What Google Cloud Next 2026 actually told us about the titan pecking order

Google Cloud Next 2026 wrapped last week. The official version of the story is the one Google wanted you to read: 260 announcements, 1,302 customer use cases, the Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform, eighth-generation TPUs, a $750 million partner fund, an $240 billion Marketplace backlog. Big numbers. On-message keynote. Tidy "agentic era" framing.

The more interesting story is who showed up to validate it, and what Google actually built underneath.

Five of the seven enterprise titans I track walked into Las Vegas and announced expanded partnerships that all rest on the same architecture: Gemini Enterprise as the agent control plane, with the titan's product playing the role of premium ingredient. Salesforce. SAP. ServiceNow. Oracle. Adobe. Add Workday and Palantir Technologies to the picture, both adjacent to my titan list but visibly aligned in the same direction.

Two titans were not in the picture. Microsoft, because Copilot is the direct counter-position and Cloud Next is not Microsoft's stage. Zoho, because Zoho's stack does not need a Google motion and Zoho's buyer is not the same buyer.

Both absences matter. More about them a little later.

What Google actually built

Let’s start with the framing. Google did not just ship a model platform with new features. It repositioned Google Cloud from "AI development environment" to enterprise agent control plane. Vertex AI services and roadmap evolutions are now delivered through the new Agent Platform rather than as a standalone product. That is not a naming change, it's an entirely different playground.

The Agent Platform stack now visibly includes:

• Agent Identity for cryptographically secure agent authentication
• Agent Registry as the catalog of every agent and MCP server in scope
• Agent Gateway for traffic control and screening
• Agent Observability for production monitoring
• Agent Simulation for pre-deployment testing
• Agent Evaluation for measurable performance against benchmarks
• Agent Runtime with sub-second cold start
• Agent Inbox for human oversight of long-running agents
• Agent Studio as the low-code builder
• Agent Development Kit (ADK) across Python, Go, Java, with TypeScript

Sitting alongside this is the new Knowledge Catalog, which aggregates native context from partner data platforms and applications including Salesforce Data360, SAP, ServiceNow, Workday, and Palantir into a single accessible layer for Gemini agents.

That layer matters. It is the third leg of the orchestration story alongside interface (Gemini Enterprise app, Slack, Workspace) and runtime (Agent Platform). And physics teaches us that a third leg creates stability.

The Agent Marketplace and Agent Gallery surface partner-built agents directly inside the Gemini Enterprise app, with an IT-driven request-and-approval governance model. Open protocols carry the connective tissue: A2A, A2UI, and MCP, all positioned as neutral interoperability standards rather than proprietary lock-in.

This is the playground Google built. It is not a naming change. It is Google trying to redraw the enterprise AI battlefield.

Not by owning the CRM.

Not by owning the ERP.

Not by owning ITSM, HCM, marketing automation, or the system of record.

But by embracing them all.

It is Google Cloud repositioning from “AI development platform” to enterprise agent control plane.

Now look at who joined this merry party.

The seven partnership announcements, decoded one by one.

Salesforce

Agentforce Sales is in open beta inside Gemini Enterprise. Slack hosts Gemini Enterprise as a private preview app. Agentforce gets native Gemini reasoning through Atlas Reasoning Engine, with multimodal support across text, image, and video. Zero-copy access to Google Lakehouse is on the late-2026 roadmap. New BigQuery connectors for Salesforce Informatica IDMC are available now. Pepkor reportedly consolidated 64 million customer profiles down to 24 million using Salesforce Data 360 plus BigQuery, a 25 percent personalization reach lift. The framing from Srini Tallapragada is "agentic interoperability".

The translation is simple: Salesforce is letting Google become a distribution and work-surface partner for Agentforce, while Salesforce keeps the customer-data gravity and Atlas Reasoning Engine. Slack is the part of the deal that helps Salesforce most. Google Workspace and Gemini Enterprise are too big to ignore. This move is consistent with the recently announced Headless 360.

The tension that nobody named on stage is nevertheless there. If a buyer ends up with Agentforce on one side and Gemini Enterprise on the other, who governs the agents, where do they run, and which vendor gets paid for the orchestration? That fight is coming. Get yourself some popcorn!

SAP

SAP's announcement was imo the most strategically interesting of the week, and worth having a deeper look.

SAP Business Data Cloud (BDC) Connect for Google enables bidirectional zero-copy data sharing between SAP and BigQuery. Cortex Framework metadata in BigQuery grounds Gemini agents in SAP enterprise context. Joule Agents in SAP CX become deployable inside Gemini Enterprise. SAP Engagement Cloud picks up agentic capabilities for content development, marketing briefs, visual concepts, and collaborative multi-agent execution. Marketing is the first GA use case in H2 2026, with the model designed to extend across the SAP CX portfolio over time.

The headline from SAP itself describes Gemini Enterprise as "central hub for data integrations and multi-agent coordination”. On the surface, that is a vendor conceding the orchestration layer.

It is not. Read it again.

SAP is not handing over the operational core. SAP is making sure the Gemini agents that buyers run cannot meaningfully execute against enterprise data without going through SAP's very own grounding layer. Cortex Framework metadata in BigQuery is the move that matters. It means the semantic context for "what a customer record actually means in this enterprise" runs on SAP's side. Google gets the AI execution layer. SAP gets to stay the meaning layer.

That is SAP looking stronger, not weaker. The friendly stage handshake is going to turn into a knife fight in the field about where business logic lives. SAP appears to have positioned itself well for that fight.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow AI Control Tower integrates with Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform so that every agent and MCP server across both platforms appears in a single governed registry. Now Assist for IT Operations Management is available through Gemini Enterprise, focused on alert and incident management. Joint solutions ship in three industry domains: 5G autonomous network operations, retail predictive maintenance, and IT systems, all using ServiceNow agents and Gemini agents handing off through MCP and A2A. ServiceNow took home four 2026 Google Cloud Partner of the Year awards, including Agentic AI Innovation.

John Aisien positioned the agreement as "open, interoperable platforms, not walled gardens”. This framing is doing real work, and it is also strategically necessary. ServiceNow is the workflow titan most directly in Google's strategic crosshairs. Both companies want to be the orchestration layer above all systems. This partnership smooths the surface. Still, the strategic overlap is significant.

ServiceNow's strongest argument remains: "We already run the workflows, approvals, incidents, assets, service models, and operational context. Don't bolt orchestration on top. Run it where the work already lives". Google's counter is: "We can orchestrate across all of you, including ServiceNow". Both arguments are valid, and both are strong. Buyers will pick based on what they value more, neutrality across systems or depth inside the workflow platform that already governs work.

Partners today. Rival underneath. Both are true.

Oracle

Oracle's announcements were broader than the Database Agent that most coverage led with. The full set: Oracle AI Database Agent for Gemini Enterprise (currently in preview on Google Cloud Marketplace), a Managed MCP Server for Oracle workloads (also in preview), Database Center integration, Knowledge Catalog integration, GoldenGate integration, VPC Service Controls. Oracle AI Database@Google Cloud is now available across 15 regions with more to come.

Business users can query Oracle data in natural language without writing SQL. Identity propagates from Gemini Enterprise to the database via OAuth. Oracle's Deep Data Security enforces row- and column-level access at the database layer. Query processing stays inside the database, which Oracle frames as a security and latency benefit, and which has the side effect of keeping Oracle's data gravity intact.

