The following article is based on the conversation with Amit.

TL&DR

If you do not want to read and prefer a video, you can also listen in to the conversation.

The original problem at hand

We started in 2019 with HR management, in particular with Zoho people, as a solution in this functional area was needed. The implementation gave us confidence in Zoho and our implementation partner. From there on we implemented additional Zoho apps. We started on the call center as the agents needed to work with and toggling between  a multitude of screens when working with a customer to resolve issues. The agents in parallel needed to talk to the customer, making sense. Of course, the quality of the conversations suffered from this and the conversations got longer. Longer conversations are a cost to us.

Why Zoho?

The original implementation gave us a good confidence in Zoho. This was not only because of the product but also because of the responses from the Zoho organization and the implementation team, the way they responded to changes that we wanted.

 When we were exploring the implementation of solutions for additional business functions we also happened to talk to Zoho’s head of enterprise sales. I talked to him about a lot of different business cases and business problems that we were facing and found meaningful to address. He responded that these could be solved with the help of the Zoho One suite. For the overall implementation we used different partners, one for Zoho People and another for Zoho One, as we needed more Creator and CRM expertise.

What challenges did you encounter during the implementation?

The main challenge was integration into the ecosystem of applications that we already had, not only Zoho. That led us to what I would call an exploration. We had to change the solution design multiple times, it was a real roller coaster. For example, we had SOAP APIs but needed Rest APIs. So we needed to rewrite them to integrate well. 

So, the project took longer than originally planned but now, we are using the outcome.

What is next?

Call center is our biggest use case because this is where maximum friction happens when the customer interaction happens mainly through it. Right now, the call center is still on premise. We want to put a cloud telephony layer on it and make it virtual. A call center agent should operate from anywhere.

Second, we are now two, two and a half years into it; so we have generated enough clean data about customer profiles and the problems customers are facing. We can now look at putting an AI engine on it and see whether we can have assisted conversations. The AI would guide agents to have an effective conversation and enrich it further. 

Third, in India people use chat instead of talking. So, we are going to add other services and channels. In fact, we have already implemented Zoho Desk and see that fifteen percent of all cases that are resolved, were resolved using chat. We want to significantly strengthen this. To give some numbers, of the about 130,000 customer contacts we have each month across chat, email and calls, calls have still the majority of share. There is quite some leverage in chat.

If you had one wish for Zoho to fulfil – what would it be?

No company is perfect, although, it is difficult for me to point out one specific thing. We have received a lot of functionality, as said, the responsiveness is definitely there.

But considering, if there was one thing, it is probably the integration within the products. Although some integrations, e.g., Zoho Desk, to Zoho CRM, are seamless, not all the other ones seem to be.

Zoho One is supposed to be a seamlessly integrated platform. However, at this point in time, this does not seem to be the case. 

As an example, and not having all the data points, we have the feeling that the integration between Zoho Recruit and Zoho People is not at the same level.

So, the question is: How can Zoho seamlessly integrate all the services into one solution? Getting a seamlessly integrated solution throughout would be the one wish.

Disclaimer: Zoho paid for my travel to and expenses at Truly Zoho. Zoho is also a customer of mine at the time of writing this. This post was neither commissioned nor influenced by Zoho but is based on the transcript of my interview with Amit Rai of Tata Fiber.

Happy New Year to everyone!

Apart from all the political suff that I do not want to dive into, the year 2022 has seen a lot of exciting events and topics, from the rise and fall of the Metaverse, to lots of defaulting crypto companies. Towards the end of the year, chatGPt stirred up quite some waves.

Not to forget the long story of Elon Musk taking over and handling Twitter ...

In more conventional areas, we have seen more of a renewed interest in affordable CX suites. Earlier in the year, also CDPs have been a big topic. Tips for good engagement to achieve customers having a positive experience is also always a topic.

(Nearly) all of this is reflected in the 2022 top ten of my blog, which has seen a good number of visits. 

A big and heartfelt thank you to all my readers!

Here are your top ten articles of 2022.

#10 How to engage for customer experience and success

#9 How to create value with a CDP

#8 The impact of the supply chain on the customer experience

#7 A great human - bot conversation with lots to learn

#6 How (and why) a marine consultancy made Zoho core of their business

#5 The almighty Metaverse - its Rise and Fate

#4 How to make Zoho a business's operating system

#3 How to Zoho'matize a business

#2 Don't mess with Zoho - A Zohoday 2022 recap

#1  Metaverse - the return of the Undead

All of these are well worth revisiting.

