Zoho has announced major updates to Zoho One, its flagship suite of applications designed to put businesses completely in the cloud. One year after its launch, Zoho One is enabling a new set of capabilities that bridge the gap between different departments and roles within an organization: Zia, Zoho's AI will soon respond to user’s queries by combining information from multiple apps; Zoho One's new Analytics delivers a deeper, more contextual picture of business operations by blending data from apps across the suite; and a new unified Search feature can execute across multiple applications, bringing back richer results that significantly reduce the time and effort needed to find the right data.

Zoho has also launched Backstage, an end-to-end event management tool that allows organizers, corporations, and non-profit agencies to plan, promote, and run enterprise events ranging from large-scale meetings to conferences and trade shows.

One year of Zoho One

The company has announced Zoho One’s adoption numbers for its first year on the market: more than 12,000 businesses worldwide have become Zoho One customers; 36% of Zoho One users are from India. The average Zoho One customer enables 16 applications for their business, often replacing software from different vendors, preferring instead to run their business from a single cloud platform. The company has added five new apps to Zoho One in the past year – Cliq, Zoho Sprints, Zoho PageSense, Zoho Flow and Zoho Backstage – at no additional cost.

New Capabilities Added to Zoho One

Analytics: The new Zoho One Analytics tab provides analytics across Zoho's suite of business apps. Business owners, CXOs and managers can now track KPIs and trends from one tab, helping them to make more informed decisions. Users can create their own custom reports and dashboards to blend data from different business apps and do cross-functional analytics. For example, a CEO or Sales VP can see not just the revenue numbers for different accounts, but also the number of support tickets pending and, the first response and resolution times, all in one place. Currently, there are over 500 pre-built reports and dashboards available across applications. Users can also import data stored in third-party applications and analyze it along with the data from Zoho's internal apps.

Zia for Zoho One: Zia, the AI-powered assistant first introduced by Zoho CRM in 2016, will be extended to Zoho One. Zia for Zoho One functions across various applications, pulling data from different departments to provide the right contextual information. Using simple commands, Zia can handle complex queries. Drawing information from Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk, Zia can tell users how many customers in the sales pipeline have an open support ticket. Similarly, Zia can generate a chart that displays revenue-per-employee trends for the last five years by fetching figures from Zoho Books and Zoho People. Zia for Zoho One will be made available in phases starting this year. Zoho also plans to open up the Zia Platform for Zoho One users, allowing them to extend Zia with custom skill sets built to address their specific needs.

Zia Search: On average, knowledge workers spend 30% of their workday searching for information, according to an IDC research paper. The new Zia Search lets users search across all their Zoho apps instantly, dramatically improving information access within an organization. Zia Search also offers a results preview as well as contextual actions so users can utilize their results without having to leave the search window.

Mobile app: The Zoho One mobile app allows organization administrators and service administrators to onboard new employees, provision applications, manage permissions, set security policies, creates groups and more, all from their mobile devices. With this app, admins can even take care of time-sensitive requests, like resetting a password, when they are away from their computers.

Zoho Concierge: Launched last year along with Zoho One, the Zoho Concierge is a free service available exclusively to Zoho One customers. Since its inception, this dedicated team has helped more than 6,500 customers by mapping their business processes and advising them on how best to optimize Zoho One for their particular needs.

Sridhar Vembu, CEO, Zoho Corp, says, "The adoption of Zoho One has exceeded our expectations, and we hope to continue this momentum into its second year. The stats clearly show that customers will use multiple apps from a single suite, if those apps work together more deeply than a patchwork of products from different vendors. Zoho One has already replaced more than 650 different products, and that number will only grow as we release even more new apps."