Oracle is doing what Oracle has always done well. Make sure its database estate is unavoidable. Give Google enough access that the partnership is real. Do not pretend Oracle is going to own the AI front end. The Managed MCP Server, Knowledge Catalog hookup, Database Center, and GoldenGate pieces all point in the same direction: Oracle data stays central to AI execution regardless of where the agents are built; and the data stays in Oracle.

The database does not need applause. It needs to remain indispensable. Mission accomplished, I'd say.

Adobe

Adobe Marketing Agent for Gemini Enterprise lands in Google’s Agent Gallery. It connects natural language queries to Adobe's CX agentic capabilities, with insights on campaign performance, audiences, and journey monitoring, accessible from inside Gemini Enterprise. The integration is more lightweight than the others, which is consistent with Adobe's pattern.

Adobe benefits from showing up in the Gemini work surface, especially when marketing teams already live and breathe inside Workspace and Slack. But this is a distribution play, not a control-layer move on the level of SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, or ServiceNow. Adobe joins the gallery without conceding much architecturally and without claiming a piece of the orchestration plane. This is consistent with the Adobe Summit messaging.

Workday

Workday shows up through the Sana Self-Service Agent, which summarizes information from Workday and other sources and handles HR and finance tasks across hundreds of skills covering pay, time, and absence. Workday is also part of the Knowledge Catalog third-party context aggregation.

Workday is playing the employee-service and finance/HR productivity angle. It’s useful, sticky, high-volume in daily user activity. Compared with SAP and ServiceNow, it is narrower in operational control. Compared with Adobe, it is comparable in scope. Workday had a solid presence at this event, not a strategic re-positioning.

Palantir

Google says that Palantir is adding Gemini and BigQuery integrations for commercial customers, connecting models to critical AI workflows and operations. Palantir is also part of the Knowledge Catalog third-party context aggregation.

Palantir is the awkward guest at the titan table. It’s not a classic business application vendor but increasingly competing at the operational decision layer with Foundry and AIP. Google wants Palantir workloads close to BigQuery and Gemini. Palantir wants model optionality without losing AIP control. The integration is real and worth tracking precisely because Palantir does not usually settle for being an ingredient.

The pecking order this event produced

Most strategically advantaged: Google Cloud. It created the playground. The full agent control plane (Identity, Registry, Gateway, Observability, Simulation, Evaluation), the Knowledge Catalog, and the Marketplace make Google the layer everyone else runs on. Google’s risk is that it wants to be the enterprise control plane without owning the transactional cores that SAP, Salesforce, Oracle, ServiceNow, and Workday control. That requires relentless execution, not keynote poetry.

Most durable titan: SAP. SAP owns the operational core. The combination of BDC Connect and Cortex Framework gives SAP a stronger bridge into Google's AI without surrendering enterprise meaning. SAP's posture is "use Google's AI, but ground it in SAP business truth". That is the right defense and a subtle offense at the same time.

Most interesting tension: Salesforce. There's a great integration story today. The unresolved question is whether Agentforce and Gemini Enterprise will eventually compete for governance and orchestration once buyers are running both in production. And they will. Procurement will notice when both vendors invoice for the same workflow.

Most direct control-plane rival: ServiceNow. A visible partner. And an architectural competitor. The "open, interoperable" framing is correct in principle, and it is also the terminology a vendor uses when its core product overlaps strategically with the platform it just partnered with. The deciding factor for buyers is whether they want a neutral AI control plane above systems, or agentic execution inside the workflow platform that already governs work.

Most pragmatic: Oracle. No applause needed. The database stays indispensable. Managed MCP Server, GoldenGate, Knowledge Catalog hookup, VPC Service Controls all point in the right direction for Oracle. That’s pragmatic, and dangerous in the right way.

Useful but narrower: Adobe and Workday. Both gain Gemini Enterprise distribution reach. Neither announcement changes their strategic center of gravity. There is nothing earthshattering about them. They are domain wins, not control-plane bids.

Adjacent: Palantir. This is worth watching specifically because Palantir does not usually accept ingredient status.

The two missing names

Microsoft. Copilot exists exactly to defend the position Google is now contesting. Microsoft has spent two years building Copilot Studio, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Dynamics 365 agents, and an Azure-side AI tooling that competes head-on with what Google just announced. Microsoft was never going to show up at Cloud Next to validate Gemini Enterprise. Why would it?

The more interesting question is whether Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and Oracle agents will sit as comfortably inside Copilot in twelve months as they now do inside Gemini Enterprise. Right now, the answer is no, and the gap appears to be widening. I expect Microsoft to respond at Build and Ignite. The main question then is whether the response will be "we have parity" or "we are bigger and we will route around you”.

Zoho works a different market segment. Zoho also builds its own AI stack. The company rarely participates in this kind of big vendor partnership theater. The absence is consistent and not so interesting when looked at in isolation. It becomes interesting, however, when paired with the observation that Zoho's mid-market and SMB-plus customers are largely outside the buying pattern Cloud Next 2026 is shaping. Two different conversations happening in two different rooms.

Open protocols, not walled gardens. Maybe.

I want to be careful about reading the "open, interoperable" framing.

A2A, A2UI, and MCP are all real, and they matter. ServiceNow's positioning is correct in principle. Salesforce kept Slack. Oracle kept the database. SAP kept Joule as the engagement layer in SAP applications. Adobe kept its CX stack untouched. Workday kept HR. Palantir kept AIP. None of these vendors handed over the asset they care most about.

But the registry is Google's. The gateway is Google's. The gallery, the runtime, the inbox, the identity model, the agent governance plane: all Google. Open protocols are not the same thing as a neutral platform. They are the price of admission to a platform that acts as a host.

The real question for the next twelve months is whether the protocols stay open enough that buyers can swap the host. If a customer can take A2A-compliant agents built around Gemini Enterprise and re-host them on Copilot Studio or AWS Bedrock AgentCore without rewriting most of the orchestration, the open framing holds. If swapping costs are high in practice, "open" is doing marketing work that the architecture does not back up.

I do not yet have any evidence either way. I expect to in the next two quarters with the first multi-vendor pilots moving into production.

What buyers should do this quarter

Force each titan to defend the front door. Salesforce will say Slack and Agentforce. SAP will say Engagement Cloud and Joule. ServiceNow will say ServiceNow. Microsoft will say Copilot. Google will say Gemini Enterprise. Make them defend the answer with specific cross-system workflows for agentic work. Note which vendor accepts being an ingredient in someone else's interface and which one fights for the seat.

Pin down the dates on zero-copy commitments. The Salesforce zero-copy with Google Lakehouse is late 2026. SAP BDC Connect is rolling out across 2026. Oracle's Managed MCP Server is in preview. Most of the headline-friendly capabilities are not in your tenant today. Build your 2026 plan around what you can run by Q3, not what is on a slide.

If you are a Microsoft shop, run a parallel evaluation. Bring in Copilot Studio. Ask whether Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow agents are first-class citizens inside it at the depth that Cloud Next demonstrated for Gemini Enterprise. Force Microsoft to demonstrate parity, not promises.

Treat the Agent Marketplace and Agent Gallery as procurement infrastructure. If your IT team adopts Gemini Enterprise as the agent procurement layer, that decision shapes which titans show up first in your future RFPs. Make this choice deliberately.

Test the governance question before you buy. If you end up with Agentforce, Joule, Now Assist, and a Gemini-Enterprise-built custom agent all running for the same business process, who governs them? Procurement will notice when you are paying twice for orchestration. Make a vendor own the answer in writing, and see to it that the SKUs do not overlap too much.

