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.

Zoho held its annual ZohoDays outside of Austin in the beautiful Horseshoe Bay resort. While this is a good way away from Austin proper, it also gave the opportunity to have long and good conversations with Zoho execs, customers and fellow analysts outside of the conference and meeting rooms. And guess what, this is exactly what happened. 

Big time kudos to Sandy Lo with her amazing team for organizing this and of course also to all the Zoho execs, including the newly minted Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu, Zoho’s new CEO Mani Vembu, Tony Thomas, Raju Vegesna, Vijay Sundaram and many more, who all were more than willing to share information and, even more importantly, get feedback. The latter is not something that we analysts take for granted.

Besides the usual – and important – state of the business update by Vijay Sundaram, the event revolved around three main topics

·      AI

·      Enterprise and partner strategy

·      Industry strategy

As Zoho is privately held, we are not given details, nor at liberty to divulge as much as we learned. So, suffice it to say, that Zoho grows healthily in the value chain from unpaid users to customers, to revenue to retention. The company announced having hit the milestone of $1bn US in revenue already in 2022 and is growing healthily in all of these categories while being healthily profitable.

With this out of the way, let’s have a look at the main topics.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial Intelligence is one of the main reasons for Sridhar Vembu focusing on technology. He was very hands-on before and can do so even more now, especially on the backdrop of DeepSeek showing that after all reasoning is a commodity, combined with the fact that it is hard to discern what LLMs learn or unlearn. This creates unstructured output and therefore the need for humans verifying the output, which drastically reduces the productivity gains ones hopes to see. His solution approach is to look at prompt engineering and RAG as input engineering and to make AI create “machine checkable inferences” on business data, which has a couple of distinct advantages. Business data resides in databases, so it is known how to change or delete it. Second, it can be validated automatically, as it is structured. The validation of structured output is generally a solved problem, too – known as a compiler. Open problems are the question how to generate this structured output in non-programming cases and the then necessary output engineering which returns the appropriate answer outside the scope of programming. I am looking forward to some creative solutions by Zoho. With its contextual intelligence, Zoho already seems on this way. 

Having said this, Zoho can’t stay out of the agent game. One of the core differences to most other companies is that Zoho comes from a use case angle and looks at AI something that gets invoked in context and is a helper in the background, instead of being pushed to the front where it almost becomes an end instead of a means. A great example for this is Zoho’s own agent Ask Zia, which is imbedded in many, if not most of Zoho’s apps. In combination with Zoho’s already available and steadily growing number of hundreds of contextual AI use cases, this becomes both, a very powerful agent as well as a foundation for the creation for more agents, if they are provided as skills. These skills can only be as good as the underlying data and, going forward, the models that are available to work with. And here, Zoho is in a quite comfortable position. The company owns the complete software stack of its applications and hence can evolve its underlying “database” into a data lakehouse that holds data from structured to unstructured data and has the ability to ingest data from connected apps. Together with its already existing data cleaning technology, the ability to create new agents and the ability to connect to self-hosted as well as externally hosted LLMs, this is a strong value proposition. This is especially true as security and privacy are an integral part of Zoho’s DNA. 

Enterprise and Partner Strategy

Zoho has a firm foothold in the SMB market and for some years now is setting up the structures, processes, and messaging that are needed to better address the enterprise market. The company has already won a good number of enterprise accounts worldwide and across various industries. From a scaling angle, the user numbers in these accounts go into the six digits. Which tells that Zoho’s software scales.

Some learnings include that while many requirements are similar, there are differences by industry and region, and this is where the platform and partner strategies come into play.

Zoho is a platform vendor and starts to position itself as such, as opposed to the current messaging that positions the company as a multi-application vendor. On top of this, and as a realization of not every large business being created equal, Zoho places a domain architecture that is roughly taken from enterprise architecture frameworks on top of this. While this is an interesting positioning that caters to different use cases, it is also a difficult one, as it easily becomes quite technical and complicated. As the platform architecture is described right now, it places many elements that one would expect as part of a platform inside domain platforms that sit on top of a more generic platform. While this makes sense in an overall architecture that offers different customizing and enhancement tools for different applications, It might be easier to understand for customers to only place applications in domains and keep the development tools as part of the general platform. The general platform is needed, anyways. As a consequence, it might be easier to digest to speak of domain specific application families that integrate into each other and with the ones of other families.

Industry Strategy

Zoho regards verticals as a key driver for growth, for both Zoho itself but also for partners. This is based on the realization that there are plenty of underserved verticals and micro verticals that all need tightly integrated applications to build solutions. While the creation of industry solutions requires the creation of industry-specific apps as part of the suite, it also requires the integration with vertical-specific apps. No single vendor can deliver it all. Instead, this requires the ability to extend a horizontal platform to support vertical platforms, or rather solutions. As you could read in the enterprise strategy section above, Zoho has this horizontal platform.

