Zoho targets enterprise, midmarket in new partner push

Productivity and CRM SaaS vendor Zoho is looking to expand its presence in Australia beyond small and medium businesses as the company looks to onboard more partners.

Zoho global chief strategy officer Vijay Sundaram told CRN that the company is looking to start work with larger system integrators and service providers with a strong presence in Australia to chase midmarket and enterprise customers.

“Globally, we’ve started serving the SMB market but we’ve slowly added enterprise customers because many larger companies come to us when they find out what our product offering is,” Sundaram said.

“Because we came from the SMB market, our solutions partners don’t usually include the big systems integrators as they don’t really service that market.

“Larger customers have been coming to us for years now so we’re now making it a core element of our strategy.”

Sundaram added that channel partners tend to look for multiple opportunities with a vendor, so Zoho’s diversified software suite would be an interesting proposition.

“If you’re a single product vendor, the channel’s opportunities are limited,” he said. “You’d have to find ways to differentiate yourself as a channel partner because of the competition.”

“Partners would also get more implementation opportunities because the more products a partner has the more chances it can do implementations, generating more service revenue whether it’s from implementation, integration, migration, training and more.”

Zoho officially arrived in Australia in February 2019, later launching an Australia-hosted version of its apps. In September that year, the company established two data centres in Australia through Equinix’s facilities in Sydney and Melbourne.

The company hinted at a pivot into the enterprise market last year, when its IT management software division ManageEngine appointed Bluechip Infotech as its master distributor for Australia.

Sundaram however said Zoho as a whole hasn’t committed to a pure distribution model in Australia yet, but hasn’t ruled out adopting it in the near future.

Earlier this month, Zoho waived the fees of its entire product suite for some customers for three months up until 1 July 2020.