AI, Analytics and Search Highlight the Power of Zoho One and Accelerate Adoption

Zoho announced major updates to Zoho One, its flagship suite of applications designed to put businesses completely in the cloud. One year after its launch, Zoho One is enabling a new set of capabilities that bridge the gap between different departments and roles within an organization: Zia—Zoho's AI—will soon respond to user queries by combining information from multiple apps; Zoho One's new Analytics delivers a deeper, more contextual picture of business operations by blending data from apps across the suite; and a new unified Search feature can execute across multiple applications, bringing back richer results that significantly reduce the time and effort needed to find the right data.

Zoho also launched Backstage, an end-to-end event management tool that allows organizers, corporations, and non-profit agencies to plan, promote, and run enterprise events ranging from large-scale meetings to conferences and trade shows.

One year of Zoho One

The company announced Zoho One adoption numbers for its first year on the market: more than 12,000 business worldwide have become Zoho One customers; 36% of Zoho One users are from India. The average Zoho One customer enables 16 applications for their business, often replacing software from different vendors, preferring instead to run their business from a single cloud platform. The company has added five new apps to Zoho One in the past year—Cliq, Zoho Sprints, Zoho PageSense, Zoho Flow and Zoho Backstage—at no additional cost.

"The adoption of Zoho One has exceeded our expectations, and we hope to continue this momentum into its second year. The stats clearly show that customers will use multiple apps from a single suite if those apps work together more deeply than a patchwork of products from different vendors," said Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho Corp. "We see customers combining data from different Zoho and third-party apps—like email campaigns, CRM, customer support, and accounting—to generate new insights and make better decisions. Zoho One has already replaced more than 650 different products, and that number will only grow as we release even more new apps."

New Capabilities Added to Zoho One

Analytics: The new Zoho One Analytics tab provides analytics across Zoho's suite of business apps. Business owners, CXOs, and managers can now track KPIs and trends from one tab, helping them to make more informed decisions. Users can create their own custom reports and dashboards to blend data from different business apps and do cross-functional analytics. For example, a CEO or Sales VP can see not just the revenue numbers for different accounts, but also the number of support tickets pending and, the first response and resolution times, all in one place. Currently, there are over 500 pre-built reports and dashboards available across applications. Users can also import data stored in third-party applications and analyze it along with the data from Zoho's internal apps.

Zia for Zoho One: Zia, the AI-powered assistant first introduced by Zoho CRM in 2016, will be extended to Zoho One. Zia for Zoho One functions across various applications, pulling data from different departments to provide the right contextual information. Using simple commands, Zia can handle complex queries. Drawing information from Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk, Zia can tell users how many customers in the sales pipeline have an open support ticket. Similarly, Zia can generate a chart that displays revenue-per-employee trends for the last five years by fetching figures from Zoho Books and Zoho People. Zia for Zoho One will be made available in phases starting this year. Zoho also plans to open up the Zia Platform for Zoho One users, allowing them to extend Zia with custom skill sets built to address their specific needs.

Zia Search: On average, knowledge workers spend 30% of their workday searching for information, according to an IDC research paper. The new Zia Search lets users search across all their Zoho apps instantly, dramatically improving information access within an organization. Zia Search was built from the ground up with an understanding of each application's domain, design and authorization rules, making it possible to display a more relevant, richer set of results. Zia Search also offers a results preview as well as contextual actions so users can utilize their results without having to leave the search window.

Mobile app: The Zoho One mobile app allows organization administrators and service administrators to onboard new employees, provision applications, manage permissions, set security policies, create groups and more, all from their mobile devices. With this app, admins can even take care of time-sensitive requests, like resetting a password, when they are away from their computers.

Zoho Concierge: Launched last year along with Zoho One, the Zoho Concierge is a free service available exclusively to Zoho One customers. Since its inception, this dedicated team has helped more than 6,500 customers by mapping their business processes and advising them on how best to optimize Zoho One for their particular needs.

"Zia for Zoho One, the new Dashboard, and Zia Search are organization-wide tools designed to give our customers a deeper understanding of their businesses," said Vembu, “This kind of unified data ecosystem is only possible because all of Zoho’s 40+ applications have been built from scratch, over the last two decades, on the same technology base.”

Data Centre

Zoho has announced the opening of data centers in Mumbai and Chennai that will be operational from August 2018. Indian users who have registered through zoho.in will be served by these data centers.

Pricing and Availability

Zoho One is available for ₹1,000 per employee per month. Businesses must purchase a license for every employee in their organization to get this pricing. Zoho One is currently available worldwide, in multiple languages. Users can sign up for a 30-day trial version of Zoho One at zoho.com/one.

Zia for Zoho One is not currently available. The Analytics feature will be rolled out in phases, whereas Zia Search is available immediately at search.zoho.com. The Android mobile app can be downloaded from the Google Play Store, while the iOS app is available at iTunes.

Zoho Backstage is available immediately. It offers four subscription plans: the Free plan, the Professional plan (₹5,900 per month), the Professional+ plan (₹11,900 per month), and the Single Event plan (₹17,999 per event) with a custom branding add-on at ₹60,000 per year. Custom branding includes a custom domain and mobile app. The Professional+ plan is part of Zoho One.