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.

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 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 and now covers processes “from the application process and approval all the way down to the credit application approval as well. The Next Step will be the implementation on the operation side and the last one is the selection process, shipping the equipment sending the equipment to the customers.”

As one can imagine, not every step of the implementation process went without a glitch. Interestingly, the biggest ones were not related to the implementation team nor technology or implementation process but found in the fourth category: people. Process and technology knowledge was readily available via the previous implementation and some very knowledgeable developer. Rene maintains that “some of the knowledge that I got from trying to implement Salesforce actually helped me when it came to Zoho. I think that one of the key things for you to actually Implement any CRM is organization, you have to be well organized, you have to be able, you have to know what you want to do, what you want to build; you want to know what is the goal”. He continues that “one of the biggest challenges was again people. They never used CRM before, so the users were a challenge, you know.” According to him, the solution to this challenge is threefold: Making things simple, so that people get comfortable fast, training, and key users who help optimizing the implemented solution. In IDT’s case, these key users have been recruited from the NRS business. “The NRS team became ambassadors for Zoho.”

Running it all out of one system helps NRS create effective and efficient processes for both, the sales, and the fulfillment organizations. But IDT is not yet fully there. NRS is “zohotized” and now the idea is to “zohotize” the complete company. “We want basically a one-pager, you know, people to go to one place, all the APIs, everything else connected behind it, whatever it's not ready in Zoho, but basically have people you know in one place because it makes it simple.”

So, everything is hunky-dory?

Not quite. As I said and wrote in other places, a vendor-client-partnership is sometimes like a marriage. There are difficulties. The one thing that IDT really wishes to get would be an improved mobile app that better fits their needs. “There's combination of a lot of different things, you know, offline, improvement of the field of the page, you know, something as simple as that, you know, we're doing something called single sign-on. We want to be able to fit it right on the on the actual application”.

My point of view

This is a prime example for the values of long-term vendor-buyer relations where both parties invest and of tightly integrated suites.

Tightly integrated suites that are built on one single stack allow for fast and easy implementation cycles with small teams. This way the business achieves fast time to value and can concentrate on outcomes rather than managing a complicated integration process. Especially in times of SaaS, a short time to value becomes increasingly important, also for the vendors. They do not offer it at their own peril – as the case of IDT moving away from one vendor (which admittedly has a great product) to another one that proved to have a much faster return on investment.

The mutual investment is shown by Zoho’s by three things. First, by reasonable subscriptions that are combined with smart bundles. This, especially the latter, is something that many vendors can do, and do. Second, there is a significant investment into the implementation process. Other vendors offer a discount on the subscription fee for some time. Third, by listening to customers and make customer requirements part of their roadmap. This, again, is something that most vendors do. And, not to be misunderstood, it is extremely hard to do. No vendor can satisfy all customers at the same time.

I just love the term of “zohotizing” the business. It is a direct translation of Zoho positioning the prime bundle Zoho One as the “operating system for the business”. It also shows an emotional bonding of IDT personnel to Zoho. And, as I said and wrote before, tying positive emotions to one’s brand is extremely powerful.  Positive emotions create a lock in. A lock in that is not based on erecting exit barriers (or entry barriers for competitors) but on the feeling and knowledge that one is in the right partnership. A good part of creating this good feeling is to co-invest into the implementation instead of temporarily subsidizing the subscription fee.

Or in brief: It is better to make customers want to stay with a vendor instead of them feeling forced to stay because leaving prohibitively “expensive”.

Here we have a customer that wants to stay.

As part of my series of customer interviews, I recently had the chance of speaking with Keith Cooper, vice president of customer experience at Bergen Logistics.

Bergen Logistics is a global third party logistics provider, based in North Bergen, New Jersey. It primarily serves the luxury fashion and home goods segments but is available in other verticals, too. In Keith’s words “When you order something from a company's website online, the order comes to us. We pull the order, we pack the order, we ship the order, and it arrives to you in most cases the next day.”

If you prefer to watch the interview, you can do so here.

