Zoho Runs on Zoho

Many users ask us how we determine the roadmap of our products. While our customer requests play an important role in deciding what goes into the product, a good percentage of our roadmap is defined by our own needs.

We are a medium sized business. With over 1100 Employees, working from 5 countries (US, India, Japan, China & UK) and multiple locations (we have offices in California & Austin along with a few remote offices), we need a system that makes it easy to collaborate across multiple locations, timezones, languages, departments etc.

If there is one application that connects all Zoho employees, it is Zoho Business. It is the central place where the entire organization comes together. Zoho Business is where we define access permissions for all users across locations. We manage hundreds of domains,  access permissions, groups, applications and lot more, all from a unified portal.

Zoho Mail hosts email for all our employees and of course Zoho Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, Notes are all complementary to our usage. Zoho Chat usage has spiked internally after its integration with Zoho Business and is now one of the primary ways we communicate within the company. This integration of Chat inside Zoho Business cut down a lot of calls. Zoho Docs is used quite a bit to create and share documents. I am trying to remember the last time I used Microsoft Office...

Zoho Discussions plays an extremely important role for communications within the organization. When you have multiple people from multiple locations and timezones and have need to communicate and discuss on common ideas/topics/issues, we turn to Zoho Discussions. While we use the app externally to communicate with our customers, we have a very vibrant discussion forum internally where the participation comes from multiple offices and languages.

Lot of our product teams rely on Zoho Projects and in fact our recent Bug Tracking module is an output of our internal requirements from product teams. We use this app for managing projects with some of our larger and strategic partners as well. 

We of course use Zoho CRM to manage all our customers across all our divisions. Our HR runs on Zoho People and we use Zoho Recruit to manage our requirements. I personally have been using Zoho Search for obtaining employee contact information. Our customer support teams rely on Zoho Assist for support and our sales engineering teams rely on Zoho Meeting for remote meetings. In the process, we ditched WebEx and saved a ton of $$$$$.

Apart from our main applications, we have a need for lots of smaller applications (like leave application or a cab booking app - we talked about more about such apps here). For such situational app

lications, we rely on Zoho Creator. 

As there is lot of activity across Zoho, we rely on Zoho Analytics to provide us good summary (related to stats like registrations, logins etc) of what's going. Stats like daily/weekly/monthly signup trends, sessions, partner usages, sales analysis etc come from Zoho Analytics. 

We use Site24x7 to display the status of our servers @ http://status.zoho.com. For managing our data centers etc, we use many products from our other division ManageEngine. 

As you can see, there is lots of 'Zoho' in there. Our idea is simple. If we are able to run a  1100+ people company on Zoho, and be productive, effective and can save a bunch of $$$$ while we do this, we believe there will be many similar companies that can benefit from what we offer. 

How do you use Zoho in your business?