The unspoken partnership

The most interesting partnership at Next 2026 was the one nobody put in a press release. Five of seven titans, plus Workday and Palantir, plus a long list of consulting firms and ISVs, are all visibly aligning to ensure that Microsoft Copilot is not the only place enterprise AI gets done. None of them said that. All of their actions imply it.

That is the alliance worth watching.

I am still skeptical about how durable this alignment is once Microsoft responds, and buyer realities surface in the second half of 2026, and once we see what "open protocol" really means in production. All vendors will optimize for their own positions. They always do, and they need to. The orchestration question may stay answered for a year, or it may reopen the moment someone like Microsoft offers a credible alternative.

For now, Gemini Enterprise has the momentum. The titans showed up. The protocols are public. The Marketplace is live. The control-plane components are named. Google moved from "another model vendor" to "the agentic substrate the application titans run inside of”.

This is a very different conversation than the one we were having last year. It’s worth paying close attention to how it evolves and whether it is the right one.

Three titan announcements in two weeks reveal what enterprise software vendors are actually fighting over in 2026, and it is not agents.

If you have been tracking enterprise AI announcements through 2025, you have been watching a race about agent counts. How many prebuilt agents. How many industry-specific use cases. How many customer stories. Agents were the marketing, the demo, the SKU. A year of the same playbook.

Something shifted in April 2026.

Inside a two-week window, Salesforce, SAP, and ServiceNow each published an announcement that, at first glance, looks like more of the same agent theater. Salesforce launched Headless 360 at TDX 2026 and the Agentforce Experience Layer. SAP pushed a simplified-architecture argument alongside a persistent agent memory layer on BTP. ServiceNow rolled out Context Engine and, on its SPM community blog, Fred Champlain published an essay reframing governance itself as "strategic decision debt”.

Different products. Different audiences. The same structural move.

All three titans just walked one layer down the stack.

Read individually, each announcement is a product release. Read together, they are a category shift. The competition is no longer about who has the best agent. It is about who owns the substrate those agents operate on. And each titan is staking a different piece of it.

The Pattern Nobody Is Naming

Strip the vendor branding from all three sets of material and the structural claim is identical:

“Your agents are only as good as the layer underneath them. The data they ground on, the logic they inherit, the memory they carry, the permissions they respect, and the decisions they represent. That layer is what we sell.”

These three vendors are by no means the only ones making this shift. They just did it in a remarkably short period, and on stages loud enough to frame the category.

The pitch is more sophisticated than the 2025 version. Agent count was a volume game, easy to parody and easy to commoditize once every vendor had a hundred prebuilt agents. Substrate is harder to commoditize, harder to rip out, and (not surprisingly) easier to price at a premium once customers have built architectural dependencies on it.

Each titan is claiming a different piece of the substrate. None of the claims overlap cleanly. All of them expand the vendor's footprint.

Salesforce: The Interface and Intent Layer

Salesforce made the boldest move. Headless 360 exposes every platform capability as API, MCP tool, or CLI command, which means external coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Windsurf) get live access to an org's data, workflows, and business logic. Agentforce Vibes 2.0 ships with open agent harnesses supporting both Anthropic and OpenAI SDKs. Developers no longer need to work inside Salesforce's own IDE.

Is the new? Not quite; API-first architectures exist for quite some time. And they are a best practice.

However!

The accompanying Agentforce Experience Layer (AXL) is the delivery side. Build logic once in Salesforce. Deliver the same agent response into Slack, Teams, mobile, ChatGPT, WhatsApp, a customer portal, or any third-party surface, with the UI rendering automatically adapted to each channel. Permissions inherit from the Salesforce platform.

This part is new.

The subtext is the real story. For twenty-seven years, Salesforce's primary interface was the browser. Headless 360 is an explicit statement that the browser has become optional. VentureBeat's framing of the Salesforce answer to "does a company still need a CRM with a graphical interface?" was a blunt no, and that is exactly the point. Joe Inzerillo, Salesforce's president of enterprise and AI technology, said Headless 360 lets agents operate directly on the platform's business logic and datasets "rather than relying on separate integrations or user interfaces”. Read together, Salesforce is telling buyers it wants to remain the system underneath, even when the user never opens a Salesforce tab.

Not everyone loves it. The "Context, Work, Agency, Engagement" framing can create the ultimate vendor lock-in architecture, and the pricing is conspicuously silent. Headless 360 is included in platform licenses today. That is a statement about today. Salesforce's historical pattern is to introduce capability in the base tier and later wrap premium SKUs around it. CIOs should be asking the pricing question before making the architectural commitment.

SAP: The Data and Process-of-Record Layer

SAP is running a different play. It is not trying to be the interface layer. It is trying to be the gravity well.

The simplified-architecture argument is a rejection of the 2024 playbook, which basically said: sprinkle Joule on top of S/4 and be AI-ready. The current SAP pitch, across the Clean Core guidance, the Reltio acquisition, the Business Data Cloud strategy, the SAP-RPT-1 foundation model for structured data, and the new agent memory layer on BTP, is a single argument: your AI is only as trustworthy as the ERP data underneath it, and most of the world's transactional data lives in SAP.

The agent memory layer deserves a deeper look. Persistent memory is where consumer AI assistants finally became useful. ChatGPT remembering preferences, Claude carrying project context across sessions. Enterprise agents have historically been stateless, forcing users to re-prime the same context on every session. SAP's answer to this problem is to build memory as a BTP service, grounded in HANA Cloud Vector, with short-term, long-term, and reflective memory tiers governed by enterprise policies (retention, right-to-be-forgotten, audit trail).

Not a plug-in. A layer.

The SAP story has one recurring weakness, though: pace. DSAG's Technology Days 2026 in Hamburg, which drew more than 3,000 participants, delivered a consistent message from users. More clarity. Less architectural theater. Customers want SAP to ship faster and integrate more smoothly, not add more conceptual layers. The "simplified architecture" framing is partly defensive. It is a tacit acknowledgment that the SAP AI stack has become overwhelming to prospective buyers and to existing customers trying to execute.

ServiceNow: The Governance and Decision Layer

ServiceNow made the most conceptually ambitious move of the three. And it did so without a single major product announcement on the day.

Fred Champlain's piece on the SPM community blog introduces "strategic decision debt" as a category. The argument: the accumulated weight of unmade, unclear, or inconsistent portfolio-level decisions is what actually prevents enterprises from turning AI capability into AI outcomes. It is not a technology problem. It is a governance problem. And, Champlain argues, the governance layer is what ServiceNow sells.

The product scaffolding around the argument is substantial. Strategic Portfolio Management. Enterprise Architecture. The newly announced Context Engine, built on ServiceNow's Service Graph and Knowledge Graph, which captures the "why" behind decisions alongside the "what." AI Control Tower for governing agent behavior. TrustCloud and ComplianceCow, both of which received ServiceNow investment, shipped AI-native risk and compliance apps directly on the platform earlier in the week, reinforcing the partner-network moat.

The piece that matters most is the language. If "strategic decision debt" becomes a term CIOs use in quarterly reviews, ServiceNow owns the vocabulary, which means it owns the sales motion. No other titan has been publishing framework-level essays this quarter. Salesforce is publishing product pages. SAP is publishing architecture diagrams. ServiceNow is publishing a hypothesis about why enterprises are stuck and is offering its product portfolio as the answer. That is analyst-grade positioning, and it is rare from a vendor.

