It's always exciting to enter a new year with aspirations for new beginnings, or to continue ongoing endeavours with renewed enthusiasm. Either way, it helps to reflect on experiences from the year past.
2021 was a tough year.
If 2020 was about the resilience and trust that our customers, partners, and teams showed, then 2021 was about moving ahead despite the adversity. If 2020 was about businesses surviving the pandemic, 2021 was about figuring out new solutions for the future of workplaces. And if 2020 was about businesses taking stock and optimizing for the most efficient practices, 2021 was about learning new skills and employing new tools.
It hasn't been easy, and these are challenges that can't be solved in only a single year. But thanks to you, we are well on our way. We cannot thank you enough for placing your trust in Zoho One, the operating system for your business. Also, thank you for taking the time to voice out your thoughts, experience and feedback; all of which helps Zoho One.
An operating system for business is not just a concept. It's a solution, and also a way of thinking about how to do business effectively. It's about moving from using disparate applications and complicated subscriptions to an evolved and unified way to work, with systems that talk to each other and no department—be it marketing, sales, finance, or operations—functioning in a silo.
Ever since Zoho One was launched as the operating system for business, there have been many adjacent products and services that have tried to build the next operating system for their industry. In many ways, this confirms that the tightly-integrated and constantly-learning business software suite is the way this market is heading.
Building an operating system for business is a continuous process and, at Zoho, it is a company-wide undertaking. In this continuous process most of Zoho's apps have found a place within Zoho One. But we are also not trying to build a walled garden ecosystem and we actively try to play well with all the other cloud applications in the market, some of which you may already be using.
We have added over 300 integrations to the Zoho Marketplace in 2021. These integrations can be used to easily connect Zoho apps with other cloud apps, helping you set up unique business workflows.
Businesses see value in Zoho One because our multiple integrated applications and services work well together. For example, the mobility company Carver Europe uses Zoho One for a wide range of activities, from booking test drives for their electric vehicles to managing complex database systems. But what helped Carver the most was the ease of data flow between applications like Zoho Bookings, Zoho CRM, and Zoho Creator, which gave them the entire picture of their business and more control over their supply chain which they could not have achieved with separate applications.
ZO21
Zoho One's update last year, was an evolutionary step towards a more unified operating system and a cleaner user experience. For starters, we introduced 6 new applications and improved search and device management services across the suite.
Understanding the difficulty of managing a business from different browser tabs, we also brought the entirety of Zoho One under a single UI that is both clean and accessible. You can pin applications to our new sidebar for easy access, or retrieve documents and conversations from a powerful and even more intuitive Zia search. There are a lot of customizable parts to the Zoho One dashboard. Go ahead and explore.
Under the hood of Zoho One are services, like enterprise search, that get multiple tasks accomplished for businesses behind the scenes. We have added more power to these services with upgrades like work graph, and introduced new services like dedicated device management and org dictionary.
Remote collaboration was almost always on our mind this year, and the new apps that we added help in different facets of remote work.
Zoho TeamInbox gets your teams their own collaborative mailbox.
Zoho Learn gets your teams up to speed with training courses that target skill gaps and ready them for their next career step in your company.
Zoho Lens uses augmented reality to help your team solve wide-ranging defects remotely, from plant machinery issues to server outages, right from your desk.
Zoho DataPrep adds a data preparation layer to Zoho Analytics, and helps your team spot errors and ensure your business data is ready for analysis.
Zoho Commerce helps you sell online with an easy-to-manage ecommerce portal through which you can accept orders, track inventory, and process payments.
Along with the remote collaboration applications, we have included Zoho Payroll for our customers in the India region. Payroll was the missing piece in our HR suite of applications for stress-free payroll processing.
These are just the highlights of the product updates and additions from Zoho One, but we would also like to remind you that Zoho One is a collection of 40+ applications and services. As a platform that lends itself to be adapted for any business, there were more updates this year than could truly be counted.
If we look at individual products, there were major updates from Zoho Analytics (Analytics 5.0), Zoho CRM (Winter '21), and Zoho Cliq (Cliq 3.0), but literally every application within the Zoho-verse came out with feature enhancements and updates all through the year. It would be a little too much if we began to list the 150+ new feature updates across Zoho, but there's no better time than now to tell the tall feats of achievements of our engineering teams. Thank you for all your hard work!
Innovation was a key trait that we observed in businesses which moved from surviving to thriving in these difficult times. Business processes and activities which were thought to be only possible via in-person meetings had to be shifted to hybrid or remote work. Our customer Heroes of Digital, a digital marketing agency in Singapore, used this opportunity to experiment with their business model. And with the help of applications within the Zoho One suite, they were able to create a new remote client-servicing model.
These were just a few of the fascinating Zoho One stories that we uncovered in 2021—stories of innovation, stories of grit and stories of resilience. But at the core these were stories of togetherness where people came together, communicated openly, and tried to solve problems. We are delighted to have played a small part in your story and will continue to improve upon Zoho One and make it a more unified operating system for your business.
We wish each and everyone of you, greater things and a very happy 2022.
Team Zoho One.
Designs by Lokesh L and Pravin F
If you would like to share your Zoho One story, write to hello@zohoone.com, we would love to hear from you.
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