The world of work is dominated by Microsoft 365, which has become the de facto standard for productivity. It has warded off incursions from the likes of WordPerfect, OpenOffice, and Apple’s iWork, although it now faces a hefty competitor in Google’s G Suite. The latter offers, among other, Docs, Sheets and Slides, as equivalents of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Now, there is a new name in town, at least in terms of offering a comprehensive alternative to the dominant office suites. It’s called Zoho, and it’s been around for about 15 years in terms of various office software options. It made its big move three years ago with a bundled suite of applications called Zoho One. And it now has feet on the ground in South Africa.
Andrew Bourne, recently appointed business development manager for Africa, was based in Cape Town, and discovered Zoho when he tried it out for his own business, Appropriately, he uses Zoho’s answer to PowerPoint, called Show, when he demonstrates its functionality.
The names of the applications all speak for themselves, with Sheet, Writer, and Mail being the obvious productivity options. They are all compatible with the Microsoft equivalents, and documents created in the one can be opened in the other.
However, it is when one looks beyond the office-style applications that Zoho shows off its true power. The Zoho One platform includes a full-function accounting package called Books, within which a sub-application called Invoice meets the needs of most small businesses. It is the equivalent of the online accounting package Xero, the fastest growing financial software platform in South Africa.
For mass-mailings, of newsletters, marketing campaigns and the like, Zoho offers Campaigns, a very similar platform to Mailchimp. The latter is priced on an upward sliding scale depending on how many people are mailed, and how often. Campaigns allows up to 10,000 contacts in the basic plan, which would cost more on Mailchimp alone every month than the full monthly subscription to the entire Zoho One platform.
For market research or any other kind of survey, Zoho offers, wait for it, Survey. In the same way Campaigns matches up to Mailchimp, Survey matches up to the most commonly used consumer survey platform, SurveyMonkey. But then you look at pricing, and Zoho starts to look like the ultimate bargain. SurveyMonkey starts at R390 per user per month for the commercial version. All of Zoho one comes in at R450 per user per month for a small business.
It all starts adding up. A Xero here, a Mailchimp there, and a SurveyMonkey anywhere, adds up to significantly more than Zoho One every month. But wait, as they say in American-style adverts, there’s more. Another three dozen or so more, in fact. There’s Cliq, a clone of the Slack organisational social network; and Meeting, is a browser-based equivalent of Zoom, although it still needs some refining. As part of Zoho One, it does away with Zoom’s time-limits and lack of booking functionality, and will probably have substantially more features in the coming months.
WorkDrive mimics Google Drive and Microsoft OneDrive; Zoho CRM offers some of the functionality of Microsoft Dynamics CRM; Connect is an Intranet environment for an organisation; Projects replaces Microsoft Project.
It is when one starts adding up these equivalents that the versatility of Zoho One comes into focus. It’s all very well that it can replicate the basic apps offered by Microsoft and Google in their standard suites. It’s a different story when it also replaces numerous stand-alone application suites that are not readily integrated with the big names. And this all translates into one further advantage, aside from cost: all are integrated, or can be linked with a few clicks.
I found that very few of the applications I use regularly – and pay for – could not be replaced by Zoho One. There are exceptions. It still does not have an automatic meeting transcription tool like Otter.ai – essential for my interviewing and writing life. But the quest for such a tool highlighted one more powerful feature of Zoho: Marketplace, which features carefully curated extensions for Zoho applications.
These are created by third party developers to integrate with Zoho, and include tools ranging from mapping to SMS integration. A transcription app called Fireflies.ai is clearly an Otter.ai wannabe, but still offers too little functionality to replace the latter. Going by the rapid evolution of the overall Zoho platform, however, it seems only a matter of time.
Read more on the next page about how Zoho is the most successful cloud software company you’ve probably never heard of.
So how come you haven’t heard of Zoho (assuming that is the case for many readers)?
The main reason is that its core base is in India, where it has a massive developer team – the force behind its vast feature set. It has more than 8,000 employees, 50-million users, and is available in 190 countries. And it’s been around for more than 24 years.
“We’ve got offices all around the world,” says Andrew Bourne. “The main ones are in Austin, Texas, and in California. And then we have our international headquarters in Chennai, India. I’m under the Dubai office at the moment, but we’re building an office in Cape Town.
“Zoho consists of both the various applications that they have built to connect together to make an ecosystem; and they’ve built a foundation so that they can really scale it in many different directions. They just keep plugging in those extra apps that they build into this connected ecosystem.”
Zoho started marketing actively across Africa in 2019, and now has a strong presence in Nigeria and Kenya.
“They have improved the technology so much in the last three years, having started with their flagship app, which was CRM. They said we’re not going to build one app and try and be everything to everyone. We’re going to have separate product teams. And they are going to focus on making those apps really, really good. And then we’re going to have a team that connects each app to each other, so that it can form this really connected ecosystem.”
Bourne’s experience in moving his business onto Zoho One persuaded him to get more involved.
“When I moved on to Zoho one, it was really a relief, because we had an integration spaghetti, we had kind of plugged in all these different apps, we had some admin staff using Outlook, some using Gmail, whereas now everyone works on Zoho mail, which brings everything in the business together. Security is extremely good on the platform, and it’s easier to manage all your information.”
Privacy is a non-negotiable on the platform. Zoho recently blocked Google and Facebook from tracking people on its website: an issue that has become a flashpoint in the relationship between Apple, Google and the developers of apps for their platform.
“Once you become a customer and a user, even if you’re on a free version or trial version, we don’t sell your data user data, there’s no ad revenue. We’re compliant with GDPR (Europe’s privacy law, the General Data Protection Regulation), which is great for POPI compliance in South Africa.”
Zoho owns a number of data centres arounds the world, where all its applications and user data are stored. This allows for disaster recovery, business continuity, and security audits, along with “threat modelling”. At present, these are located in Asia, Australia, Europe and North America. But Dubai and South Africa are on the roadmap for further roll-out.
- Arthur Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za. Follow him on Twitter and Instagram on @art2gee