The Two Battlegrounds

I look at all these titan moves through two lenses.

• Interface control: who owns how users and agents access business applications.
• Orchestration: who owns the layer that coordinates work across systems.

This set of announcements maps cleanly on either lens.

Salesforce is the aggressive play on interface control. Own the access, and you own the orchestration that follows. AXL is the clearest multi-surface interface-layer bet any titan has made so far. SAP's interface-control play is softer, still routing interactions through Joule and its own surfaces. ServiceNow, interestingly, is not fighting for the interface at all. It is interested in being the backbone under whatever interface the user happens to be using.

On orchestration, the roles invert. Salesforce orchestrates experiences across channels, and, excluding what MuleSoft does, is quieter on orchestrating workflows across non-Salesforce systems. SAP orchestrates processes across SAP and non-SAP via BTP, Integration Suite, Advanced Event Mesh, and now master data via Reltio. ServiceNow makes the most conceptually interesting move by extending orchestration into the decision flow itself. Context Engine plus Service Graph plus Knowledge Graph is orchestration applied to how decisions get made, not just how tasks get executed.

Three titans. Three different pieces of the substrate. No direct overlap. Significant expansion of footprint for each.

The Titans Who Skipped This Quarter

Reading these three announcements in sequence raises an interesting question. Where are Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, and Zoho?

Microsoft in particular is the puzzle. Copilot, Fabric, Dataverse, Foundry, Power Platform. Every component needed to tell the same substrate story is already on the Microsoft roadmap or already shipped. The gap is the narrative. Microsoft has the pieces, but Satya Nadella's team has not bundled them into a coherent layer-down argument the way Salesforce and ServiceNow have. If Build 2026 does not fix that, Microsoft cedes the architectural high ground on substrate for yet another quarter, while three of its main competitors keep compounding.

Oracle's AI Data Platform push is similar to SAP's BDC play but has not surfaced an equivalent integrated narrative. Adobe remains anchored to content and CX. Zoho continues its integrated-suite, lower-price playbook with less architectural theater, which is arguably the right move for Zoho's segment and consistent with its philosophy. It keeps the company out of this conversation, though, and that is a choice with consequences.

What Buyers Should Actually Do

The three recommendations from my LinkedIn post on this hold, and they deserve elaboration.

Stop evaluating AI features in isolation

A feature list is a snapshot. The substrate is what survives the next 18 months. Ask every vendor you are evaluating which layer of the substrate they claim to own, analyze whether the claim is architecturally coherent or three product pages stapled together, and what happens to your architecture if the vendor executes on that claim versus if they don't. Features come and go. Architecture commitments do not.

Ask the pricing question now, not later

Headless 360 is included in Agentforce 360 platform licenses today. SAP's agent memory layer is part of BTP today. ServiceNow's Context Engine sits inside existing product lines today. None of these vendors has announced whether they will keep the substrate capabilities in the base tier indefinitely. The historical pattern says no. Build your architectural dependencies with pricing clarity, not without it. And build the architecture in a way that those dependencies do not become impossible to unwind later. After all, today’s pricing clarity might be tomorrow’s pipe dream.

Treat "memory," "context engine," and "experience layer" as three costumes for the same problem

All three titans are building a substrate for agents to reason over. The vocabulary differs. The underlying capabilities: persistent cross-session state, grounded enterprise context, consistent multi-surface delivery are the same, just with different strengths and weaknesses in each implementation. Write down the capabilities your agents need. Map each vendor's product to these capabilities.

Do not let vendors map you to their product pages.

Three Things to Watch

Whether Microsoft responds at Build 2026 with a bundled substrate narrative, or lets Copilot keep carrying the whole story alone.

Whether SAP's Reltio integration actually ships as the promised trusted-data spine for Joule Agents or becomes another BTP component that customers must stitch together themselves.

Whether Salesforce's "Trust Moat" language around AXL holds up in enterprise deployments, where the every agent needs consistent permissions across Slack, Teams, ChatGPT, a customer portal, and more. If it does, lock-in critique loses force. If it does not, the critique becomes the dominant analyst read.

The Question That Matters

All three titans have moved one layer down, coming from different angles. The logic is sound. The architectural ambitions are serious. The open question is whether three companies each trying to own a different piece of the substrate produces three coherent platforms, or three partial platforms that leave buyers integrating the substrate themselves.

Twelve months from now, we will know whether April 2026 was the moment the agent conversation matured, or the moment it splintered.

I am curious whether CIOs are reading these three announcements as compatible stories, or as three competing bids for the same piece of architectural real estate.

Recently, while on the ground in Austin, Texas, attending ZohoDay 2026, I had the pleasure of sitting down with Vaibhav Dani, the CEO of Map Communications. In the enterprise software ecosystem, we talk endlessly about digital transformation, but it is always refreshing to ground those lofty concepts in reality by speaking directly with the leaders navigating these complex implementations.

Our conversation touched on a surprisingly common, yet notoriously difficult challenge: harmonizing a homegrown operational tech stack with off-the-shelf enterprise software. Map Communications’ journey with the Zoho ecosystem provides a masterclass in pragmatic architecture, the age-old "buy versus build" dilemma, and the foundational data hygiene required to actually make artificial intelligence work.

TL;DR  

If you do not want to read this, here’s the full length video interview.

Everybody else, please read on.

The Business Context: Bespoke Service at Scale  

To understand their technology strategy, you first have to understand their business. Map Communications is a nationwide, employee-owned (ESOP) virtual receptionist and bespoke answering service operating across the US, Canada, and the UK. They serve a wide array of clients, ranging from legal firms and SMBs to large enterprises in various industries.

Because their core service is highly specialized, Map relies on its own proprietary, homegrown software lineup to manage day-to-day operations and real-time answering services. However, when it comes to managing the customer lifecycle from the moment a prospect lands on their website to the execution of contracts and ongoing support, they rely on the Zoho suite.

The Age-Old Dilemma: Buy vs. Build  

As businesses grow and their processes add complexity, leadership is inevitably faced with a choice: do we build custom modules into our core software or do we buy an off-the-shelf solution?

Dani approaches this with a highly disciplined decision framework. Map evaluated their requirements and realized that building tools to manage vendor and customer contracts or constructing a native quoting tool that would expose their internal APIs simply wasn't a valuable use of their development capacity.

Instead, they followed the Pareto principle and applied an 80/20 rule. As Dani rightly pointed out, "If 80 percent of the requirements are met, we'll be fine because no system would have 100 percent software requirements". Chasing those elusive final 20 percent now often results in over-engineered, heavily customized systems that become a nightmare to manage and support later. By accepting the solid 80 percent requirements fit that tools like Zoho Contracts and Zoho CRM offered, Map Communications avoids unnecessary technical debt while keeping their internal developers focused on their core, proprietary service offerings, the very ones that differentiate Map Communications.

Decluttering the Stack and the "Evil" of Copy-Paste  

One of my core theses as an industry analyst and consultant is that the "copy and paste" of data is the root of all evil, well, at least much of it, in enterprise software. Dani wholeheartedly agrees. When data is manually moved or fragmented across multiple systems, automations break, billing mishaps occur, and the customer experience suffers.

Still, it is often necessary,

Map Communications deliberately architected a separation between their real-time operations and their CRM environment. They utilize Zoho Data Bridge to move data smoothly into Zoho CRM, Zoho Desk, and Zoho Analytics asynchronously, ensuring they don't burden their live, day-to-day answering systems with heavy real-time external integration calls.

