Last week I was fortunate enough to attend Zohos flagship conference in Sydney, Zohoholics.
The last Zoholics held in Australia was in 2019! The world was then turned upside down by the pandemic, so the excitement and energy to attend an in-person conference was high!
Zoholics is a special event where Zoho reveal their road maps, future app concepts and run product specific focus sessions! Its also a great opportunity to connect with Zoho customers and Zoho partners from across Australia and New Zealand.
In this short article I’ll highlight my takeaways and experiences.
Zoho is growing. Fast!
Something that should be comforting and exciting for all Zoho customers and partners is that Zoho Corporation is constantly and consistently growing! The global software company is now a billion dollar (USD) company! Reaching the revenue milestone in mid 2022.
This milestone is especially impressive as Zoho is a completely private company with no external funding.
The Zoho platform is used by over 80 million users worldwide and this number is growing by 35% year on year. Further to this Zoho is growing very rapidly in Australia and New Zealand and is increasingly becoming a solution that Aussie businesses rely on daily.
To compliment their growth in Australia, Zoho are focusing on growing and expanding a head office in Adelaide, South Australia.
Zoho is backing partners
The Zoho partner ecosystem is flourishing and as a partner its very refreshing to know Zoho care about their partners success. This is not always the experience when partnering with large software vendors.
Zoho have expanded their partner team to provide even more support for Zoho Partners as well as adding additional criteria to their partner tiers to reflect more accurately the experience and expertise of the partner channel.
The dedication to the partner channel is a win-win for customers who are looking to an partner to assist with their adoption and implementation of Zoho applications.
Unification Focus
If I was to pick one overarching message from Zoholics 2022 its definitely ‘Unification’.
Zoho has a vast array of applications that deliver various outcomes, most integrate in some way and there is also some cross over of functionality. While the large list of applications is impressive, it can also present challenges for those businesses that are using multiple applications, especially from a user-experience perspective.
Zoho are investing heavily in Zoho One unification by creating new user experiences and interfaces that allow users to access multiple apps and their functions from a single user interface.
A great example of this is ‘tasks’. Tasks can be created in many Zoho applications, CRM, Projects, People, Desk etc. The unified user interface brings all tasks into one location and allows tasks to be managed from a central interface! Yay!
Zoho Marketing Automation 2.0
Zohoholics is always packed with snippets and previews of upcoming changes and improvements to Zoho applications, but the one that stood out the most to me was Marketing Automation 2.0
Zoho Marketing Automation is a relatively new app in the suite, allowing marketing professionals to build out omni-channel marketing campaigns, plan their schedules and assign marketing tasks to team members.
Up until now there has always been some confusion as to where the product fits between the other Zoho applications such as Zoho Social and Zoho Campaigns.
Marketing Automation 2.0 clears this up. Essentially if you are just after email marketing, stick with Zoho Campaigns, if you want to market across multiple channels, Email, SMS, Social etc. Then Marketing Automation 2.0 is the way forward.
The 2.0 version also has a great UI overhaul as well and you can request beta access today!