Bergen Logistics started to search for a CRM solution with the original focus on the-lead-to-order process. The trigger was the owner of the company inquiring for the status of a lead that he had given to sales a while ago – because the prospect was inquiring. At that time, “there was a belief that it was okay to take three or four days to respond to a client when they wanted to talk to us because we're very bespoke; the salespeople sort of have this view that they would wait.” Not only did this risk the company reputation but additionally, available data showed that 40 percent of the prospects didn’t want to wait that long. They were trying to resolve a business issue. This translated into loss of business.

The company did research and narrowed down the competition to Salesforce and Zoho. They did an in-depth analysis and went for Zoho. “Between Zoho and Salesforce when I looked at the value proposition primarily the cost and what does one do that the other doesn't do, Zoho CRM did everything Salesforce did at a better value proposition.”

After the implementation of Zoho CRM, Bergen Logistics had the ability to measure and optimize its sales process. The company gained “the ability to timestamp all of the activities of a lead through its journey into qualifying as an opportunity. And then once it's qualified as an opportunity looking at getting the proposals done getting the pricing done and then going to closing so we were able to start measuring the time between stages.”

The result is a far faster and more defined sales process that quickly confirmed the working theory that a fast sales process in fact does matter. “Within two years, we tripled our sales production or annual sales production from the sales team and have a much more defined sales process.”

In addition, being able to measure the process enables Bergen Logistics to identify problems with the sales process itself to fix them and to coach the sales team towards becoming more successful. As Keith says, “having those KPIs allows us to help triage if there's a problem we can see where leads are if they're leaking out or if we have one particular salesperson who's not performing, we can see within the within the funnel where their performance misses. And then coach to that activity.”

Since then, Bergen Logistics added considerably to this footprint, using Desk including a customer facing self-service portal, Analytics, Forms and Social, with a phone integration and an ABM solution being in the works. But what is interesting for Keith Cooper is the broad scope of Zoho One that offers the ability to consolidate when and as needed. “You know, it's not what that's not one we're using yet but a lot of times it's it's knowing that we have these applications available that can replace what somebody's using should we need to or should we want to there's some other things that are more firmly embedded and might take a little longer to get them forked out.”

But how difficult was the implementation?

Bergen has a DIY attitude, so they did a lot on their own.

Which brought them quite far, although, unsurprisingly, this also led to making mistakes – which is not a problem in itself. Implementing a system is always also a learning process and then it is interesting to see how much of a partner the vendor is. Says Cooper “And so, we made mistakes along the way, there were things that we can figure out, things that we built wrong the first time and the support team was always very helpful in helping us understand why the Frankenstein that we built was never going to walk and that if we made these changes how we could get it off the ground.”

It turned out that some of the “troubles” were caused by the license type. Even here, the Zoho team showed flexibility although at one point it was obviously necessary to step up to the license that covered Bergen’s requirements.

It also turned out that at some point the required knowledge was too much to be covered by the in-house team. For Bergen, this point is reached where CRM and Desk shall be integrated into the phone system.

In the meantime, Bergen went up to 250 seats of Zoho One and sees considerable exposure to Elanders Group, its parent company, due to the success of its implementation, so that the ‘regional’ implementation becomes a group-wide one.

Asked about complaints, there aren’t really any.

My point of view

Many find it surprising to hear (or read) a statement as bold as “Zoho CRM did everything Salesforce did at a better value proposition”, in particular the first half of it. After all, Salesforce is the undisputed 800-pound gorilla in the CRM game. However, this impressively reconfirms a point that I make for quite some time, namely that the capabilities of Zoho CRM are somewhat of a better kept secret, especially outside the core SMB market. It is not surprising that Zoho has a very interesting price point; this has to do with the company’s overall philosophy of not pursuing an extractive form of capitalism and of considering its success as a consequence of making the surrounding ecosystem – and with that, the customers – successful.

Integration is usually one of the biggest cost drivers in an enterprise software project. Well-engineered suites offer fast and easy integrations between its various subsystems or applications, ideally even work on the same data without moving it back and forth.

