Business platform Zoho has announced it is expanding it’s all-in-one suite of applications, Zoho One, to offer more value to customers with new process automation, telephony, single sign-on and blockchain capabilities.
Zoho now introduces the next generation of Zoho One, the operating system for businesses that is designed to run an entire organization—from sales and marketing, finance and HR, operations and business intelligence, and more—all on a unified technology platform.
Zoho One now boasts a new business workflow management application, Orchestly, that lets customers effortlessly create, manage, and optimize their business processes through an intuitive drag-and-drop interface. In the two years since its launch, Zoho One has seen considerable growth and now serves more than 20,000 customers who make Zoho One the operating system for their business.
Around a quarter of Zoho One customers use more than 25 applications on the platform and more than 50 percent utilize beyond 16 applications showing that businesses are embracing an easy-to-use, all-in-one solution to run their businesses.
In the past two years since launch, Zoho One has evolved into a powerful operating system for businesses with over 45 applications, along with several built-in services including AI, Business Intelligence, Messaging, Search, and more. Zoho One is today a customizable, extendable, and integratable platform all at the same cost to customers.
“Technology is supposed to help businesses. Instead, it has evolved into a complex beast customers have to tame—from juggling apps from multiple vendors to trying to solve the multi-app integration puzzle to dealing with vendors forcing customers into expensive, lengthy contracts. The technology industry has gone too far down this path and this has to change,” said Raju Vegesna, Zoho’s Chief Evangelist. “With Zoho One, we want to change all of that. It’s a technology platform to run your entire business with a vendor that is easy to do business with and you can trust. With Zoho One, you are not just licensing technology. You are licensing peace of mind.”
Zoho is introducing bold new operating-system services:
Communications:
– PhoneBridge, Zoho’s telephony platform, which integrates over 50 telephony vendors on one side and several Zoho applications on the other side, is now available within Zoho One. PhoneBridge integration enables telephony in Zoho apps like CRM and Recruit. It allows customers to make calls from Zoho apps, and provides contextual information on incoming calls. Enabling PhoneBridge will give users context for all incoming calls from Zoho CRM, Zoho Recruit, Zoho Mail, and 20+ other apps.
– Single Sign-on: This allows customers to integrate any third-party applications onto their Zoho account and currently supports around 50 third-party applications. Single Sign-On works with third-party systems like active directory, which makes it scalable for mid-to-large sized businesses.
– Zoho One admins can now enforce YubiKey authentication as an added factor for increased security, on top of existing multi-factor authentications already supported.
App Management and Provisioning:
– Zoho One currently enables provisioning for all 45+ Zoho apps. This is now being extended to custom apps created through Zoho Creator as well as external apps available through Zoho Marketplace. Zoho, third-party, custom, and SSO apps can be provisioned either individually to users or as groups conditionally provisioned with custom criteria. Zoho One’s new Admin Panel with dashboards and reports allows admins to monitor user activity and app usage, enabling them to find and manage underutilized resources. Admins also get extensive reports on user management, sign-in activity, app usage, and account security.
Business Workflow Management:
– Orchestly has a drag-and-drop interface to enable managers with no coding skills to define processes with little effort. Managers and administrators can automate and run their regular workflows, including cross-departmental workflows such as purchase approvals, content publishing, asset management, and onboarding. In the case of onboarding a new employee, the recruitment, interview, offer submission, and onboarding is handled across the recruiting department, HR department, legal department, and whatever team the applicant is joining. Because so many departments and applications are involved in this process, Orchestly is able to cut across these various teams and applications to create comprehensive workflows and automate complex processes.
Products and Services Innovations:
– The enhanced Zoho Sign now provides an additional level of verification for customers by adopting blockchain-based timestamping through Ethereum, the globally accepted, open-source platform.
All Levels of Support:
– Zoho One offers free Concierge service, where potential customers can consult with the Zoho team to better understand how Zoho One can help their business.
– Zoho is introducing Jumpstart for Zoho One, helping customers through their initial implementation. All Zoho One customers are provided support, out-of-the-box, but now enterprise customers can request premium support.
Pricing for Zoho One, including all the new enhancements is £30 per employee or £70 per user.
In a world where vendors are frittering away customer budgets, every new feature, service, and product mentioned here is included in Zoho One for free.