Today, Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, announced the latest version of its low-code offering, Zoho Creator Platform, an all-in-one solution that bridges the gap between business users and IT teams by providing a low-code solution-building experience regardless of technical know-how. Organizations currently face soaring demand for new business software, but existing low-code platforms for business users only facilitate basic app building, lacking the sophistication needed to develop scalable, enterprise-ready end-to-end tools. Existing solutions on the market that address those needs are tuned specifically for savvy users who possess the complex, technical understanding of complicated development processes. Existing solutions in the market designed specifically for business users facilitate only basic app building, lacking the complexity needed to develop end-to-end tools, which allow organizations to scale and ensure centralized governance.
Addressing the needs of both business users and IT teams, Zoho Creator Platform supports all levels to build, manage, integrate, and analyze for a complete low-code experience, enabling 10X faster deployment than any other solution on the market. Democratizing access to low-code development tools allows IT and business users to work in tandem to create and deploy apps that are highly customized, while minimizing common interoperability, permissions, and governance challenges.
The Zoho Creator Platform integrates digital data and processes to facilitate the creation of truly agile solutions for business users and IT teams alike. Business developers can now easily build scalable low-code solutions which include apps, integrations, analytics, and process automation without heavy dependency on IT teams or time-consuming training. For IT stakeholders, the Platform now provides deeper controls around governance and management, without compromising automation, data-driven insights, customization, and the ability to affect revenue and growth. Together, business users and IT can quickly deploy secure, dynamic solutions built to auto-scale, so that organizations can focus on solving business problems and pursue new opportunities.
Key areas of innovation in the new Creator Platform include:
Expand App Building to Solution Building
Unified Solution Builder – Create, integrate, analyze, and manage custom business solutions at scale from a single dashboard. Seamlessly switch between different elements, with deep interoperability between capabilities, and in-built guardrails for IT teams to drive enterprise-wide citizen development programs.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Zoho’s intelligent AI assistant (Zia) now enables developers to import data from anywhere, cleanse and transform with one click, build data models, and automatically detect data relationships via Smart Import. AI tasks such as predictive analytics, keyword extraction, sentiment analysis, OCR, and object detection are built into the drag-and-drop user interface for easy deployment.
Process Blueprinting – This intuitive drag-and-drop builder graphically constructs an online replica of a business process by specifying each step, assigning responsibilities across stakeholders, and automating actions based on pre-set conditions. Users can now identify bottlenecks and have clarity to facilitate scalability for evolving business needs.
Enhanced Serverless Functions – Developers can now write, store, and execute reusable code blocks in Zoho Creator Platform using Deluge, Java, or Node.js. These functions encourage IT and business teams to work together to build scalable and easily maintainable enterprise-ready apps faster.
Build a Connected Ecosystem of Solutions for a Seamless Experience
Unified Data Modeling (UDM) – Unchecked data points, varied data formats, and evolving app landscapes add layers of difficult-to-solve complexities to data integration, resulting in sub-optimal business results. Universal cloud modeling is now included to help developers establish secure data transfer by automating data integration protocols with unified data architecture and over 650 plug-and-play connectors to make data integration easier for users.
Integration Status Dashboard – Users have complete visibility on how well each integration operates with the new Integration Status Dashboard. Status Dashboard provides key findings on recent executions, success and failure stats, and top connections facilitating early error detection and resolution to enable organizations to discover errors and resolve them quicker.
Embedded BI and Analytics Engine – An industry-first, full-fledged business intelligence and analytics engine is now included in the Zoho Creator Platform, enabling users to derive business insights from the data residing in their applications without worrying about bringing another subscription into the fold. High-end BI functionalities like predictive analytics, data alerts, what-if analysis, data blending, and conversational analytics are all now supported on the low-code platform.
Increased Control for IT with End-to-End ADLM
Environments – Developers can now launch solutions in different environments of choice-development, staging (testing), or production with a single click based on the readiness of the solution. This allows users to add features continuously or make changes without disturbing the existing app in production. The environments also support role-based access to help business developers simulate user-specific experience validation.
Centralized Governance – To help IT manage low-code development, features such as granular role-based access controls, comprehensive audit trails and backup options, application IDE, dashboards to view and manage users, billing dashboard, personalization options such as localization, branding customization, and more, are now available in the low-code platform.
Integrated Communication and Collaboration Aid – Often, business developers get stuck in the build phase with minor obstacles, especially when new to the platform. In order to enhance communication and collaboration, integrated communication enables messaging, sending files, sharing screens, and the ability to make audio and video calls.
Zoho Creator Platform Pricing
Pricing starts at $35 CAD per employee. For comprehensive pricing information, please visit: https://www.zoho.com/creator/pricing.html
Zoho Celebrating Major Milestones in Growth, Investments, and R&D
Posted in Commentary with tags Zoho on July 26, 2022 by itnerdZoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, announced achieving a rate of 38% year-over-year growth and surpassing the 80 million user mark. In addition to ongoing global expansion, the company continues to grow its product portfolio and make investments in automotive, robotics, and health care technologies. Zoho also celebrated opening 59 new global hub-and-spoke offices in rural areas and small cities over the last two years to expand into new markets and further support local communities.
The announcement, made at Zoho’s annual analyst summit, affirms the company’s commitment to developing resilient solutions that support all businesses, many of which have been negatively impacted by recent economic disruption.
Investments
Zoho has made strategic investments in the areas of automotive, robotics, and health care technology to support the development of and access to advanced solutions by those in need. These include:
Innovation and R&D Diversity
Zoho’s investment and innovation philosophies are rooted in the research and development of powerful, unified tools that are customizable to any organization’s distinct business needs and vision. More than 60% of the company’s workforce is devoted to engineering, both in the development of new technologies and building ways for those apps to complement and integrate with one another. To date, Zoho has developed more than 55 apps, having grown from 40 only two years ago. Though the scope of our offerings continues to increase, our price does not, and we remain committed to affordability—offering both free and paid versions of every product—and delivering software tailored to the distinct needs of small and medium-sized businesses.
Zoho’s Proven Growth Philosophy: Transnational Localism
Zoho continues to celebrate global expansion through its Transnational Localism effort, first introduced in early 2020 as a means to create self-reliant local communities and economies. Since then, the initiative has grown to include new global offices, local hiring, partnerships with local organizations and government bodies to lower the technology adoption barrier for businesses, upskilling courses in association with educational institutes, language localization including RTL support for languages like Arabic, and local pricing for several countries. The offices opened as part of Zoho’s Transnational Localism efforts follow a hub-and-spoke model, with larger offices serving as hub to several dozen small spoke offices located in rural areas and towns around the world. This method of growth allows employees to stay in their hometowns and contribute to their local community while working for a leading, globally recognized technology company.
The company improved access to both software and localized Zoho support, opening 59 hub-and-spoke offices in the last two years. In addition to aggressive expansion into new territories and markets, including Canada, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, Zoho has announced plans to add 100 new small-scale offices in rural districts across India in the next few years.
Zoho celebrated impressive regional growth, with headcount up 300% outside of India since the start of 2020. It also aims to hire at least 2,000 employees across engineering, technology, and product development, particularly software developers, quality assessment engineers, web developers, designers, product marketers, writers, technical support engineers, and sales executives within the next year. The recent openings of Zoho’s McAllen and New Braunfels, TX, offices in April 2022 and December 2021, respectively, exemplifies this mission. Since its ribbon-cutting, the McAllen office now hosts 40+ employees from surrounding communities, and has maintained an ambitious hiring cadence. The New Braunfels office has added more than 30 employees since its opening.
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