The possibility to get quite far with an implementation without the help of an implementation partner is not something that is possible with all systems that offer a similarly broad and rich set of capabilities. That Bergen requires SI help only at a stage where the phone system shall be integrated into CRM and Desk shows how integration in a suite should be and how easy configuration and customization can and should work.

Lastly, we see the validation of how Zoho does provide customer value through guided choice and flexibility.

Bergen moved up from a single solution to Zoho One, while not leveraging all of the 50+ applications this subscription contains, although now, of course, paying for the premier product. Instead, Bergen Logistics chooses to implement additional applications on a need base and to mix and match with other applications, e.g., the G-Suite. This shows that the full subscription is advantageous to the menu approach.

These are quite some points that more enterprise vendors could have a look at.

As you know, I am very interested in how organizations are using business applications, which problems they do address, and how they review their success. In a next instance of these customer interviews, I had the opportunity to talk with Melissa Gordon, Executive Vice President, Enterprise Solutions at Tidal Basin about their journey with Zoho. You can watch the full interview on YouTube.

Tidal Basin is a government contractor that provides various services throughout the government space, including disaster response, technology and financial services, and contact centers.

Tidal Basin started with Zoho CRM and was searching for a project management tool in 2019. This was prompted by mainly two drivers. First, employees were asking for tools to help them running their projects. Second, with a focus on organizational growth and bigger projects that involved more people, Tidal Basin wanted to reduce its risk exposure and increase the efficiency of project delivery. This way, the company could actually create a triple-win situation, benefitting the employees, customers, and the company. also following the top management’s motto “if you take care of your people, and you take care of your customers, everything else will take care of itself.” The thought behind this is “that providing a mechanism for people to be more efficient, because everybody wants to come to work and do a good job. Nobody wants to do mundane tasks that don't add value. And so, if you can provide a mechanism to do that, it enables our employees to then take better care of our customers.”

Being tasked with implementing it, Melissa started off with a software selection process. This process included integration into CRM, a feature analysis, and a cost-benefit analysis. At the end of this process, Tidal Basin selected Zoho Projects “because the cost of the system and the value and the tools that we needed really did win out against the alternative options.”

 The implementation was fairly small and, most of all, painless, although the company chose to implement its own way of doing project management, based on principles that are applicable across different sizes of projects, allowing their tailoring according to the needs of the project by means of templates. Tidal Basin initially saw a limited adoption, as they did not immediately enforce the use but went for an organic approach. Still, since there is some adoption, the company sees better visibility into and tracking of projects. In Melissa’s word, what Tidal Basin also sees is “that our PMs, are spending less time trying to aggregate information when they're having their meetings; they're easily able to go in and kind of follow up on the things that, you know, should have been done between the last meeting and this one. And then the people who are doing those tasks can also be a collaborator. And they're providing those updates. So, you can also eliminate unnecessary meetings, if both parties know that the work has been done; and there's no need for a follow up. There's also the mechanism, being able to tag things and tag people, if you have questions. That kind of helps facilitate communication about a specific task within a project that you don't necessarily have if you, know, you're managing via email, for lack of a better way of saying it.”

The success of the Zoho Projects implementation led to the adoption of additional products, particularly Zoho Forms and Zoho Desk, to fulfill requirements of public programs. An example that Melissa Gordon brings, is “grant programs require a mechanism for the general public to notify the grantee if there is the potential for fraud, waste, and abuse. And so, we were able to take Zoho Forms and Zoho Desk to build out a reporting form for fraud, waste, and abuse, tie it to a help desk, that we were then able to manage the monitoring and review of those reports that were coming in, and then also aggregate and report that back to the client as part of one of our deliverables.”

From here on, it was a natural extension to also use Zoho Desk for employee support. It, since has been rolled out to nearly every department. This, in combination with the embedded analytics provides the visibility that is necessary to improve the employee experience further by not only enabling fast and efficient problem resolution but, moreover, giving the opportunity to identify address areas that can get systematically improved. “You are only as good as your customer remembers” says Ms. Gordon.