Thank you again for your readership. I wish you all the best for 2023.

Exciting times are lying ahead of us.

The News

Today various media outlets broke the news that Salesforce is in advanced talks with Slack Technologies about a possible acquisition. The news had two effects: Slack stock went up nearly 40 per cent during trading hours while Salesforce stock loses out by 5 percent, which basically says that Salesforce investors are not so convinced about this acquisition being a good thing, whereas Slack investors clearly are.

Slack and Salesforce share an integration, which is listed on appexchange since 2019.

There have been speculations on Slack being a good target for Salesforce that date back till August 2016, basically ever since the integration between Salesforce and Slack got announced.

The Bigger Picture

There are several aspects to this news.

Salesforce already has Chatter, a tool that often gets negative feedback. The company also owns Quip, which is essentially a solution for the collaborative creation of documents and spreadsheets.

And Salesforce has created work.com, as a solution to increase business resiliency and to improve collaborative work.

On a larger scale, and accelerated by the Covid crisis, the need for fast and efficient communication and collaboration of distributed work forces and their customers, using various means of communication is there. Actually, it has been there for quite some time, as the emergence of solutions from Slack to Teams, Zoom, etc. proves. E-mail is still very important, but only a part of this communication, which includes near instant chat, voice and video communications as well as collaborative work on documents – inside and outside an organization.

Another part is, that this communication needs to be tied to business processes and enable three things: Better outcomes by connecting all documents and communications to business processes and business objects, the ability to use this additional data to feed models that enable better predictions and/or actions and a reduction of efforts for the involved people, e.g. when it comes to finding information.

Businesses have a challenge here and are looking for solutions to fix it, and fast. This can be seen by the revenues of Zoom nearly quadrupling between Q2/19 and Q2/20 or the usage of Microsoft Teams skyrocketing from 13 million daily active users in July 2019 to 75 million daily active users in April 2020. At the same time Slack grew its paying customers between February and July 2020 by more than 20 percent, too.

Because of this, vendors of CRM solutions have increasingly been strengthening their built-in collaboration and productivity suites or are forming partnerships with companies in this space.

My Analysis and PoV

My first reaction was: Wow!

Slack, coming out of the developer community, has been an early player in the communications tools space. It does not only allow chat, voice and video communication for (smaller) groups but also allows embedding of bots as well as workflows. The company is clearly loved by small companies and startups and has been able to get a substantial number of customers.

As the numbers above show, Slack has not been able to capitalize on the Covid crisis and grow as fast as the competition. Further, Slack has not yet become a profitable business and also has a negative cash flow. Especially Microsoft putting an increased focus on Teams, put Slack, as well as Zoom, under significant pressure, as there is a considerable benefit to use MS Teams in an environment that already uses MS Office. Given that, I think that Slack is in a tight position. I dare saying that Slack on its own would not have been viable for much longer.

When it comes to Salesforce, Slack makes for a terrific addition to its portfolio for various reasons.

Slack enables Salesforce to significantly strengthen its productivity/collaboration suite, bringing it to a level that is no more far behind Microsoft. Productivity/collaboration is one of the four core pillars for a platform player. While Salesforce already has Chatter, this tool only works within a company and does also not allow for voice or video communication.

Neither Oracle nor SAP have a similar technology, although Oracle has its Beehive product that offers web and audio conferencing, plus a strategic partnership with Zoom, which it increasingly embeds into its CX suite. SAP has a strategic partnership with Microsoft and deployed MS Teams throughout its organization.

Slack also comes with far more than 100,000 customers and an expected revenue of in excess of $860 million in FY 2021, which would nicely add to Salesforce’s platform revenues, which in Q2 of FY21 rose to $1.2 bn.

In addition, the customers that Slack brings, are predominantly SMB businesses. In FY 20, less than 900 of 110,000 paying customers spent more than $100,000 for using Slacks services. This opens up a huge opportunity for Salesforce to tap into the SMB CRM market, which is a market that all big players are trying to scale down into. It remains to be seen in how far especially the smaller Slack customers accept a Salesforce that is seen as an enterprise player, as a partner.

In conclusion: For Salesforce, acquiring Slack makes perfect sense. It enriches the platform and therefore the Salesforce CX play. It is at least a jab against Microsoft and ringfences the Salesforce portfolio in the Clash of Titans with Oracle and SAP.