Furthermore, they are looking to Zoho Social to centralize their marketing technology, aggregating Google Ads, LinkedIn profiles, and Trustpilot reviews into a single pane of glass. The goal is clear: declutter the system. By minimizing the number of distinct data silos, Map establishes an authoritative data source, a single source of truth.

This isn't just about clean reporting. As Dani wisely noted, the highly anticipated "agentic AI" that every vendor is currently hyping is practically useless without properly governed, centralized data. If your AI doesn't know which system holds the truth, it cannot act effectively on your behalf.

Knowing When to Ask for Help  

Another trait of a mature organization is knowing when to raise a hand and ask for help. Map Communications’ journey with Zoho began around 2021, and they initially worked directly with Zoho's professional services teams, who worked tirelessly across time zones to pull off a complex legacy migration.

However, as they acquired more businesses and faced tighter integration timelines, they didn't hesitate to bring in specialized external implementation partners, like Workflow Academy, to accelerate the process.

As a consultant myself, I always appreciate a leader who recognizes the value of an outside perspective. External partners bring cross-platform experience. They have seen migrations from Salesforce, Zendesk, or Freshdesk, and can help organizations avoid costly architectural mistakes early on. At the end of the day, this is mostly cheaper than running into a sequence of snafus. The key, according to Dani, is ensuring that the vendor provides thorough documentation and cross-training so the internal team isn't left in the dark when it's time for the next iteration.

Past the Honeymoon Stage: Looking to the Future  

Map Communications is well past the "honeymoon stage" with their CRM vendor, entering that mature, long-term marriage phase where continuous improvement is the name of the game. And so far, this marriage seems to be a happy one.

But no software relationship is perfect. When asked for the one missing feature he desperately wants to get from Zoho, Dani didn't hesitate: a unified single sign-on that allows C-suite executives to toggle seamlessly between their multiple, distinct Zoho instances without having to constantly log in and out.

Consider the pressure publicly applied, Zoho!

Ultimately, Map Communications proves that a successful CRM strategy isn't about buying the most expensive system on the market. It’s about rigorous data governance, pragmatic vendor selection, avoiding scope creep, and relentlessly focusing on communicating value to the customer.

Three Key Takeaways for Pragmatic Tech Leaders  

As we wrap up this insightful conversation, a few core themes stand out that any organization evaluating their software architecture should take to heart.

Embrace the 80/20 Rule: Chasing a system that perfectly fulfills 100 percent of your business requirements will lead to over-engineering, scope creep, and bloated budgets. If an off-the-shelf solution meets 80 percent of your needs, accept it, work around the remaining 20 percent, and avoid building costly, complex custom systems on top of it.

Clean Data Precedes AI: The industry is still not stopping to buzz about agentic AI, but as Dani correctly highlighted, AI is completely dependent on having an authoritative, decluttered data source, a single source of truth. Eliminating manual workarounds because copy-pasting of data across systems is truly evil, and harmonizing your core tech stack are absolute prerequisites for any future AI success.

Demand Knowledge Transfer from Partners: Recognizing when you need external help for complex software migrations is a sign of mature leadership. It is a strength, not a weakness. However, when you do bring in outside consultants or vendor implementation teams, you must mandate thorough documentation and cross-training. Your internal team needs to be fully empowered to manage, fix, and iteratively improve the system long after the consultants have rolled off the project.I am already looking forward to checking back in with Dani in the course of the next year to see how Map Communication’s preparations for agentic AI going forward and eventually help the company.

During ZohoDay26, I had the absolute pleasure of sitting down and talking CRM with Julie Lloyd from Acme Brick in beautiful Austin, Texas,. Naturally, the topic of the day was Acme Brick’s fascinating journey into the Zoho ecosystem.

As a CRM analyst and consultant, I've seen countless software deployments crash and burn because organizations focus entirely on the technology rather than the people actually using it. That is why talking with Julie was such a breath of fresh air; her focus is entirely on the human element of Acme Brick’s digital transformation. For those who aren't familiar, Acme Brick isn't just any company; they are the largest US-owned manufacturer of brick. They deal in a wide gamut of materials, including manufactured block, stone, tile, and various other wall cladding. It is a sizeable operation with around 1,700 employees spread across 13 states.

This coming April, Acme Brick is celebrating a its 135th birthday. When a company with that much history decides to overhaul its CRM technology, you know there’s a good story behind it. Even more so, if it is a system replacement story, Julie has been with Acme Brick for two years, and what keeps her up at night is CRM training and ensuring user adoption.

TL;DR

If you do not want to read, here’s the full video interview.

For everyone else, read on.

Having said all this, let's dive into why they made the switch and how they are making it work this time.

The Square Peg, Round Hole CRM Disaster

Before migrating to Zoho, Acme Brick used another CRM system. We won't name names here, but in spite of it coming from a highly reputable vendor, it was a very clunky implementation. Julie described it as a "square peg, round hole" situation. While the tool was a powerful one, it simply did not match their specific business needs and therefore suffered from poor user adoption.

Why? Because it was incredibly click-heavy. A sales rep might have to click 27 times just to input some data or view a specific field. That is simply not tenable. You cannot ask busy sales professionals to spend their precious time working a complicated system. They have better things to do than inputting data while not getting much out of it. Ultimately, the goal of a CRM system is transparency and accountability. Management needs to see what quotes are out there so they can adjust manufacturing or stocking speeds accordingly. But you won't get that transparency if the reps refuse to touch the software.

The Three Traits That Make a CRM a Treat

In my experience, systems either enforce behavior or encourage it. As Julie rightly pointed out, nobody likes to be forced, although imo there is something to be said against using a reasonable carrot and stick approach. She outlined three essential traits that turned their CRM rollout from a nightmare into a treat.

Customizability: Acme Brick is not a tech company; their sales are deeply relational and heavily focused on account management rather than a rigid, step-by-step process. The CRM had to adapt to their relationship-building style, not the other way around.

Intuitive Design: They have highly seasoned reps. Some who have been selling brick at Acme for 35 years or more. While some of them are tech-savvy, others are rather paper-based and cautious about adopting new technology. The Zoho interface won them over because, as Julie said, if you can order from Amazon, you can point and click your way through Zoho.

Management Buy-in: This one is an absolute must. From the executive VP all the way down, management has bought into the system. They are leading discussions, sending messages directly within the tool, and are pulling their own reports instead of demanding standalone spreadsheets from their teams.

Tuning Into Radio Station WIIFM (What's In It For Me?)

Many CRM implementations fail because they are designed to exclusively benefit management. When that happens, not only seasoned salespeople immediately tune into their favorite radio station: WIIFM (what's in it for me?).

Julie’s philosophy here is incredibly pragmatic. A CRM shouldn't just be a strict mandate where reps are threatened with, "If it's not in the CRM, you don't get paid". She actually believes reps shouldn't waste their time tracking tiny, insignificant deals that turn into an administrative time suck. Instead, the real value of the CRM is preventing important details from falling through the cracks. It saves reps from spending 20 minutes hunting through a physical notebook for a three-week-old detail. With Zoho, they can send emails directly from the tool, keeping all correspondence cleanly logged under the relevant opportunity, which is a clear time-saver.

A True IT Partnership

When selecting Zoho from a crowded market, cost was certainly a factor, but a major differentiator was the ability to work directly with Zoho's Enterprise Business Solutions (EBS) team. Acme’s IT department had a bad taste in its mouth from their previous CRM, having dealt with three different implementation partners who had no "skin in the game" and left them with a "take it or leave it" implementation.

