Zoho, a leading global cloud provider, has announced plans to extend its footprints in the region to help African businesses in their Digital Transformation journey.
The announcement was made at its first African user conference, Zoholics: South Africa that was hosted in the city.
“We have noticed a significant rise in the number of customers in South Africa and other African countries,” said Hyther Nizam, President MEA, Zoho Corp.
“We are also expanding our presence by conducting and participating in more events.”
The Operating System for Business Zoho’s product portfolio consists of more than 45 apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer experience and support, finance and back office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools.
Its most revolutionary offering is Zoho One, a single platform comprising more than 45 products built on one technology stack that can run an entire business in the cloud, making it the operating system for business.
“South Africa is quite high on cloud literacy,” said Ali Shabdar, Business Development Director, MEA, Zoho Corp.
“Unlike some of the other markets facing challenges with moving away from legacy systems and adopting cloud, South African businesses are already taking advantage of the cloud technology.
“Even as the other parts of the world are inching away from multiple best-of-the-breed software towards pre-integrated suite of products, local businesses here are already choosing suites, thereby significantly lowering their IT costs and minimising integration problems.
“This is why Zoho One, which goes one step further by creating a platform for running the whole business, is seeing rapid adoption in the country.”
Customer Statement Gilt edge, an award-winning travel company based out of Cape Town, has been using Zoho since 2015.
Julien Perreard, Head of Digital at Giltedge, said: “Earlier, we had no consistent, standardised way to collect and handle travel inquiries and we struggled with our large database of clients.
“We also faced the problem of blending data from different sources to build a cohesive report. We initially started using Zoho CRM, and then Zoho Analytics. We noticed that data extraction was significantly faster, helping our management quickly make sense of the business metrics and act on them. We also liked Zoho’s integration, customisation and the ability to streamline all our workflow processes. We started using more Zoho products, eventually moving to Zoho One.
“Zoho has allowed us to centralise our CRM, social media scheduling and data analysis activities under one roof. It meets the needs of our digital marketing and travel advisor team, is easy to use, nicely designed, and requires very little training.”
