GLOBAL TECH GIANT SETS UP SHOP

GLOBAL TECH giant Zoho Corporation has opened an office in Auckland to better service its growing local customer base. A full go-to-market team is being hired to support its push into the Australia and New Zealand region, which is one of its top four performing markets in the world.

Zoho has a technology stack used by more than 45 million users across 180-plus countries, and more than 300,000 companies including Tesla, Netflix and Amazon.

The company competes directly with the likes of Salesforce, Google and Microsoft and cites its speed of deployment and pricing structure as its key competitive differentiators, with even the smallest of businesses able to digitise their operations with Zoho for as little as $1 a day.

In New Zealand, customers include major airlines and banks, and Turners and Growers, among other large household names. With tens of thousands of companies across Australia and New Zealand and continued strong growth across the region in cloud services – and with Gartner predicting a 20 percent increase in spend in 2019 – Zoho is looking to accelerate its growth in the region with investment in a local team and premises.

“There are two broad goals for us," says Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu, "expanding our large enterprise business and widening our geographic footprint. Setting up shop in New Zealand is a crucial part of our global expansion.”

The company in this region will be led by Timothy Kasbe. An experienced technology leader, Kasbe has held positions as Chief Information and Digital Officer at several Fortune 50 companies.

"Business software has historically conjured up thoughts of applications that were only available to large companies with deep pockets and sophisticated IT teams.”

Zoho's application suite has democratised business software for all, he says.