With Zoho, the team that implemented Acme’s system is the exact same team providing daily support. Julie noted that they are yet to hear the word "no" from Zoho yet; instead, they get invitations to be beta testers, or "guinea pigs". Currently, they are beta-testing the Graph API integration for Microsoft Outlook. They've also successfully integrated Power BI and industry-specific permitting services that handle commercial and residential builds.

Crawl Before You Run

The system is still very young; Acme Brick is only about two or three months in. They are very much in the "crawl" phase of a "crawl, walk, run" strategy. Julie and two IT staff members serve as the system admins. Julie is happily able to make some system changes herself, like updating drop-down menus, without constantly relying on IT. This shortens turnaround times and has a positive impact on user happiness and adoption.

Looking ahead, Acme is evaluating the Zoho Marketing module. The goal is to capture leads directly from their brick.com website and seamlessly import them into the CRM without incurring massive new implementation costs.

The Honeymoon Phase

Like any relationship, vendor-buyer relationships are much like a marriage; you hope they last a long time. Right now, Acme Brick and Zoho are still in the honeymoon phase. I pushed Julie to tell me the system's biggest flaw or what they didn't get from Zoho to give us a real challenge to discuss.

Her answer? She simply hasn't found the weak link yet. While I always hope for a little dramatic friction to analyze, her confidence that Zoho will handle any future bumps in the road smoothly is unwavering and speaks volumes. As I joked at the end of our chat, hallucinations are for LLMs, not for CRM analysts. I'll take her honest, positive experience at face value and do not doubt it, looking at my own experience with Zoho.

Three Learnings for CRM Success

Looking back at my conversation with Julie, there are three universal lessons any organization should apply to their CRM strategy.

User Adoption Trumps Raw Power: It does not matter how robust a system is or how great the reputation of its vendor is, if your sales team refuses to use it. Acme Brick learned the hard way that a "click-heavy" platform built for a prescriptive sales process is a recipe for failure in a relationship-driven business. A tool must be highly customizable and as intuitive as ordering from Amazon to truly stick.

Always Tune Into "WIIFM": A CRM cannot simply be a mandate or a surveillance tool for management. To win over the users, you have to prove it makes their lives easier. Like preventing vital deal details from falling through the cracks and eliminating 20-minute searches for old notebook scribbles.

True Partnership Beats Transactional Implementation: The difference between a mere vendor and a true partner is ongoing accountability. By working with an implementation team that has "skin in the game" and remains on board for daily support, Acme Brick successfully avoided the frustrating "take it or leave it" trap that plagues so many software rollouts.

ZohoDay 2026 is in the books, and it has again been an intense two days of information and discussions, starting off with some impressive statistics. In time for its 30^th anniversary, Zoho crossed the milestones of one million paying customers and an eye watering 150 million users. All this while not having raised a single dollar of external capital or buying technology or users. The company stays fiercely independent and continues to grow very profitably since it crossed the threshold of an annual revenue of $1bn back in November 2022.

If I wanted to boil this event down to a few key messages, it would be value, independence, platform, and, of course, AI. 

The conference in a nutshell: Value is the result of the smart use of automation with AI that works on top of the corporate system of record, powered by a platform that is built on an independently owned stack. This is also the secret sauce of Zoho, a philosophy that the company follows since its inception. 

And here is how Zoho brings this to work. 

Zoho owns and continuously improves its stack

Coming from the angle of sovereignty, Zoho extends this thought of independence to its customers now in an answer to Raju Vegesna’s not so rhetoric question “what will happen if someone can pull the plug?” on any of your essential systems. All of the sudden, the thought of local deployments or hybrid deployments with cloud apps operating on local data becomes very interesting, valuable, again. It is mitigating risk. According to Vegesna, clients of different sizes are asking for this model. Another part of this equation is the ability to mitigate risk while keeping control as Zoho Corp’s Chief Strategy Officer Vijay Sundaram maintains. Apart from being a business and deployment model, he argues that SaaS brought an institutionalized risk reallocation from the customer to the vendor. 

Customer Risk under a SaaS Model; source Zoho

Part of the price of this reallocation for the customer is ceding control to the vendor, which in turn can become a risk in itself. 

On top of this, the move to more use of AI and agentic systems, along with the proliferation of no-code and low-code systems, which moves control back to customers, is increasing their risk exposure, with all its associated security, compliance, operational and customization risks, as more and more business logic is built by the customer again.

Using its own stack, from hardware to AI, with what Sundaram dubs “the magnificence of the mundane”, the corporate systems of record, at its heart, Zoho offers customers control while moving less risk back to the customer.

The value of being able to mitigate risk, that is hard to quantify comes on top of the value that Zoho offers through owning its stack, therefore being sovereign itself and in control of (most of) its own risk.

Platform play

Zoho regards itself as a technology vendor rather than a business app vendor for quite some time now. Quite rightfully so, as the company builds its own hard- and software stack and as part of it, its own application IaaS and PaaS, to stick to SaaS terms. The problem is that this led to a sprawl of business apps and corresponding fragmentation on the data level, that even a middleware cannot keep up with; not even talking about shadow IT and shadow AI.

The consequence is a chaos of apps, inconsistently connected by various middlewares, these days with an army of (unreliable) agents on top of them. As an example, businesses have deployed 275 according to the 2025 Zylo SaaS Management Index. 

Enterprise software, current state, with agents; source: Zoho

Zoho intends to fix this by using a page from Apple’s iOS platform book. This way, the company wants to be able to not only keep the infrastructure layer clean but also leverage its already existing application foundation by streamlining it. Zoho calls this AppOS. AppOS is intended to have applications built within it, on a shared data foundation, using common business and process models, built-in workflows and automations, etc. In simple terms, AppOS contains everything that is needed to build and run applications and that is not domain specific. It gets enriched by domain specific platforms on which the various apps are built. 

With AppOS, Zoho wants to bridge the gap between the increasing proliferation of apps that gets fueled by AI code generation and the business need to maintain structure. It shall do so by providing a common data structure, a consistent business context and, last but not least, by enforcing standards. According to Mani Vembu, CEO of the Zoho Division of Zoho Corp., transitioning to AppOS will be a seamless experience for customers.

And then there is AI

Let me start with that I found it refreshing that AI was not a centerpiece of the presentations. Actually, Zoho caught some analyst flak for not pushing an AI story aggressively. 

Which they responded to with a strong counter argument. Most vendors bolt AI on top of an unreliable data infrastructure. Zoho wants to do it right and first lay the data foundation and with that what Zoho calls the “unified business context”. This unified business context is built of the combination of designed and discovered information, structured and unstructured data. Based on this context, AI will become more reliable. In addition, it enables Zoho  to offer own foundational LLMs and MoE models that are both, more reliable, more performing, and cheaper to run. Why? Because context, private data and specialized models always outperform generic data that is fed into massive models. With that approach, Zoho puts intelligence in front of the models, thereby avoiding the need for what I’d call “commodity inferences”. Plus, own models enable Zoho to allow for custom training and custom deployment of specialized models. As also a recent HBR report stated, the competitive advantage that businesses have, lies in context, not in the model, in particular not if businesses use the same models. This ties back to the unified business context of AppOS. Plus, inference will become expensive again, when the major LLM vendors switch from an investment mode to a value extraction mode to turn profitable. Combined with an emerging own agent ecosystem, Zoho again can promise to offer customers a high value.

