One Year of Zoho One: Introducing Analytics, Unified Search, AI, and More

It’s been a year of Zoho One, a complete suite of integrated applications to run your entire business. To commemorate the occasion we’re announcing several updates that take our operating system concept to the next level. This release includes a centralized analytics dashboard, a unified search, new AI capabilities, a mobile app for Zoho One administrators, and even a new app to run events.

The Operating System’s First Year

Last year we launched Zoho One with 35 apps. The idea was to offer businesses one suite of tools to improve and manage processes across the organization. More than a few people told us we were crazy to try this. Today we have more than 12,000 organizations paying for Zoho One around the world. These organizations have enabled over 16 apps on average, replacing more than 650 different pieces of software.

The more we talk to customers the more we hear the same thing: the value of Zoho One is in the pre-built integrations that make the apps work together. We’ve seen many customers start with just one or two apps, like our sales and email marketing tools. After a few months they add our help desk service so they can support their customers. Then a few more months pass and they expand to our social media marketing and team communication apps. Then they add project management tools, and so forth.

Why does this happen? How is this possible? Because the integrations are ready when needed, setup is quick, administration is simple, and there are no additional costs or barriers. Meanwhile, we’ve added five more integrated apps to the suite since launching Zoho One at no extra cost, taking the grand total of apps to 40. Now we’re upping the ante with something new entirely.

Building on the Operating System

To this point we’ve focused on forming the operating system. This has largely meant creating tighter integrations between our existing services and covering new business functions. Now comes the fun part: building new, deeply integrated services on top of the Zoho One suite. Services that can only be built on top of an integrated operating system. Services that assume the underlying apps are integrated so data can flow between them. We’ve built three such services on top of Zoho One: centralized analytics, unified search, and new AI capabilities.

Analytics for Zoho One: One analytics dashboard for your entire business

When your business relies on scattered reports and dashboards it’s difficult to understand how to best guide your team or company forward. Analytics for Zoho One puts an end to all that by providing you an analytics tab at the Zoho One level. That means you get one place to track KPIs and trends across business functions, including financial health, sales and marketing performance, inventory counts, and more. With over 500 pre-built reports and dashboards—plus the option to create your own—you’ll be able to blend data for cross-functional analytics right out of the box. You can even incorporate data from third-party applications, giving you a complete picture of your team, department, or business.

Zia Search: An integrated, unified search

Searching for emails, documents, and business data is a major pain. In fact, many of us spend 30% of our workday searching for information. The new Zia Search gives you one unified search for all your Zoho apps, helping to reduce the amount of time you spend looking for things while respecting authorization rules and data access controls of every app, for every user within your organization. Even better, Zia Search allows you to take contextual actions once you’ve found what you’re looking for. So for example, you can find, read, and respond to an email within Zia Search. Or you can view the slides in a specific deck and then launch the presentation. Or assign a help desk ticket or change the owner of a CRM lead. Or you can lookup a colleague and start a Cliq chat with them. I think you get the idea.

Zia for Zoho One: Zoho Intelligent Assistant to be extended across apps

In 2016 we introduced Zoho CRM users to Zia, Zoho’s AI-powered assistant. We will soon extend Zia across Zoho apps, making it possible to pull data from different departments to quickly provide key information. Using simple commands, Zia will be able to handle complex queries. Like how many customers in your sales pipeline have an open support ticket, for example. Zia will also be able to generate and display charts, like revenue-per-employee trends for the last five years by fetching figures from accounting and HR apps. We even plan to open up our Zia Platform to all Zoho One users, giving you the ability to teach Zia custom skills for your unique needs.

Zoho Concierge: Advising Service for Zoho One Customers 

When we launched Zoho One we knew some people would find it difficult to navigate such a large suite of apps. That’s why we quietly launched Zoho Concierge alongside it. Zoho Concierge is a free service available exclusively to Zoho One customers to help map specific business processes to the Zoho suite. So far Concierge has helped 6,500 customers optimize Zoho One for their particular needs.

If you want to see if your business can benefit from Zoho One or Zoho apps in general, talking to concierge is a good place to start.

Introducing the Zoho One mobile app 

If you’re an organization or service administrator, you’re in luck. The Zoho One mobile app—for both iOS and Android devices—allows organization and service administrators to onboard new employees, provision applications, manage permissions, set security policies, create groups and more, all from their mobile devices. Administrating Zoho One just keeps getting easier and easier.

Another One: Manage events with Backstage

To round out the first year of Zoho One, we’re giving you another app. Today we’re introducing Backstage, an event management application that allows you plan and run events from start to finish. You can learn all about it right here.

What’s Next?

We’re proud of Zoho One’s first year but there’s still a lot to do. We’ll continue working on more apps, integrations and features while also building additional services on top of the suite. What we’ve shown so far is just the tip of the iceberg. While services like Analytics and Search may seem like they’ve been built in the last year, the reality is these projects have been in the making for about a decade. Our commitments to research, development, and long-term thinking are combining in increasingly exciting ways. We hope this latest round of updates continues to show how much better things are when you have one suite of apps for your entire business.