Zoho captures workplace software program market share in SA

Indian-based software program agency Zoho has set its sights on taking additional market share from US-based giants, Microsoft and Google, within the workplace suite market in South Africa.

Based in 1996, Zoho is a multinational know-how firm that makes software program and web-based enterprise instruments. It’s best recognized for the net Zoho Workplace Suite.

In an interview with ITWeb, Andrew Bourne, Zoho regional supervisor for Africa, says Zoho Office was launched globally in 2017.

“Since then, the workplace productiveness suite – which embody mail, chat, docs, calls and duties – has seen good progress and traction in SA and is among the many prime 5 merchandise within the nation.”

He provides that to maintain up with clients’ rising wants for collaborative instruments that may unify office communications in a single platform, the corporate earlier this 12 months launched Zoho Trident, a local desktop utility for Zoho Office.

Bourne explains Trident combines collaboration, productiveness and communication expertise in a single place, which reduces context switching for purchasers.

Zoho, which claims to have 16 million customers globally, is difficult a market entrenched by US multinationals Microsoft and Google.

Based on Statista, as of February, Google’s workplace suite managed over 50% of the market share for main workplace suite applied sciences worldwide.

It notes Microsoft’s Workplace 365 is the opposite main competitor available in the market and lately misplaced the result in Google Apps.

Statista factors out that workplace suites equivalent to these fall beneath the overarching class of productiveness software program. This consists of all the things from time administration software program to e-mail shoppers, and is constructed to facilitate environment friendly workforce work and coordination inside skilled and educational environments, it explains.

Zoho additionally competes towards OpenSRS, GoDaddy, Freehostia and Namecheap, amongst others.

“We’re already seeing a rise in customers migrating to Zoho Office from Google and Microsoft’s collaboration choices,” Bourne says.

“In 2022, migrations from Google and Microsoft almost doubled globally. This uptick in migration is owing to 3 major causes – growing enterprise demand for a unified and highly effective answer, rising requirements for consumer privateness and worth when in comparison with different collaboration platform suppliers.”

He provides that Zoho Office permits customers to combine and match between completely different paid plans with none minimal or most cap of customers.

Bourne notes the Zoho suite of functions additionally has the potential to co-exist with different platforms available in the market by means of a hybrid set-up.

“This enables organisations to switch a portion of their customers to Zoho Office, whereas retaining the usage of Microsoft or Google by one other group of customers. In addition to, Zoho Office is out there in native pricing.”

Like most tech firms, the COVID-19 pandemic was additionally a boon for Zoho.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has expedited the digital transformation course of for firms of all sizes. We have now skilled a major surge in inquiries for our cloud-based e-mail and productiveness options, in addition to a considerable enhance in utilization throughout our chat and video conferencing functions. Even within the present post-pandemic period, we proceed to look at this development.”

As enterprise grows, the corporate lately announced plans to open its second workplace in SA.