Zoho is playing the long game. Their suite of business solutions speaks for itself, not in the form of quarterly earnings calls or billboards or bombarding prospects with online ads, but through the voice of their customers. Zoho is a profitable private company that focuses on, in their own words, “value over valuation.”

Being private allows us the freedom and luxury to be ourselves.

Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation

Opus Research recently traveled to Austin, Texas for Zoho Day, a long overdue (thanks to COVID) gathering of analysts, Zoho leadership, and their customers. We spent two and a half days learning about Zoho’s past, present, and future. They are one of the biggest companies you’ve maybe never heard of in the SMB world and they are moving upmarket.

Central to the Zoho stack is Zia, an intelligent assistant for business that can serve both internal stakeholders and AI self-service options for customers. “Just seeing the organic uptake and proven business results from bringing natural language understanding and machine learning into the workflows is really impressive,” said Dan Miller, our founder and lead analyst at Opus Research. “The next step they have to prove is that this stuff scales. That’s what’s on the horizon for Zoho.”

Panels at the event were stacked with customers happy to share stories of how they’ve built some or all of their business on the back of the Zoho platform. Time to value, cost savings, interoperability, simple and reliable connectors to other systems, these were all recurring themes. And it wasn’t a manufactured enthusiasm for the sake of an audience full of analysts. Client testimonials included a palpable sense of relief to be working with Zoho after previous and less fruitful integrations.

In this episode of Conversations with Opus, Opus Research analysts (that’s us) sit down together (via Zoom) to talk about our experience at Zoho Day 2022. We cover the surprising breadth of their offering, how hard they are to describe to other people, we share what we were most impressed by at the event, their strategic plans to move upmarket, and the opportunity for Zoho’s intelligent assistant Zia to become a centerpiece for their business intelligence offering.

Categories: Conversational Intelligence, Intelligent Assistants, Articles