The IT Nerd

Zoho 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:

• An investment in Silicon Valley-based smart electric utility vehicles and powertrains manufacturer Boson, which focuses on light utility vehicles (LUVs). Boson’s initial focus is on farming, and Zoho shares that focus as it expands into rural areas across the globe.
• An investment in electric motorcycle company Ultraviolette Automotive in partnership with TVS Motor Company, an India-based motorcycle manufacturer. The combined investment totals roughly $15 million and will support the launch of a new, high-performance electric two-wheel vehicle slated for release in 2022.

• A $5 million investment in Voxelgrids, an Indian startup that builds Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scanners. This is being used to foster development of deep technological capabilities and intellectual property (IP) in the country.
• Forming a consortium of local technology companies based in the Kongu region of India. Through this initiative, Zoho will make a capital investment to set up centers in the region focusing on the research and development of critical technologies for capital goods manufacturing, like machine tools, industrial automation software, and production process know-how.
• A $2.5 million investment in Genrobotics, an Indian startup building robotics and AI-powered solutions for social issues such as hazardous working conditions. Zoho’s investment will assist Genrobotics in its mission to eradicate manual scavenging in India and provide safety and dignity to workers in the sanitation and oil and gas industries.

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.

A newly released survey by Zoho Corporation – the Zoho SMB Outlook Survey – reveals that Canadian small and medium-sized business leaders are optimistic about their company’s prospects. 

The survey – which queried 750 business people across Canada – found that 66.7% of respondents are optimistic about the next six months, with 74.2% of those surveyed forecasting upwards of 20-percent growth. This positive outlook stems, in part, from productivity, as more than three-quarters of respondents expressed satisfaction with their output.

Key Survey Findings:

Productivity

• 77.7% of respondents are satisfied with productivity
  • 83.9% of Quebec’s respondents are satisfied 
  • 73.7% of Alberta’s respondents are satisfied

Optimism

• 66.7% of businesses are moderately to very optimistic about the next 6 months
  • 14.8% very optimistic; 20.8% moderately optimistic; and 31.1% optimistic
  • 71.4% of Quebec’s respondents are optimistic
  • 64% of Ontario’s citizens are optimistic

• 39.1% expect their business to grow by 1-10% during the next six months
  • 51.3% of Albertan respondents anticipate growth of 1-10%
  • 32.1% of respondents in Quebec anticipate growth of 1-10%

• 22.5% expect their business to grow by 11-20% during the next six months
  • 26.8% of respondents in Quebec anticipate growth of 11-20%
  • 15.8% of Albertan respondents anticipate growth of 11-20%

• 12.6% expect their business to grow by 20+% during the next six months
  • 15.8% of Albertan respondents anticipate growth of 20% or more
  • 14.3% of respondents in Quebec anticipate growth of 20% or more

Hiring/Retention

• 42.4% of businesses are hiring and 52.7% are neither hiring nor laying people off
  • Only 4.9% anticipate layoffs

• 42.5% have struggled to retain employees

• The majority of respondents have retained more flexible work options, with hybrid work accounting for 36.8% and at-home work accounting for 29.7%. Only 33.5% of respondents are working in-office.
  • 39.3% of Quebec’s respondents have a hybrid workplace model and 21.4% work from home; 39.3% work in the office
  • However, 53.9% of Albertans work in the office, while 32.9% use a hybrid workplace and 13.2% work at home

Return To Workplace / Mask Mandates     

• 64.5% of businesses have already returned to the office, while 13.6% are planning to return in the Fall
  • In Alberta, 81.6% of respondents have returned to the office while only 58% Quebec’s respondents have gone back

• 38.4% of all respondents will maintain a mask mandate
  • 41.4% in Ontario
  • 32.1% in Quebec
  • 17.1% in Alberta

• 44.7% of all respondents won’t maintain a mask mandate
  • 68.4% won’t in Alberta
  • 41.1% won’t in Ontario
  • 32.1% won’t in Quebec

• 46.3% of all respondents will require employees to be vaccinated
  • 48.2% in Quebec
  • 46.2% in Ontario
  • 34.2% in Alberta

IT Highlight

• 76.1% of IT respondents are optimistic about the future of their business, positioning them as the most optimistic vertical

Report Methodology

Conducted in March 2021 by Zoho Survey, this study contacted 750 individuals across Canada. Participants in the study included a range of business leaders, from manager roles to the C-level, at small and large enterprises across a variety of industries.

