Zoho cites growth in enterprise SaaS suite as businesses digitise

Zoho Corp, a homegrown technology company that makes web-based business tools, has claimed a 34% year-to-year growth in adoption of Workplace, its enterprise communications platform, in 2021. Its adoption among small businesses seemingly grew by 40%, while mid-sized firms in Zoho’s clientele reportedly grew by 36%. The company also claimed 20 percent more large businesses as having taken up its software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings. With all of this, Zoho claimed that its Workplace suite saw 1 million more users over 2020, reaching 16 million users in 2021.

Demand for SaaS products in India grew as more ventures digitised in the aftermath of the covid-19 pandemic, according to industry reports.

Zoho Workplace is an enterprise software platform that offers email, chat, audio and video conferencing, shared file storage and an online office applications suite. The company is one of the many offering SaaS products in an increasingly competitive market in India – which exists alongside big companies such as Google and Microsoft in this field.

An industry report by Bain & Co on India’s SaaS market in 2021 said that through 2021, the country saw more than 2x new firms offering SaaS products for enterprises. The report stated that through 2021, India saw 13 unicorns from the SaaS industry, with nine of them generating more than $100 million in annual revenue.

SaaS firms in India also attracted more investments from venture capital funds and other sources. Bain & Co states that in 2021, investors pooled in $4.5 billion in enterprise software providers in India – up by 170 percent from 2020. The report also stated that the sector presently employs over 62,000 professionals, as of 2021.

Sridhar Vembu, chief executive of Zoho Corp, said in a statement that the company has cashed in on the expiry of free or trial phases of larger SaaS providers to target small businesses.