On top of this technological issue, it requires the ability to build an industry solution that actually solves a problem – instead of one that is in search of its problem. A very good approach for this is to co-create solutions with a meaningfully large customer. This ensures two things, first that the solution actually becomes meaningful and not something that is specific to this customer, and second it gives credentials. The challenge is obvious: it is necessary to first convince this charter customer that one is able to create the solution at reasonable cost in a reasonable timeframe. 

This is exactly, what Zoho is doing. Having a reasonable size itself, a strong collaborative culture and, what is more, the technology to do this.

To scale this concept across industries, this ability needs to be made available to partners as well. This is what Zoho is doing as well. By enabling partners to build vertical solutions for smaller or micro verticals, Zoho will be able to scale the own business faster by offering them a sustainable business niche. Part of this is, of course, that partners can be reasonably sure that Zoho will not invade this niche. This is something that other vendors do; and is something that makes the investment decision for partners hard. They simply cannot compete with the ecosystem owner. 

What Zoho does instead, is offer partners the tools to build integrated industry solutions and to make them available to a global audience via the Zoho ecosystem. This way Zoho becomes more successful by making partners successful by making their customers successful. To achieve this, Zoho will make a Vertical Studio available to partners in March. The Vertical Studio will enable partners to build vertical-specific scalable multi-tenant apps that seamlessly integrate with other Zoho apps. Together, these deliver an industry solution.

Outside-in thinking at its best, and a true win-for-all. 

Bringing it all together

Zoho and Zoho customers have told a strong and coherent story during the ZohoDay 2025 event. It is one of the best and credible AI and digital agent story around, especially when combining current execution including the upcoming own LLM, own hosting and strong privacy focus.

Zoho has learned some very interesting lessons from its own endeavor into enterprise and industry territory. The best one being in my mind to “open source” its learning and to make process and tools available to partners, so that they can build industry solutions fast. This way, micro verticals can get developed and partners get what I would call a safe harbor with the promise to carve themselves a niche and owning a specialized domain. This message can only become stronger if Zoho decides to explicitly tell partners which domains Zoho will not actively engage. This increases trust further and makes it easier for partners, ISVs or SIs, to invest into creating IP.

A topic that is of importance in this regard is the one of regional partners. These fit better into the strategy of transnational localism as the global SIs and they bring relevant industry expertise. In addition, they are often more trusted than the global SIs while being able to offer near- and offshoring services that allow them to compete on price if necessary.

What I would call the “weakest link” in this good story is the messaging towards enterprise architecture and enterprise readiness. Not to be taken wrong: Zoho is enterprise ready. However, it is incredibly difficult to put the dimensions ‘SMB vs. enterprise’, ‘business domains’, and ‘industry’ into a short and succinct narrative, let alone an easy-to-consume slide. Do I have the perfect answer? No, I don’t. But I strongly believe that Zoho has the smarts and the arts to create this slide.

It was a good event, with helpful information, and I am glad to see Zoho on a continued trajectory of success. Functionally, there are only few companies that can deliver on a similar or bigger scope, culturally, there is none.

_{Disclosure: Zoho covered all cost for me attending ZohoDay 2025. Still, all points of view expressed in this post are mine and not influenced by Zoho personnel in any way}.

The news

On February 7 and 8 2024, Zoho held its annual ZohoDay conference, along with a pre-conference get together and an optional visit to SpacX’s not-too-far-away Starbase. Our guide, who went by Chief, and is probably best described as a SpaceX-paparazzi was full of facts and anecdotes, which made the visit very interesting although we couldn’t enter Starbase itself.

The event was jam-packed with 125 analysts, 17 customer speakers, and of course Zoho staff for us analysts to talk to. This was a chance we took up eagerly.

This time, the event took place in MacAllen, TX, instead of Austin, TX. The reason behind this is once more Zoho’s ruralization strategy, transnational localism.

Which gives also one of the main themes of the event. It was more about understanding Zoho than about individual products, although Zoho disclosed some roadmaps. More about understanding Zoho in a second.

The second main theme was customer success and testimonials. Instead of bombarding us with presentations ad infinitum, Sandy Lo and her team did an amazing job of organizing a series of panels with customers talking about – and being questioned about – their use of Zoho products. And questioned they were. In what cannot be taken for granted, they gave very candid answers, making a learning opportunity out of the event.

The third main theme was the “state of the business” session, as usual presented by Zoho’s Chief Strategy Officer Vijay Sundaram. As Zoho is a privately held business, this information is largely under NDA. So, suffice it to say that Zoho is continuously growing across a variety of metrics including users, paying customers, and revenue. You may remember, that Zoho reported annual revenues exceeding $1 billion back in September 2022. The company is profitable; it is highly diversified across products, industries, regions and customer size. Zoho attributes this to living three core values: financial prudence, customer focus, and social conscience.