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, today announced Zoho Marketing Plus, a new unified platform that brings together marketing activities across campaign ideation, creation, execution, management, and measurement, providing stakeholders across the entire marketing organization with a single, shared view of critical information for improved collaboration and results. The new marketing platform increases the effectiveness of digital marketing strategies by giving marketing leaders a deeper understanding of customer preferences and behaviors so they can deliver dynamic, high-value customer experiences that drive brand affinity and customer happiness.

CMOs require their teams to leverage technology solutions that capture customer insights in ways that add value both to the business and customers. Through automation and business intelligence, the platform synchronizes engagement data to help marketing teams better understand customers, make more informed decisions, and ultimately drive better results, growth, and revenue. 

The unified platform empowers marketing teams to build continuous and consistent experiences for end customers and deliver more personalized journeys through:

Improved Collaboration Across Campaigns: Marketing teams will be able to connect and collaborate on various projects in tandem and with ease, enabling users to create, manage, execute, and monitor individual activities, across different stakeholders, and accurately track the progress of each task and brand asset. The platform delivers a strong creative suite that empowers teams to develop and improve marketing assets through comments, with the ability to maintain version control with flexible sharing capabilities for both internal and external stakeholders. 

Streamlined Management of Marketing Projects: Brand Studio eliminates the need for siloed solutions by serving as the centralized workplace where marketing campaigns can be created and managed. Users strengthen the brand from a single, unified platform where they can oversee all marketing strategies and progress. Capabilities like Brand Assets, powered by Zoho Workdrive, for example, help digital marketers better manage documents and assets, serving as the repository for all project support materials. 

Unified Digital Brand Asset Creation and Repository: Documents, presentations, sheets, videos, and other files can be kept in a single shared space, making assets easy to locate, reuse, or share. Machine-learning-powered search capabilities streamline team efforts, quickly and accurately locating the correct file. 

Strong Marketing Automation Capabilities: Customer insights are surfaced through AI-powered data analysis, which activates marketers to design the journeys customer respond to best. The platform properly tracks engagement and response data of customers, giving marketing teams insights to improve their journeys over time. This clear and granular understanding of customer behaviors gives marketers the ability to collaborate with customers like never before, ultimately delivering experiences that speak to their unique wants and needs.

Omnichannel Engagement: Customers bounce between channels and devices regularly, yet marketing teams can be ill-equipped to adapt to this rapid movement. Zoho enables marketing teams to access and manage all channels, driving better connections with customers and brand engagement. Email campaigns, social media, customer surveys, webinars, events, and more can all be created and managed from one single interface within the platform.

Supported Integrations: Zoho’s new marketing platform supports strong integrations with third-party solutions, making it easy to share data and insights where needed. For example, sales teams can connect insights from Zoho CRM to existing systems like Salesforce, Microsoft, HubSpot, and more to help measure how much marketing spend is converting to sales. Other key integrations across finance, commerce, and event management strengthen the connections between apps that marketers already have in their arsenal. Platform integrations include Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search console, YouTube, Survey Monkey; on the finance side it integrates with QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe; on the commerce front it integrates with WooCommerce and Shopify; and on the events front, it integrates with Eventbrite. Integrations can be accessed via Zoho Marketplace from the Campaigns and Analytics sections of the platform.  

Accurate and Real-Time Measurement: Real-time data aggregation and analytics deliver business intelligence that helps marketing teams and leaders determine true marketing ROI. Integrations further support a more accurate view of customer impact, ROI, and revenue growth projections.  

The unified platform includes a vast array of integrated capabilities aimed at helping digital marketers achieve greater results through simplified processes, tighter collaboration, shared assets, and consistent data. Zoho Marketing Plus combines the capabilities of multiple Zoho applications including Campaigns, Social, Webinar, Analytics, Marketing Automation, Workdrive, PageSense, Survey, and Backstage. This newest iteration of Marketing Plus will continue to evolve through tighter integrations with existing Zoho tools such as Cliq, as well as new apps including LandingPage, a no-code page builder that enables marketers to create high-converting website landing pages in minutes without needing a developer-level skillset.

Pricing and Availability

Zoho Marketing Plus is available immediately with a starting price of $31/month, billed annually. For more information, please visit www.zoho.com/marketingplus/

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 Corporation, a global technology company offering the most comprehensive suite of business software applications in the industry, today announced that its collaboration and communications platform, Workplace, now serves more than 16 million users globally. The company attributes this substantial growth to increasing business demand for contextual applications with utmost standards for user privacy as well as rising costs from other collaboration platform providers. Since the start of the pandemic, Zoho Workplace adoption has accelerated as businesses of all sizes transitioned to digital-forward, remote work.  