And this customer may very well be your own employee! And helping the employee ultimately benefits the customer, is a belief at Tidal Basin.

Being asked what’s next, Ms. Gordon elaborates that Tidal Basin now has a good number of Zoho app in use and people see the value. So, they are preparing for a full-fledged roll out of Zoho One.

Still, a vendor-buyer relationship is comparable to a marriage. There is no eternal honeymoon. Asked for where she sees scope for improvement, she mentions two. Documentation is not always up to the speed of delivery of new functionality. This is something that gets mostly covered by Zoho’s support organization. However, Ms. Gordon regards this as a price to pay for the pace of innovation that she sees. The second one would be the process of becoming a partner. Tidal Basin sees Zoho as an opportunity to provide even more value to their clients and feels that it is somewhat hard to become a partner. Everything else is pretty much business as usual, there is always one or another feature or improvement request, and Tidal Basins regularly sees solutions to them appear in the software.

My point of view

This is an interesting journey of a company that has an outside-in view on its processes and apparently some out-of-the norm values, which I mean in a very positive way. You do not hear statements like “if you take care of your people and you take care of your customers, everything else will take care of itself” or “you are only as good as your customer remembers” – and that they are not lip service.

It also shows the power of a highly integrated suite of independent applications that can get bundled. It enables the implementation of various applications to improve employee- and customer experience at the customers’ own pace. And this, even though not every piece of the software seems to work seamlessly with the other ones.

Still, companies see the value offered by being able to flexibly choose what they need and want and to add on when they realize the value of their current implementation.

May more vendors pursue this path.

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.

Zoho is a privately-owned technology company that was founded in 1996 as Adventnet, Inc. and has quietly evolved into an ambitious global player that serves the SMB and enterprise markets with cloud applications. The company offers a suite of more than 50 business, collaboration and productivity applications. These include applications for CRM, project management, finance, human resource management, analytics and support. 

The company is headquartered in Chennai, India. It has eleven offices in India, five in the United States and has offices in Brazil, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan, Singapore, China, Egypt, South Africa, United Arab Emirates and the Netherlands. Offices in France and Germany are in preparation. Zoho has more than 10,000employees as of mid-2021. It is present in 180 countries with more than 70 million users.

Zoho is led by its co-founder and CEO Sridhar Vembu. Being a privately held company, Zoho is not obliged to, and does not publish revenue or profit numbers. However, the company indicates a track record of profitable growth that is well in the double digits.

The company manages its growth organically, i.e. without acquisitions. All applications are built by Zoho, using one single hard- and software stack. They are deployed and delivered via Zoho owned data centers in the United States, Europe, India, China and Australia. Following this unique approach, the company has built a solid platform with a unified data model that allows it to grow and deliver software at high speed.

Core values of Zoho include corporate self-determination, privacy as a principle and a commitment to delivering high value.

Zoho One

Zoho aspires to deliver the operating system of a business 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 45 applications supporting sales, marketing, email and collaboration, helpdesk and customer support, finance, HR, analytics and business process. Of these, customers have activated on average 21. 

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+, Finance+, or Workplace).

The most used applications in Zoho One are CRM, Analytics, Cliq, Books, SalesIQ and Desk. Zoho analyses show that this is quite consistent across regions. This means that customers use Zoho One to support a broad variety of front office, back-office collaboration and business intelligence processes.

Figure 1: Most used Zoho One applications

Zoho One has currently around 40,000 customers, which makes it Zoho's most popular suite. 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.

Analysis

With Zoho One, Zoho offers a comprehensive set of applications that support a major part of the corporate value chain, including supporting processes. The main areas that are only partially covered (via Zoho Inventory) are Procurement and Inbound Logistics, as depicted in the diagram below. These processes, however, are supported by partner solutions that are available on the Zoho Marketplace.

