The IT Nerd

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, announced today that the Zoho Finance Platform has achieved 50% year-over-year (YOY) revenue growth, supporting more than half a million businesses across more than 160 countries. 

Driving the Platform’s growth is the global expansion of its cloud-based accounting application, Zoho Books, which now supports 180 currencies, 17 languages, and is backed by a comprehensive global tax engine that solves country-specific tax compliance challenges. Following today’s launch of Zoho Books in Mexico, just a few weeks after launching in Kenya, the accounting application now supports 14 editions, including a global version.

Launched in 2011, Zoho Books is among the five highest grossing Zoho products, with revenue growing 50% YOY. The accounting application offers editions across the globe, including Canada, the US, UK, India, Australia, UAE, Kenya, and Mexico.Zoho Books is a government recognised tax-compliant solution in the UK (MTD), Saudi Arabia (ZATCA), UAE (FTA) and India (GSP). 

Zoho’s Finance Platform includes solutions for accounting, inventory management, travel and expense management, billing and subscription management, and payroll management. These applications are built on the same underlying platform, enabling instant interoperability, seamless data flow, and unification across systems. Typically, businesses start using one of the finance products, and then expand their usage to other applications within the suite. On average, customers using Zoho Books for more than one year adopt at least two other applications within the finance suite.  

Powerful ecosystem 

Beyond products and the platform, businesses can benefit from the strength of the ecosystem. The finance platform comes with a growing network of payment gateways, banks, travel partners and shopping carts. Businesses can also connect with any third-party applications through APIs and Zoho Marketplace. This significantly reduces the need to invest in IT resources, and enables them to go to quickly-market with any change.  

Zoho Finance Plus and Zoho Books Pricing: 

Zoho Finance Plus starts at CAD $349 monthly per organization, includes 10 users. 

Zoho Books starts at CAD $20 monthly ($15 billed annually), per organisation. It also comes with a free plan. For more information on pricing please visit: www.zoho.com/books/pricing/

The newly released Zoho SMB Outlook Report by Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, reveals that Canadian small and medium-sized business leaders are optimistic about their business prospects and looking to hire. According to the survey, 40.1% of respondents expect 1-10% growth; 22.7% expect 11-20%; and 10.6% expect growth of 20+% over the next six months.  

Surveying 1,526 Canadian business leaders (C-level to manager) about business performance, staffing, the economy, pandemic responses, and tech usage, the Zoho SMB Outlook Report additionally reveals that 64.6% of business respondents say their pricing has been impacted by inflation.

The Canadian SMB Outlook Report builds on two previous versions of the report that surveyed individuals in May, 2022, and October, 2021. The May report indicated that 81.2% of respondents were optimistic about the next six months and forecasted 1-20+% growth. Currently 73.4% feel similarly optimistic, which suggests that the economy and news of a recession have muted respondents’ enthusiasm, but not by much.

Key Survey Findings:

Business Growth:

Respondents feel good about their business prospects, with 40.1% of respondents expecting 1-10% growth and 22.7% expecting 11-20%, and 10.6% expecting growth of 20+% across the following regions. 

• Alberta – 40% expecting 1-10% growth, 24.8% expecting 11-20%, and 6.7% expecting growth of 20+% during the next six months. 
• BC – 41.3% expecting 1-10% growth, 22.7% expecting 11-20%, and 9.1% expecting growth of 20+% during the next six months. 
• Ont. – 40% expecting 1-10% growth, 24.5% expecting 11-20%, and 10.8% expecting growth of 20+% during the next six months. 
• Quebec – 37.8% expecting 1-10% growth, 25.2% expecting 11-20%, and 13.5% expecting growth of 20+% during the next six months. 

Staffing:

Staffing plans show optimism with 43.4% planning to hire, 51.2% expecting no change, and only 5.5% anticipating layoffs.

• Alberta – 41.8% hiring, 50.9% no change, 7.3% layoffs
• BC – 41.3% hiring, 53.3% no change, 5.4% layoffs
• ON – 43.6% hiring, 51.9% no change, 4.5% layoffs
• Quebec – 44.8% hiring, 48.7% no change, 6.5% layoffs

The majority of respondents who are hiring struggled to find staff, with 47.5% saying yes, 35.9% saying no, and 16.6% not hiring.

• Alberta – 48.5% yes, 35.9% no and 15.8% not hiring
• BC – 46.3% yes, 30.6% no and 23.1% not hiring
• ON – 45.2% yes, 38.8% no and 16% not hiring
• Quebec – 57.4% yes, 32.2% no and 10.4% not hiring

Inflation:

Inflation is affecting businesses, with 64.6% of respondents saying they’ve been impacted and 35.4% indicating no changes.

• Alberta – 72.1% yes, 27.9% no
• BC – 59.9% yes, 40.1% no
• ON – 66.3% yes, 33.7% no
• Quebec – 67.8% yes, 32.2% no

The majority of respondents increased prices, with 25.2% raising prices by 1-2%, 24.9% raising prices by 3-5%, and 20.2% raising prices by more than 5%. 29.7% said the question applies to them, suggesting perhaps that they didn’t increase their prices.

• Alberta – 29.1% raised prices by 1-2%, 23% raised prices by 3-5% and 20.6% raised prices by more than 5%.
• BC – 20.7% raised prices by 1-2%, 24.4% raised prices by 3-5% and 19% raised prices by more than 5%.
• ON – 26.9% raised prices by 1-2%, 25.6% raised prices by 3-5% and 19.1% raised prices by more than 5%.
• Quebec – 22.6% raised prices by 1-2%, 29.6% raised prices by 3-5% and 25.2% raised prices by more than 5%.

A Link to the report dashboard can be found here: Zoho SMB Outlook Report

Report Methodology

Conducted in August, 2022, by Zoho Survey, this study contacted 1,526 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.

The Canadian SMB Outlook Report builds on two previous versions that also surveyed individuals in May, 2022 and October, 2021.

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, announced today the opening of its new office in Cornwall, Ontario. This new office will build on Zoho’s regional Canadian approach to sales, support, marketing, and partner management—including bilingual sales and marketing—to facilitate a greater regional understanding of the specific needs of local customers, and to create closer relationships with surrounding businesses.

Zoho’s success in Canada has seen 35% and 15% growth in revenue and customers, respectively, and the company plans to expand the Cornwall office as those numbers rise.

Zoho’s Proven Philosophy: Transnational Localism

The new Cornwall office is part of Zoho’s global Transnational Localism strategy, which was first introduced more than 10 years ago 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, and local pricing for several countries. 

This new Cornwall office is part of the Transnational Localism hub-and-spoke model, with larger offices serving as a hub to several dozen small spoke offices located in rural areas and towns around the world. This method of growth allows employees, like those in Cornwall, to stay in their hometowns and contribute to their local community while working for a leading, globally recognized technology company.

In the last two years, Zoho has opened 59 hub-and-spoke offices, improving access to both software and localized Zoho support. 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 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.