In 2021, Zoho Workplace experienced 34% year-to-year growth, with more than 40% of the new migrations coming from Google and Microsoft. Momentum was strong across all segments, with the SMB customer base increasing 40%, Mid-Sized surging 36%, and Enterprises expanding by more than 20%. Within days of Google’s announcement that it would be ending the free edition of Workspace in January 2022, Zoho’s Workplace platform experienced a 120% increase in migrations from Google-hosted domains. Demand for Workplace has been driven by the harsh realities of the pandemic, which continues to impact the growth and revenue of businesses globally. Unforeseen hikes in operational costs to support collaboration is making it more difficult for these businesses to recover and thrive.

Zoho Workplace is available in three editions: Standard is $3.75 per user per month. Professional is $7.50 per user per month.  Zoho Mail is $1.25 per user per month. For more information, please visit: https://www.zoho.com/workplace/pricing.html?src=wp

Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. More than 75 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho everyday to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, please visit : https://www.zoho.com/privacy-commitment.html

A newly released survey by Zoho Corporation has revealed a surprising amount of growth among Canadian businesses in 2021 – despite the extreme challenges of navigating the pandemic – as a majority of the respondents indicated they experienced year-over-year growth in 2021.

The survey – which queried 501 business owners across Canada – found that 72.5% of businesses had year-over-year growth in 2021 and even more said they had high hopes for the future, with 82.6 % stating they had optimism for growth in 2022.

Key Survey Findings:

• 72.5% of Canadian businesses say their business is growing when compared to 2020, with the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) leading the pack at 77.6%, Montreal lagging behind at 66.7%, and Calgary coming in last at only 59.3%.
• 82.6% of Canadian businesses are optimistic about the next 12 months, although that optimism is significantly less pronounced in Calgary with only 67.9% stating optimism for 2022. 
• 66.3% of businesses say they are at the intermediate to advanced level of fully digitizing/automating their businesses, indicating a strong acceleration in digital transformations.
• Business apps are popular among Canadian businesses with 56.9% of respondents using 1-40 apps and another 7.6% using more than 40 apps.
• 64.9% said low-code apps improve speed-to-market and another 62.2% plan to use a low-code tool to build more apps.
• While 40% say they’ll maintain a work-from-home or hybrid model in the future, 33.3% of respondents overall said they’re unsure about where their employees will ultimately work. This is in stark contrast to Montreal, where 50% of those surveyed plan on having employees return to the office full-time.
• Almost 1-in-5 people surveyed have relocated since the beginning of the pandemic.

Report Methodology

Conducted in October 2021 by Zoho Survey, this study contacted 501 individuals across Canada. Participants of the study included a range of business leaders from manager roles to the C-level at small and large enterprises across a variety of industries.

Zoho Corporation, today introduced new apps and services in Zoho One, the operating system for business. The new release empowers businesses to solve disjointed data challenges and close communications gaps across silos, so organizations can become more productive, adapt more quickly to changing business conditions, and become poised for growth. 

Zoho One aims to resolve operational, digitization, and retention challenges that businesses encounter. Enhancement categories include: 

Unified, Real-time Insights for Critical Business Decisions 

Businesses now have stronger real-time, organization-wide analytics, connecting the dots between data previously lost across departments, teams, and accounts. Powered by Zia, Zoho’s AI assistant, and Zoho’s BI and Analytics Platform, Zoho One allows users to predict and provide insights across the organization enabling confident decision-making. New innovations include: 

• Embedded and Conversational BI: Zoho One now features embedded and conversational analytics enabling decision makers to drill down into their data and glean cross-departmental insights, all through natural language commands using Zia Insights. By providing 1,500+ pre-built analytics reports and dashboards, critical business decisions can be made with greater precision and speed. 
• Data Preparation: This self-service data preparation and management tool is now available in Zoho One. Whether users are preparing data from third-party apps or other sources, DataPrep, powered by machine learning, can help business users integrate, model, cleanse, transform, enrich, and catalog data, as well as integrate with Analytics or a third party for new-found insights. 