Figure 2: Processes of the corporate value chain that are supported by Zoho One

Zoho One is a set of solid horizontal applications without much industry flavor. Still, it is adopted across a wide range of industries around the globe, which shows the versatility of Zoho One and its underlying development platform. Due to Zoho owning the whole solution stack, the applications are well integrated with each other. This goes beyond process- and data integration. In fact, the applications that are part of Zoho One can be regarded as components of a unified system. They share the same set of underlying core services, like AI, analytics, communication, provisioning and search to name but a few. This set of services is continuously enhanced, with new services being for example the work graph, mobile application management and organizational dictionaries.

Zoho focuses especially on the flexibility and adaptability of its system. Even during development, everything is kept simple and expressed in a uniform and easily understandable style. The solution stack’s design allows for rapid creation or translation of business applications for most vertical industries, as well as adaptability to individual customer requirements using no code, low code and high code environments. 

With Canvas, Zoho opened the solution to detailed visual adoption of roles, customer corporate identity or templates, e.g. for industries. In combination with Zoho Creator, Zoho Catalyst, Zoho Flow and the Zoho Marketplace this creates opportunities for partners and developers by offering a complete develop - extend -integrate - deploy platform. At this time, Canvas supports only Zoho CRM.

Zoho One’s pricing model has worked well for companies that are growing and want to go beyond CRM applications, with more than 50 other applications available and more on the way. With Zoho One, companies can scale easily and quickly. Zoho also benefits from the significant synergies and savings in organic marketing in highly competitive markets. 

The availability of a wide range of APIs as well as more than 2,500 integrations, either natively or via tools like Zapier, Integromat or PieSync, enables Zoho One to become an integral part of a corporate business application landscape. Customers are using parts of Zoho One in combination with parts of or the complete Google Workplace (GSuite), Netsuite and various marketing applications. 

Currently there are around 1,000 extensions or custom apps solutions available on the Zoho Marketplace (https://marketplace.zoho.com/home), but the number is steadily increasing.

Zia, the Zoho Intelligent Assistant, is a platform tool that provides AI/machine learning driven services throughout Zoho One. Zia not only provides intelligent data enrichment services but also powers predictive scenarios. In addition, Zia is a core part of Zoho's context-aware, natural language enterprise search. The enterprise search is already pre-integrated with external applications like box, Dropbox, Slack, Salesforce and others. In combination with its ticketing system and knowledge management capabilities, this could be a game changer in the industry. Many companies are looking for a service that answers questions across a wide variety of sources and topics.

Further, with its integration into more than 100 call center solutions, in combination with the collaboration suite, Zoho PhoneBridge and Zoho Voice (not part of Zoho One), Zoho, from a capability point of view, is already now on the forefront of the converging call center and unified communications markets, without saying so.

Zoho One represents an interesting path for Zoho to take, the path to disassembling applications into services which can be recombined as needed. Thought to an end, every business object like "account," "quotation" or "customer visit" is a service that any other application can use. These services are recombined with no code/low code (workflow engines) and high code tools to create solutions as needed.

SWOT

Strengths

• Deep integration between applications that cover a wide range of corporate value chain including an e-commerce solution that offers visibility into inventory and financials
• Built-in data cleansing through the data preparation capabilities of the Zoho BI and Analytics platform
• Independent applications reduce entry barriers and allow multiple entry paths into Zoho One
• Work graph, which enables context aware communications and search based on an understanding of the strength of interactions between people
• Context aware conversational search
• Transparent and attractive  pricing without hidden fees
• Natural Language Processing powered enterprise search and analytics 

Weaknesses

• Usability is not always consistent across the various applications and devices 
• Missing industry solutions
• No CPQ solution in their own stack

Opportunities

• Capitalizing on industry solutions and technology trends, leveraging the deep and wide solution stack, full development platform and the Zoho Marketplace together with technology and implementation partners
• Hybrid work solutions extending Zoho Workplace like Zoho Backstage, but also Zoho Learn, Zoho Lens and further solutions

Threats

• Competitors' acquisition strategies might out-compete Zoho's organic growth strategy by enabling faster delivery of new functionality
• The partner management organization might be lacking local staffing to support strong growth in strategic regions