Zoholics24 - exciting news from the Zohoverse

Zoho’s annual main customer event Zoholics took place in Austin, TX last week. The company presented updates to products and strategy and gave partners the opportunity to present themselves on a big show floor. In parallel to the event, Zoho published some interesting news about product enhancements in four areas, namely security and privacy, CRM for Everyone, collaboration, and platform tools. In addition, Zoho reaffirmed its AI strategy.

Of course, CEO Sridhar Vembu set the scene in his usual humble, yet no-nonsense way. He detailed out, why Zoho is truly different. Zoho’s strategy of transnational localism with a clear focus on investing into employees is well known by now, and we see it working. Explaining the strategy with another twist, Vembu laid out five principles that will continue to be essential for every business software vendor to thrive:

·?????? Investing in a full product portfolio with breadth and depth

·?????? Offering attractive bundles that have deep value

·?????? Investing into exceptional service and support

·?????? Improving interoperability with more prebuilt integrations

·?????? Getting close to the customer with a strong local partner ecosystem

With 55 tightly integrated apps and growing, value-oriented bundles, and a thriving ecosystem, Zoho is certainly on a strong way following these principles.

Another topic is the way applications get built by software developers. Vembu compares developers to artisans and postulates that software development will become ten times more efficient with the help of generative AI. The developer’s role will change to become far more one of a scientist, leaving the mundane tasks to the system. This way, the whole development cycle as such changes considerably, also enabling vendors to deliver more value by keeping cost in check – or ultimately at close to the cost of the infrastructure that is needed to run the necessary code generators. It will be interesting to see how Zoho’s internal as well as external development environments evolve, based on this prediction.

AI

Apart from development tools, Zoho’s aspiration is to sprinkle AI contextually across the board, i.e. have relevant – productivity increasing – AI capabilities in all applications. Doing this, Zoho focuses on use cases where AI actually adds value. What is interesting is that, defying the current LLM hype, Zoho insists that not one LLM fits it all but that there is an ongoing need for more specialized, narrow, small, and medium models.

read on https://aheadcrm.blogspot.com/2024/06/zoholics-24-exciting-news-from-zohoverse.html