• Work Graph: Zoho’s new back-end service, an industry-first for business software, maps interactions between people, resources, systems and processes by studying signals and their strength across the board to build a business-wide work graph that is specific to each individual within the organization. The result of a work graph will be seen in the day-to-day productivity of users across various apps. 
• Enterprise Search: Zoho’s actionable, organization-wide search, which is powered by Zia, can now understand natural language requests. Natural language powered search will lead to more accurate data discovery across teams and functions. 

Scale and Manage Operations More Effectively in Unpredictable Climates 

Global health and economic crises have accelerated the need for digital solutions that support varying workplace and business models. Operations have become more complex, making employee data and security a priority. The addition of Mobile Application Management and Zoho Commerce aim to help businesses better manage operations: 

• Mobile Application Management (MAM): With remote work now persistent, Zoho One now includes enterprise-grade Mobile App Management capabilities. Admins can easily add and manage all of their users’ devices for better insight and control of provisioning, specific app permissions and policies, locking and wiping devices remotely, and more, to support employee mobility and flexibility. 
• Zoho Commerce: Businesses need to digitize faster than ever. The addition of Zoho Commerce enables retailers to easily build online shops with the tools needed to construct a website, accept orders, track inventory, process payments, manage shipping, market their brand, and analyze data. Zoho Commerce also integrates with third party payment gateways. 

Build Strong Employee Experiences, From Anywhere 

To help close the distance between employees, employers, and teams, which has widened with remote work, Zoho One delivers solutions that promote stronger collaboration and employee experience to support any mode of work: 

• Zoho Learn: Organizations now have a learning management tool that enables interactive training programs and assessments with Zoho’s course builder. Online centralization of company information, training programs, and more, gives businesses a better way to nurture employee growth. 
• Zoho Lens: To facilitate better communication and collaboration in a remote-work environment, Zoho Lens provides remote assistance and guidance to employees through augmented reality (AR) via real-time AR annotation, VoIP and text chat, and more. 
• TeamInbox: Teams use this shared email inbox to eliminate task duplication and streamline email conversations in one central location. 
• Org Dictionary: Another industry-first, this new organization-wide service offers a central dictionary for the entire organization. It automatically incorporates the organization’s employee name and other sources offering a central, consistent diction across various Zoho applications and users. 

Unified and Personalized Experience with Context 

Zoho One’s enhanced user experience allows easy customization and personalization of workspaces: 

• Unified Console, Dashboards, and Smart-Stack UI: Employees are now able to see their apps, services, and dashboards in one view with centralization across calendars, dashboards, navigation, and more. 
• Customizable Dashboard with Pre-Built Widgets: Widgets encapsulating data across the organization can be aggregated together in a custom dashboard. This provides users visibility across the organization in a single view with the ability to drill down just one click away. 

A Deep Ecosystem that Extends and Integrates 

Recognizing that businesses value flexibility in choosing apps that serve their specific needs, the Zoho One platform already integrates with 1,000+ third party solutions on Zoho Marketplace and now extends integration with 100+ telephony providers to enable seamless communications between stakeholders. Zoho One also includes a comprehensive platform for developers and business users to create, extend, and integrate. The platform includes newly released no-code tool, Canvas, low-code tool, Zoho Creator, and pro-code platform, Catalyst. 

Zoho Pricing: Pricing starts at $50 CAD per employee. For comprehensive pricing information, please go to: https://www.zoho.com/one/pricing/

Zoho Corporation, a global technology company offering the most extensive suite of business software applications in the industry, announced that starting today, its online invoicing solution, Zoho Invoice, will be completely free of cost to further extend the company’s support for small and medium-sized businesses. 

In the last four years, Zoho Invoice’s revenue growth has rapidly increased, demonstrating the need for a comprehensive invoicing solution to aid businesses from any industry to shift from manual to digital. Due to the global pandemic, SMBs have decided to modernize their invoicing processes at an accelerated rate. To continue its support of the SMB community, Zoho Invoice offers advanced capabilities such as time tracking, auto recording of expenses, project billing, and 30+ real time reports to help freelancers and small businesses easily navigate the billing and payment collection process, without the concerns of cost. 

For small and medium-sized businesses billing and payment collection has continued to be a challenge, due to administrative costs, limited staff, and insufficient time resources. Additionally, businesses need the ability to access data remotely, which has caused a shift from on-premise solutions to cloud-based solutions. 