My take

Zoho shows a remarkably consistent strategy that centers around “maniacally focusing on value”, monetary as well as less tangible value like the ability to control or balance risk. 

Given all the economic and regulatory uncertainty that we see these days, this strategy of maniacally focusing on value by the smart use of automation with AI that works on top of the corporate system of record, powered by a platform that is built on an independently owned stack, puts Zoho in a sweet spot. The combination of data, context, and sovereignty ensures this.

Of course, there are companies that can compete with Zoho on the breadth, width and depth of functionality, but not very many. Looking at Zoho’s overall capabilities, there is only Microsoft. Looking at business applications only, we can add Oracle and SAP, maybe ServiceNow soon. In a world that increasingly swings back to – and needs to swing back to – suite thinking, Zoho punches well above its weight. This is not to say that specialists have an important place in the software industry, but consistent and contextual data will become ever more important. 

Are there challenges ahead? Sure as! Zoho has big ambitions, enhancing its software, building out its AI, not to mention getting a deeper foothold in the ERP market, which is a topic that I didn’t cover at all here. And then, there is the topic of implementation cost. The better the price to value ratio of Zoho software becomes, and I’d consider it market leading, the more implementation cost matter. They can outstrip the licensing cost by an order of magnitude. 

Zoho’s Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu cited examples of how efficient software development with the help of AI code generation has become. One of them has been a compiler that two developers could create in 2 – 3 days instead of the 3 months that it would likely take human engineers. This kind of value needs to hit the customer implementation, and fast. 

On top, as also Jon Reed alluded to in his excellent take on ZohoDay 2026, it still needs to be proven that AppOS delivers on flexible customizing while avoiding technical debt.

In closing, as Raju Vegesna said in his speech, customers license not software but peace of mind and not the software, but customer satisfaction is an enterprise software vendor’s ultimate moat.

I tend to agree. And Zoho is well on the way down that route.

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 recent ZohoDay 2025, I had the pleasure of talking to Jaroslaw Pietraszko, CIO for IFFCO Group, about what IFFCO is doing with Zoho, why, and what the outcomes of their Zoho implementation are.

IFFCO is a privately held multinational company that is active in the fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) sector that also has some beauty business and is active in packaging and transportation. The company has its headquarters in Dubai, UAE and has operations in 50+ countries on five continents. The company has more than fifteen thousand employees.

Due to its distributed nature and also multiple ERP systems in the back end, IFFCO – and in particular also IFFCO’s employees – suffered from slow, inconsistent and regularly manual expense management process. This also caused a policy adherence and compliance problem, as reporting was virtually impossible. Only two countries used an Intranet based digital process that still was cumbersome due to the company’s matrix organization. “It was completely manual process. So just imagine that someone from the one category of the businesses has some marketing spend in Indonesia. Line manager sometimes is not aware because it's a matrix reporting. They need to exchange multiple emails between the Indonesia then the finance and the potential marketing from UAE to get this approval and that you can proceed and claim this expense. So, it was very inefficient process. It could take between two to three weeks to get this something approved.”

So, there was very clearly a need for a streamlined solution that could be rolled out globally and that ultimately could cover travel, expenses, and petty cash transactions.

Here you can watch the full conversation with Jarek.

IFFCO ultimately chose Zoho Expense because of its easy-to-use user interface, its adaptability and ability to integrate into the company’s backend systems and Zoho’s motivation to involve itself. With IFFCO being an early enterprise customer, Zoho showed a strong interest in making the project successful.

The initial implementation with a focus on travel and employee expenses happened in the UAE and took around three months. It was followed by a six-month roll-out into the other countries. Due to their higher complexity, petty cash processes were added at a later stage.

The whole process was supported by formulating a new expense management policy that, with some localization, is applicable worldwide. It was a cross-functional project with involvement of HR, finance, and IT. As a rare positive of the pandemic, Covid 19 became an unexpected catalyst for the rollout. It accelerated adoption, facilitated a natural transition to digital processes, and provided a smoother initial implementation phase due to reduced travel volumes.

Overall, the implementation process went pretty smooth. The main challenges were less of technical nature but rather the change management itself plus data accuracy. According to Jarek, “Now the rollout was not the technical challenge; it was change management challenge because at the same time we were introducing the new policy, which sometimes had to be localized.”

Still, some technical challenges, mainly on the interface side, needed to be overcome as well. “We had a bit of hiccups at the beginning with the interfaces to the ERP whenever we are talking about the mainly sending the Pos for through the creation of the Pos and then sending this information to the travel agency but yeah after some time we stabilized it and the inter vendor and inter SI cooperation worked smooth as well”.

However, the main hurdle was and is an operational one: data accuracy in the HR system, as the expense system depends on it. Jarek maintains that “the biggest challenge even which we are facing today is to keep the data updated in the in the primary HR system so if the people are for example shifting between or they are changing the grade whatever is happening with them it should reflect in SuccessFactors as quickly as possible because if Zoho doesn't know this because it's not entered anywhere then the people used to come okay it went for the approval to the to the wrong person.”

But what about outcomes?

Implementing a central expense tool led to significant time and effort savings due to a high degree of automation. The effort went down from half an hour to about two minutes while the collection schedule of the shared service went away totally. “Now just to understand also the benefits even for UAE the people used to for example I'm getting back from the travel. I take my bills; I scan one by one; I'm sending them to my mailbox. Then I need to open the new folder. I need to save each of them and renaming at that point of time from the scan to specific bill, I don't know, taxi, food, whatever. Then I had to open this expense. I had to itemize my expenses, attaching the right expenses, the right attachments, print the report after submission, clap all this together, and put that into the cabinet. And every two weeks, the shared services used to collect that, and only then the reimbursement was happening. Nowadays the people used to travel, they’re taking the photos on the spot on the go when they are in travel, and when they reach the, you know, the home location, they just mark this, this, this, this against this trip. Thank you. So, you do everything in an electronic format. So, reduction even for the business expense got from half an hour to two minutes.”

This results in much faster reimbursements with its obvious impact on employee satisfaction, which is something that Jarek is quite passionate about. “So, this is the massive benefit, and we have to also keep in mind that when the people used to spend their own money, we are not holding them right now for two weeks or something like that. When they claim and it's approved, then everything afterwards happens automatically. The booking in the downstream system happens automatically. The request for to the bank for the payment reimbursement happens automatically. When the confirmation of the reimbursement comes to the one of our ERPs, we are also sending this information back to Zoho. So, the people who are claiming, they don't have to be users in one of those ERPs. They use Expense, and they have a full visibility what's happening.”

In addition, there is better compliance “obviously when you don't have that in a digital format, how you can ensure that the policy is deployed, how that the particular country is compliant”.

The necessary harmonization of the spend categories brought better data visibility into the process. Spend categories are held in Zoho Expense, which also reduces the complexity of the ERP interfaces. This, quite naturally, led to the use of Zoho Analytics, which helps in identifying spending patterns.

The success of the project has brought it considerable internal recognition. “Zoho Expense has been, this implementation was cross functional effort between the HR, finance, it was the project which was identified as the biggest innovation delivered in 21/22, I think for IFFCO group as general”.

Key takeaways

IFFCOs transition from a manual to a globally harmonized process with Zoho Expense resulted in a significantly reduced user effort and a dramatically reduced overall processing time.