Which brings me back to the first core theme: Transnational localism and CEO Sridhar Vembu’s keynote. In summary, he starts off with explaining why Zoho owns its complete tech stack and why the offering is that wide: it is financial prudence, which gives the long breath that is needed to survive in the competition with the established mega vendors. He showcases this with Zoho Mail, Zoho’s financial software and Zoho’s productivity/office suite. All of these succeed in mature markets because Zoho is also playing what Vembu calls “the long game”, which includes owning the IP of the whole stack. He maintains that the average SaaS company doesn’t have the “differentiated tech that the giants covet” and therefore are dependent on the mega vendors.

In essence, he explains that most software vendors extract capital, resources, and people from where they “reside”. In consequence, they concentrate and accumulate in few pockets. This causes harm.

Based on this insight, he presents the distinctly different Zoho model with its economics. Instead of pulling people and capital from regions, Zoho invests into regions by moving there and leveraging the services of regional businesses and, more importantly, working with the people where they live – instead of forcing them to go somewhere else. Zoho calls this “rural revival”, which started in South India and gets progressively applied and adapted in other regions – like MacAllen. Rural revival has four focus areas:

• supporting education,
• providing jobs, directly or indirectly by sourcing locally,
• fostering health via organic farms, clinics, yoga camps, health awareness
• improving the environment via e.g., water supply, trees, renewable energy.

This is not altruistic but helps lowering Zoho’s cost while increasing the own ability to tap into a pool of educated people. Case in point: More than 90 percent of Zoho Schools of Learning graduates have turned into Zoho employees – hitting the ground running with competitive salaries after graduation. During education, students receive a stipend. There is no tuition.

The bigger picture

In this time and age, we see an increasing concentration on platforms, driven by the cloud and fast-evolving technology. Many business application vendors have realized this and are using the term platform to increase their perceived relevance. Most of these vendors, however, are highly depending on platform services that are provided by only a few IaaS and PaaS players. Applications become more and more a thin logic layer set on top of these services. Combined with a “grow fast” mentality, this leads to a vicious circle – or rather a virtuous one, if you are one of these IaaS- and PaaS players.

My analysis and point of view

I have already written about how Zoho combines capitalism and doing right to society coincide. During ZohoDay 2024, Sridhar Vembu presented an evolved version of transnational localism, or at least dug deeper into his vision. In the course of his speech, he actually sketched a new economic model that is not based on scarcity, but on what I want to call abundance, lacking a better term. It bases on the recognition that an economic imbalance has arisen that concentrates the income of production in the hand of a few instead of those who actually consume the product. His way is using technology to be where people are, creating opportunities for them, instead of providing opportunities at centralized places only. This way, companies can operate at lower cost while tapping into more talent. Company and people, in turn spend parts of their income regionally, which benefits the whole regional ecosystem, probably even creates one. This reduces economic imbalances, revives the regions or second and third tier cities, for that matter, and benefits the company. Zoho is a very profitable business.

In essence, what Sridhar Vembu describes is a kind of a circular economy.

This economic model works. Zoho is the living proof. And Zoho is the business that Sridhar Vembu essentially uses to test some of the ideas behind this vision. And to be able to test this vision, the company must stay profitable. And it does. It does so by leveraging its own technology to increase its own productivity and gives back some of the gains via great products at a very reasonable price point. This includes the addition of new non-trivial capabilities like AI at no additional cost. Why? Because these capabilities are part of the product.

There aren’t many vendors to state it that way, as it cuts off a potential additional revenue stream.

Now, the big question for me is whether – or how far – this economic model scales, or rather, what its inhibitors are, and how these inhibitors can be contained. One inhibitor is obvious: greed. “Greed is good” is the (simplification of the) mantra that we all heard Gordon Gekko utter in the drama Wall Street. And there are people who live this.

It surely works out for Zoho, as evidenced by the company’s success. As for a scale-out, only time will tell.

Till then, I am very convinced that Zoho will continue to provide high value to its customers through its strong outside-in approach to success. Customers  have a combination of choice and flexibility. Case in point: Zoho One, which is Zoho’s premier bundle subscription covering around 55 apps across sales, marketing, HR, finance, productivity, collaboration. A significant number of Zoho customers opted for this solution. And of these, a whopping 60 percent are using more than 20 of the apps that it covers.

I am convinced that Zoho will continue to build and sell a very relevant, competitive, and ever-improving set of solutions with a smart bundling strategy, and at a highly attractive price point.

Zoho is truly playing the long game.