According to an Analysys Mason study, SMB spending on on-premise solutions for invoice management will be stagnant between 2019 and 2025, while spending on cloud-based invoicing solutions will increase from 0.9 billion dollars to 2.1 billion dollars. Fully cloud-based, Zoho Invoice enables businesses to create and send fully-customized, professional invoices in less than a minute, follow up for payments automatically, and get paid online to achieve efficiency in their invoice process. 

Zoho has supported small and medium-sized businesses for over 20 years, and Zoho Invoice has helped businesses with their invoicing needs for 13 of those years. Zoho Invoice’s free offering will continue to help businesses streamline their billing and payment collection process through streamlined payment collection, simplified billing, tax handling, and more. Invoice integrates with Zoho applications, and also integrates with third-party applications so that businesses can use the solution to contextually sync their AR information to relevant systems. 

Key benefits of Zoho Invoice include:

• Simplified billing: Businesses can create and send fully customized, professional invoices within minutes. Invoices can be sent automatically if they are recurring in nature. 
• Tax Handling: Businesses can track US sales tax or Canada’s GST levied on every transaction with tax summary reports to assist with tax filing. 
• Streamlined payment collection: Payments can be collected quickly and securely online through ACH, Debit/Credit Cards and PayPal. 

• Automated payment reminders: Based on customizable settings, the system will automatically send payment reminders to customers through email. 
• Effortless expense tracking: Expenses can be recorded automatically by scanning the bill or receipt using the Zoho Invoice mobile app.
• Client portal: Businesses can allow their customers to keep track of all relevant invoices, projects and make payments through the client portal. 
• Time tracking: Businesses can manage multiple projects, track time and accurately bill their customers. 

• Instant reports: Businesses have access to 30+, real-time reports that provide insights into key financial metrics such as best-selling products, invoice statuses, pending payments, and more.
• Mobile apps: Zoho Invoice is available on the web or as a fully functional, downloadable mobile app available for all devices.

Availability
Zoho Invoice is available for free immediately on the web and as a fully functional, downloadable mobile app on all devices.

For more information, please visit https://www.zoho.com/invoice

Zoho Corporation today announced its new Business Intelligence (BI) Platform — an AI-driven data analytics solution empowering businesses to surface precise and actionable insights through self-service data preparation and augmented analytics. Combining newly launched Zoho DataPrep with an enhanced version of Zoho Analytics, Zoho’s end-to-end self-service BI Platform enables organizations to cleanse, unify, and analyze cross-departmental data, obtain an encyclopedic view of the company, and ultimately move toward a more competitive business strategy based on real-time insights.

Zoho’s BI Platform brings together pre-built, visual dashboards, comprehensive data integrations, data preparation, augmented and embedded BI, security and privacy capabilities, flexible deployment models (cloud or on-premise), and scalability. Below are four standout pillars of this platform, which allow businesses to perform better and remain competitive in their industries:

1. Augmented Data Prep and Management – Zoho DataPrep, a new application, is an AI and machine learning-driven self-service data preparation tool. The addition of Zoho DataPrep to the BI Platform allows business users to easily create and manage data pipelines that enable them to integrate, model, cleanse, transform, enrich, and catalogue data before making it ready for analysis. 
2. Data Stories – Zoho’s BI Platform now offers an integrated enterprise portal builder (Zoho Sites) and presentation software (Zoho Show). Embedding live reports and dashboards into a website or presentation allows administrators to wrap additional context around data and foster more iimmersive discussion on business matters. Data Stories reduces friction within an organization, so that businesses can be data-driven without needing to learn new tools.
3. Augmented Analytics – Ask Zia, Zoho’s conversational AI, enables business users — with or without technical know-how — to surface data through natural language querying. Additionally, the all-new Zia Insights provides textual narration of key insights from reports and dashboards, which significantly reduces the time and effort required to explore data and glean insights. Zia Insights also includes what-if capability, enabling scenario analysis for effective decision-making.
4. Marketplace – Through Zoho Marketplace, an apps marketplace , Zoho is enabling partners to develop and publish analytical apps and integrations to complement Zoho Analytics users, thereby strengthening the BI and Analytics platform. Another dimension is the launch of deep native analytical apps, with domain-specific advanced analytics, in third-party marketplaces such as Shopify, ServiceNow and Atlassian.