The user-friendly system and automated processes that allow for easy compliance and fast reimbursements should have a positive impact on employee satisfaction and it improves productivity.

Implementing Zoho Expense increased IFFCOs ability to deploy and enforce company-wide expense policies while the digital process enables better monitoring and control of expenses for all parties.

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 a technology enthusiast. This leader set a goal to eliminate spreadsheets and to only use a digital platform, which helped drive user adoption of Zoho CRM within that division.” This sent the clear message that the implementation is not yet another implementation that doesn’t matter but that it is important for the company. In addition, this strategy facilitates doing a further roll-out on the back of a successful implementation (or limits the losses in case of a failure).

Second, Blue Star answered the important question “what is in it for me” that the sales reps have. The sales teams’ concerns were mitigated by explaining and later showing how unproductive time would be reduced by the CRM via eliminating spreadsheets and significantly simplifying visit reports. This way, sales reps spend less time with administrative parts and instead can do more of what they really want – spend time in the field with their customers. “So, no more filling out of spreadsheets, no more creation of visit reports, uh all the manual stuff which they used to get into. We said you don't need to do part of it will be done on by the app and part of it you will have to do it on the app, and it will format everything for a review.”

The sales teams seem to have understood and believed this. What also helped was that the new system was no more referred to as a CRM system but as a “sales organizer”. This contributed to positioning the system as a helper instead of a monitoring tool.

“So I think they realized that as we are growing their unproductive workload is going to grow even further and here is a tool which will help me reduce my unproductive time so that I have more time to spend in the market with the customer and I don't have to worry about all the administrative tasks which I need to do in the back end.”

Instead, the system digitalized a good part of the workload. The system minimizes the need for input into a visit report to five or six structured fields, automates the summarization, reporting and analysis, helping both, the sales reps and back-office staff who are relieved of the cumbersome consolidation of reports that came in via Excel spreadsheets. In addition, this enables the system to draft a route plan for the sales reps, facilitating their planning. In Pahwa’s words “that took out a sizable chunk of admin work for the users as well as the supporting staff who were attached to the users”. And this is also where Blue Star sees the way ahead with the sales organizer. Next steps include the evaluation of AI powered speech to text technologies to further reduce efforts. Instead of typing, sales reps will then be able to dictate visit summaries etc. This input then shall be converted to text and then automatically populate the CRM.

Of course, users have to pay a price for this, which is mandatory use of the system. Managers won’t accept reports in the form of spreadsheets anymore and require that all pertinent data is entered into the sales organizer. Basically, the approach is that “if it ain’t in the system, it doesn’t exist”. This again is facilitated by offering all sales reps and managers personalized dashboards that give real-time insight into budget vs. actual sales, also thanks to an integration into the SAP ERP system.

One could say that this is a kind of a carrot and stick approach, however one with a considerably sized carrot and a fairly small, yet effective, stick. Especially since Blue Star plans to make work with the system even easier and more beneficial for the sales reps.

The result? Success. “… this worked well and we had near 100% adoption with that business division so much so that their pipeline of leads I think went up by about 35% and they were able to attract a larger business you know under their fold because for us in the in the commercial air conditioning segment the more leads you have the more chances are for the conversion and growth of business. So that worked well for them.”

This, in turn, caused the other divisions to get on board, or as Pahwa says “When this was a success in one business division it started having a rub-off effect across the organization and as we speak today the entire sales organization is live and 100% adopting the my sales organizer which is the Zoho CRM.”

In summary, Blue Star worked with a smart combination of decisions that turned out to be a winning strategy to achieve the goal of 100% user adoption and to drive business through it.

• With Zoho CRM, Blue Star chose a flexible tool.
• With Zoho, Blue Star found a partner that was willing to co-create a solution with them.
• Blue Star promised and delivered significant value for the sales reps and not only for their managers.
• Blue Star moved away from the term CRM, which was a burnt and positioned the tool as a helper, naming it sales organizer.
• There is executive buy in to the solution with not only sales reps being mandated to use it but also managers and executives wanting to use a system.

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 keep up and it's not even that good because at the end you do it once a week.”

In short, Selectra urgently required an analytics solution to automate the reporting requirements.

Here, you can watch the complete conversation with Adrian.

Selectra investigated a number of possible solutions including Power BI, Tableau and Metabase. Being a Zoho CRM customer the company ultimately settled on Zoho Analytics as it is well integrated and offers an easy-to-understand UI. In Castellanos words, “We had different options PowerBI, Tableau; we were already using a little bit of Metabase the open-source BI tool. The engineers love it in the company, but it requires a lot of knowledge, and we choose Zoho for two reasons. First, the native integration with CRM, which has been our CRM since 2015 and was where the big majority of our data was stored. Well, the having a native integration with it made it great. It was one headache less and making transition really fast and implementation super-fast. And the second one was that the UI is not simple, but easy to understand. Drag and drop. Take it, put it, you have it everything.”

The positive working relationship with Zoho helped to make this decision, too. “We have always had the feeling that they hear our feedback, and they implement solutions for that, or in case they couldn't implement it because maybe it was too specific or whatever. At least they were interested in looking for workarounds and other options.”

Although the integration with Zoho CRM made the initial implementation easy and fast, Selectra encountered and overcame a number of issues during and after the implementation project. It was far from a slam dunk. Specifically, the replication of the CRM data into Zoho Analytics and the recreation of the existing reports took considerable time, which partly had to do with a lack of data standardization. This lack of standards became apparent during the recreation of the reports, when the team found out that different countries and verticals measured KPIs differently, which led to inconsistencies in the reporting. “When I started migrating reports and getting the external reports and trying to replicate them into Zoho, I failed terribly doing that because I was not matching the same data that those reports were providing and I realized that that was just because we didn't have a standard, we didn't have a standardization of KPIs and how to measure things, and each vertical each country was measuring in their own way. We had to actively establish the standard.”

Of course, this also led to trust issues, in addition to resistance to change. Overcoming them took some effort for training and documentation and, most of all, transparency and continuous communication.

The biggest problem emerged after about a year. With increasing reporting requirements, it became clear that the CRM data structures didn’t give the necessary granularity of data. “And what happened afterwards, like one year after, is that no one in the company was happy with Zoho. It was not providing the data that they required. We realized that our CRM data structure was really bare bones, and we needed something more. So, we went through this process of transformation; we are still in that process of transformation in some verticals because it's really difficult. It's a big project.”

Lastly, the increased use of Zoho Analytics showed that the management of the solution became an issue. With approximately 150 dashboards with between three and twenty different reports, it became difficult to maintain control over the workspace. This has been addressed with Zoho and is being solved.

The outcomes

Zoho Analytics is well in use now, in spite of its initial and ongoing challenges. The time to create new reports has gone down considerably and Selectra achieved a near-time reporting. This allows for faster and better decision making.

Due to the initial scope of the project, Selectra also gained an additional benefit due to the need of KPI standardization across regions. Zoho Analytics has become the single source of truth for Selectra.

Key takeaways

Selectra successfully transferred its reporting requirements from Excel to Zoho Analytics. Thanks to its native integration into Zoho CRM, the initial setup went fast.

It is important to plan and prepare the setup of an analytics solution very carefully, to ensure company-wide definitions of KPIs.

Analytics is only as good as the underlying data. An analytics project has an impact on the source systems. Increasing reporting requirements can make it necessary to have more complex source data structures.

Change management and user training are key activities. Constant communication, documentation, and user involvement are important for project success.