What we know and can observe

• SAP is strong with B2B customers. Manufacturing, but also CPG companies are some of the biggest customers.
• In the CX area, SAP is not particularly strong in with its Marketing Cloud (although the software is underrated in my eyes)
• With SAP Commerce, SAP owns one of the leading E-Commerce solutions.
• The Sales- and Service Clouds are pretty strong and do not need to hide.
• Growth in the Sales Cloud seems to be declining.
• The Sales- and Service Clouds are functionally adjacent to SAP’s core business, which is the ERP aka Digital Core. Marketing is not.
• SAP is investing in the service area, especially in S/4. The customer service module in S/4 is also essentially the former CRM Service.
• One of the four core processes that SAP has defined is lead to cash, which includes a lot of Commerce Cloud and Sales Cloud, augmented by quite some ex Callidus (CPQ, Commissions) and some Marketing Cloud.
• SAP CPQ, the former Callidus CPQ has been moved organizationally towards the ERP group.
• A good part of the on premise SAP CRM Sales and Service have been made part of S/4HANA.
• SAP has invested a lot into integrating the acquired solutions into the own software; this to an extent that made customers worried about the further roadmap.
• SAP has created a number of microservices on the SAP Cloud Platform that resemble business objects, in particular the business partner and with SAP Graph has introduced a business object orientated access model for its solutions, which abstracts away from the actual data layer.
• The Commerce Cloud is undergoing some modularization and the storefront is getting disjoint with Spartacus; this essentially creates a headless commerce solution, which goes beyond E-Commerce but makes commerce channel agnostic.
• In a recent investor interview (to which I wasn’t invited, so I took the quotes from a cloudwars post by Bob Evans), SAP CFO Luka Mucic made a few interesting statements about the SAP CX stance:
  • So, first of all, customer experience is absolutely a key market in which we want to be a significant player but with a focus on those categories where we clearly see that there is potential for SAP to be a strong #1 or #2 player.
  • There is a very obvious one in which we are leading the market and that’s the whole area of experience management, where we have Qualtrics, which is the category leader and that we are truly excited about and we are obviously looking at a partial IPO of Qualtrics to even further exemplify and magnify our growth opportunities.
  • The other area as I mentioned before is e-commerce, where we have with Hybris a very strong cloud fit that is growing in the high double-digits and that is in huge demand these days in particular with the challenges introduced by COVID. We think this is one of the core investment priorities for many companies around the globe.
  • And then also areas like customer data cloud, for example, where we also have a leading solution that can help customers manage the GDPR and triggers a digital sales motion in a way that is conducive to consumer preferences.
  • In others that from our perspective more translate into commodity markets where the growth rates are coming down and admittedly there is clear market leadership by others, we might look also at one or the other partnership opportunities. And in the meantime of course we see that the rising tide lifts many boats in many of those areas and so we will continue to look practically at an opportunity to participate in this growth.
  • But we don’t necessarily see it as an area in which we would dramatically double down on our investments. But clearly, CX remains a critical pillar of our cloud strategy, just in a little bit more of a focused sense.

• Not surprisingly, the CX team is incredibly busy.
• There seems to be considerable effort spent into re-platforming the CX suite, moving it away from the underlying Netweaver, making it cloud native software.
• The team is building something that they are calling a Customer Data Platform ++. This CDP seems to be built around the Customer Data Cloud as part of its core.
• SAP has moved a few of its main business objects and engines into the SAP Cloud Platform and/or is breaking them down into micro services.
• A strategic partnership with Thunderhead seems to be evolving, which is not overly surprising after Thunderhead’s partnership with Salesforce cooled down sudden- and rapidly and with Bob Stutz being the one who initiated the partnership at Salesforce
• There is some B2B marketing functionality that currently makes its way into the Sales Cloud.

And now you surely ask yourself where all this does lead to?

And finally, some suggestions

The News

The Bigger Picture

My Analysis and PoV

• The story around customer (and user) experience extending the intelligent enterprise that needs to be told is available, but it isn’t really told yet, at least not consistently. SAP has strong analyst relations and an even stronger partner network, which could – and would love to – help around this topic.
• As a result of its acquisitions, SAP now has a number of solutions that need to be integrated. This is very hard work, especially in the light of a multi-cloud strategy that works across hyper scaling IaaS vendors.
• Although most CX solutions are good, there needs to be a lot of attention to detail. And taking the marketing cloud as an example, it has quite some strengths, but could do better with a closer look at what marketeers are doing day by day. Combine this with a more reliable roadmap communication brings a winner
• Related to the intelligent enterprise story there is the actual uncertainty about how S/4 and C/4 (here we are with naming) actually complement each other or where the boundary between the two really is.