Zoho Eyeing Pie Of Global Enterprise Market: CEO Mani Vembu

Software-as-a-service company Zoho is aiming to increase its enterprise customer base in markets beyond India, and is seeing opportunity in US, UK and Middle East markets, according to Chief Executive Officer Mani Vembu. 

The company is also shifting focus towards platform vending that is more domain specific as it plans to cater to the enterprise segment, Vembu told NDTV Profit on Wednesday.

"Enterprise software market is the largest, we see opportunities across verticals. We have a huge customer base in India, but now we want to take this geographically," he said. "Focus now will be on large customers across verticals and domains. We Looking to grow organically in terms of revenue and adoption."

Commenting on the competition in the market, the CEO said that along with having a cost advantage, its service is easy to implement and its low-code tool reduces the learning curve. Zoho is seeing opportunities in newer verticals, and replacement and transformation opportunities in some verticals. 

Amid the Agentic AI boom, the SaaS company is also working on an agent builder called Agent studio that allows customers to build agents for different business use cases, and has also opened an Agent marketplace.

Vembu, underscoring the effect of current macroeconomic conditions on tech spending, said the company is watching macro trends closely, remains cautious and will be prepared for effect. 

Zoho also released a study with IDC, which indicated that 75% of Indian enterprises that have adopted SaaS solutions since 2020 have encountered implementation delays, resulting in an average timeline overrun of 57% and cost overrun of 43%. These setbacks have led to an average loss of Rs 5.6 crore in missed business opportunities, in addition to impacting employee productivity, customer experience and competitive positioning.

Delayed SaaS implementations create cascading effects, affecting both ongoing and future digital transformation initiatives. As per the study, 92.5% of Indian enterprises recognise that timely implementation is critical, while the remaining consider it somewhat important. 

The study found that 67% of enterprises reported increased costs due to extended deployment timelines, making implementation overruns a direct financial burden. 53% of the respondents indicated that delays hindered digital transformation progress, slowing down innovation and business growth.