The new Zoho BI Platform is built for scale and is extensible to more than 250 data sources—including Zendesk, HubSpot, Microsoft, Mailchimp, Stripe and Google—allowing businesses to integrate and analyze data sourced from diverse third-party systems.  Blending with outside data sources has always been one of the key strengths of Zoho Analytics, and a value demonstrated  by the fact that 60%of existing users have chosen it as their BI tool while solely running on non-Zoho applications and data sources..  

The BI platform gives users on-demand insight into operational data to inform critical business decisions with the support of Zia, Zoho’s AI tool. Zia augments data preparation and visualization by using natural language querying and generation, text narration of key insights from reports and dashboards, and cognitive and advanced analytics. . These self-service and real-time capabilities make it possible to capture actionable data insights to boost operational efficiency and productivity. 

With more than 50,000 organizations already using it, Zoho Analytics has consistently been one of the company’s fastest growing products. Within the last two years, Zoho Analytics has grown by 30%  YoY with a 40%YoY increase in the enterprise segment. The application has seen a 10% jump in customers switching from competitive platforms. Also, 50% of the customers have chosen Zoho Analytics after evaluating multiple competitive BI products. With this new BI Platform, Zoho expects above 45% YOY revenue growth.

I got a demo of this last week and I walked away impressed. Tasks such as cleansing data which is usually the domain of people with BI backgrounds can be done by end users. And it integrates incredibly well with Zoho Show (which is Zoho’s presentation software) to the point where slides can be “live” which allows you to get those deeper insights on the fly. The bottom line is that the Zoho BI Platform takes BI out of the realm of a few, and democratizes it.

Pricing and Availability

Zoho BI Platform, which includes Zoho Analytics and Zoho DataPrep, is available immediately in two versions, cloud and on-premise.  For monthly option, the cloud version is $8 per user, per month. The on-premise version is $30 per user, per month. For annual option, the cloud version is $108 per user, per year. The on-premise version is $360 per user, per year. 

Zoho DataPrep is also available as a standalone. The standard plan starts at $40 per month for 2 million rows including 3 users while the enterprise plan is highly customizable and the pricing is based on the customization.

For more information, please visit https://www.zoho.com/analytics/

Zoho Corporation is marking its 25th anniversary with a commitment to open 100 new offices around the world in the next three years, bringing opportunity to talent regardless of location. Privately-owned and bootstrapped, Zoho has grown into a multinational technology corporation with more than 9,000 employees serving more than 62 million users worldwide. 

Recently, the pandemic has proven Zoho’s business model and platform offerings are ideal for organizations that need to scale and lean on cloud-based collaboration to succeed. Some of the company’s major milestones to-date include: 

• Zoho registrations increased 22% between 2019-2020 from 51 to 62 million users. The company’s communication, collaboration, and other remote-work tools have proven highly valuable for customers, especially during the pandemic.
• Zoho has remained profitable since its inception, growing on average 30% year-over-year for the past five years, all while providing powerful yet affordable software to customers.
• In 2018, Zoho removed all third-party trackers from its properties as part of the company’s commitment to customer data privacy. Zoho is leading the data-protection charge so that others will do the same.
• Created in 2005, the Zoho Schools program has graduated more than 900 students from disadvantaged areas throughout India. Today, Zoho Schools graduates make up more than 10% of Zoho’s total workforce.
• The company’s commitment to fostering innovation and empowering ideas has created a ripple effect of opportunities: 57 start-up companies have been founded by former Zoho employees, raising $1.5B in capital to-date.
• With a portfolio of more than 50 applications in the areas of financial management, digital workplace, low-code app development, customer experience, employee experience, and many others, Zoho has guided the industry away from stand-alone apps toward platforms with its Zoho One suite. It has likewise challenged complex, enterprise pricing language with its groundbreaking, transparent, per-employee pricing model.

To support its vision of uplifting local economies and empowering local communities, Zoho has expanded its transnational localism efforts by adding two new offices in the rural Texas towns of New Braunfels and Bastrop; an office in Cornwall, Ontario, Canada; as well as two in San Juan Del Rio and Tequisquiapan, Mexico. As I am a Canadian, I am most interested in the fact that Zoho picked Cornwall to put their Canadian office in. It was chosen by Zoho because of the level of affordability and location.

In South India alone, Zoho has 15 functional offices with six more currently under construction. The company will continue to expand in various locations throughout Europe and Asia Pacific. As Zoho embarks on its next 25 years, it remains steadfast in its commitment to sustainable growth. Zoho plans to run its US headquarters in Austin, Texas, and its adjoining farm, entirely on solar power by the end of 2021.