Techaisle Blog

The cloud has transformed the IT industry and has altered IT service delivery options. Cloud has impacted the economics & resource requirements associated with that delivery and has unlocked applications and business opportunities for user organizations of all sizes and industries. We are increasingly immersed in a post-transactional market, where discrete sales of individual products or integrated systems are replaced by agreements to provide IT capacity and business functionality “as-a-Service.” Organizations are increasingly turning to as-a-service models to ensure they have the agility and cost predictability needed to remain competitive. No segment of the IT market is immune to this trend. Sales of on-premises hardware and software are declining and will continue to decline. Inexorably, the market is shifting from one defined by discrete purchase-and-deploy deals aligned with refresh cycles to one where businesses take a ‘hybrid IT’ approach that blends a limited number of on-premises assets with a growing range of on-demand services. Cloud has transitioned from desirable to mandatory. The technology acquisition model is shifting from CAPEX to OPEX. Techaisle’s latest commercial segment survey reveals that 53% of businesses are considering OPEX-based agreements (pay-as-you-go/consumption based/as-a-service), and 26% plan to use a mix of CAPEX and OPEX, depending on which is best for business. As cloud applications proliferate, the demand for hybrid IT – integrating multiple delivery sources into a single, unified fabric so that workloads can be assigned to the best (rather than ‘best possible today’) location and that data and critical services (notably, security) can be connected across platforms, is becoming an urgent requirement. As a result, organizations find themselves in a multi-cloud by default setup, where they have applications and data residing in multiple cloud environments. There is little consistency between these environments, resulting in unpredictable costs and challenges to developer productivity. Techaisle’s cloud adoption study shows that between 45% and 83% of businesses use multiple clouds. The desired objective for each of these businesses is to have a seamless connection between traditional, private, public, and hybrid/multi-cloud environments via automation and orchestration.

The above challenge is what Dell aims to address with Dell APEX, a portfolio of as-a-service offerings that deliver infrastructure, and solutions, wherever needed. It aims to offer a better way to adopt a multi-cloud setup — multi-cloud by design (a term coined by Dell).

Let us first understand how Dell APEX came into existence.

In October 2022, Zoho reached US$1 billion in revenue. Zoho was founded in 1996 to deliver easy-to-use and deploy CRM solutions to the SOHO market segment (Small Office, Home Office). Even the Zoho name was a spin from SOHO. Zoho has transformed from a fledgling startup to an enterprise serving small, midsized, large, and public sector organizations globally. In recent years, Zoho has successfully moved upmarket from helping small businesses to midmarket firms and enterprise customers. Mid-market firms are measured, thoughtful, agile, and rapidly digitally transforming, focusing on cloud cost optimization and business process automation. These firms are building a longer-term strategy for an integrated, flexible approach to incremental cloud expansion. In direct contrast, small businesses move from point to point, working first on one discrete solution and then on the next. This dichotomous approach is a real challenge for suppliers as they need to differentiate solutions for the small business market and demonstrate that their offerings are essential components of broader strategies for mid-market firms while attracting attention to their products and building brand preference in both segments. While the expectations of mid-market buyers about SaaS providers are similar to large enterprises, the budgetary limitations create challenges in supplier selection, deployment, and management.

Techaisle research shows that midmarket firms invest in their employees and are social responsibility advocates. As a result, they want their vendors to share these characteristics and mindsets. Therefore, serving the mid-market segment necessitates a distinct culture that is not characterized by high prices and lengthy sale cycles.

Midmarket technology DNA and role of Zoho

The positioning of the solutions within the midmarket is essential. It requires in-depth information on business benefits and the process steps needed to capture those benefits targeted at BDMs, and information on how to assemble, deploy, integrate, and support/optimize these solutions targeted at ITDMs – and an understanding of how to position and convey the messages to each audience.

Its extensive portfolio of cloud business applications includes 50+ products, ranging from traditional office suites to analytics, finance, sales and marketing, collaboration, customer service, HR, and many more business processes at competitive pricing. Zoho has a deep engineering culture immersed in R&D, along with maintaining its cultural ethos without having to cope with any interference from either external investors or the public market. Zoho believes that instead of spending heavily on sales and marketing, it would instead invest in software development efforts or let its potential customers access the limited-feature platform for free. This strategy has proved to be very successful for Zoho and its customers.

Simplicity, flexibility, and value for midmarket firms

Zoho One, the flagship product, is designed for mid-market businesses. With Zoho One, customers have access to 45 business, collaboration, and productivity applications, of which over 20 applications (across functions) are used by more than half of Zoho’s customers. The solutions are a part of a unified technology platform with built-in search, messaging, and AI services. It runs on a unified database with a unified data model with data pillars that enable seamless integration to deliver single truth for the business empowering users with a unified experience. The collection of apps running on a single database architecture and purpose-built on Zoho technology stack - services, software, hardware, and network infrastructure - deployed on Zoho’s own global data centers ensures performance, availability, security, and privacy. All these solutions and features come at an affordable price, which makes the package suitable for mid-market firms as it significantly reduces the total cost of ownership, deployment, and integration timeframes.

Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho, once said, “the market is littered with features masquerading as products.” Zoho One provides single sign-on, single subscription, and a fully integrated platform. It is common knowledge that app-specific experiences drive infrastructure-level optimization steeped in Zero Trust, AI, distributed file structure, and data center expansion driven by market dynamics.

More than 60% of Zoho’s workforce is devoted to engineering, developing new technologies, and keeping these technologies updated. Since the launch of Zoho One in 2017, Zoho has been innovating and updating its applications. With the evolution and maturing of newer technologies, Zoho has been adding AI/ML functionalities and improving user experiences.

In the past five years, Zoho One has grown considerably and has acquired over 50,000 businesses as customers in 160+ countries. Over the past two years, the platform has grown 150%, with 37.5% of new customers from mid-market and enterprise segments. License upgrades have increased by 92%. These figures spotlight the strategic commitment by Zoho to deliver end-to-end solutions that empower organizations to be agile, scalable, and adaptive to changes in their industries. Even the midmarket developers are taking notice as they can access Zoho Tables, RPA, and Test automation tools. Zoho Finance suite has seen tremendous growth. As per Zoho, it is processing 100M invoices per year.

Zoho One is wholly developed in-house on a single technology stack and is a unified, end-to-end platform that offers plenty of integration points across applications. Well-grounded unification enables organizations to link functions such as sales, marketing, customer support, accounting, human resources, and others. Moreover, the platform can be easily integrated with third-party solutions, allowing organizations (especially mid-market enterprises) the flexibility to manage complex systems, large amounts of data, and dispersed teams.

Techaisle’s latest midmarket research shows that 42% of firms are increasing their spending through cloud marketplaces. Over 500K Zoho users use 1500+ apps from the Zoho marketplace (e.g., Twilio for Zoho CRM). Recognizing the need for verticalization, Zoho has purpose-built industry apps such as real estate CRM, travel agencies, IT services, field services, and many others. Most importantly, Zoho enables midmarket firms to develop and deploy custom apps.

Zoho addresses the need for high-velocity custom apps

It is relatively easy to adopt a single SaaS solution, connecting its inputs and outputs to relevant internal systems and processes. It is possible to adopt a handful of cloud applications, hand-wiring the interconnections between them and adjacent applications. But this craft-built approach to the cloud differs from longer-term visions of scale, flexibility, and agility. It creates IT management overhead and performance and security risks. Even worse, disconnected systems affect relationships between companies and their customers: workflows that lack cohesion create unnecessary gaps in service. Unable to link all inputs to achieve a single view of the business reduces visibility into individual customer preferences and broader market opportunities. Zoho One provides midmarket firms with tools they can use to develop their applications and automate their business processes by creating workflows. For example:

The vision of Xero, a cloud accounting software firm for small businesses and their advisors, is to be the most trusted and insightful small business platform. Its objective is to improve life for people in small businesses, their advisors, and communities worldwide. The adoration of customers and partners was visible during the two days of Xerocon New Orleans 2022, Xero’s flagship event attended by over 1000 accounting and bookkeeping partners, exhibitors, and speakers. The pace of innovation, increasing dedication to small business success, and promise to promote diversity were evident. In its founding stages, Xero was built to empower collaboration between small businesses and their accountants and bookkeepers. From its inception, the heart of Xero has been to make the complex simple. The ethos continues today as Xero is evolving to be different, dynamic, unique, and memorable. Xero’s long-term plans for North America are centered around augmenting, harnessing partnerships, and tapping into the broader small business ecosystem.

Ecosystem vision progress

Xero has a very sound strategy and is flexible in its approach to small business customer needs. It has created an ecosystem (with over 1000 apps that integrate with Xero) that includes applications that extend how customers digitally transform their organizations with adjacent and complementary solutions to the accounting software. Xero has adopted API standards that facilitate integration across these complementary offerings. In other areas, Xero is establishing alliances that help position integrations as part of a strategy aligned with a digitally transforming small business segment. Xero recognizes that pursuing the ecosystem business approach requires success in other areas, including go-to-market strategy and the ability to integrate around data. So far, Xero has transformed in step with the transformation of its customers and accelerated its integrated offerings to meet rapidly evolving customer expectations/requirements.

Mitel’s overall philosophy for unified communications (UC) is enabling customers with broad flexibility to deploy what they want and purchase solutions how they want. A key differentiator of Mitel’s has been its belief that one size does not fit all. That belief is supported by a recent Techaisle global study revealing that 44% of firms use multiple communication platforms. On-prem unified UC solutions dominate in 88% of firms, but in 56% on-prem capabilities co-exist with cloud solutions. All these options are choices that Mitel supports with its Customer Lifecycle Management approach, recently bolstered by its exclusive UCaaS partnership with RingCentral.

Mitel - RingCentral UCaaS momentum - “A Differentiated and Evolved Partnership”

Mitel is not just partnering with RingCentral but doing even more by optimizing the complete migration experience through collaborative processes, migration tooling, device transfers, and exclusive incentives providing Mitel customers a world-class UCaaS solution and a clear, flexible path toward the future. Mitel is actively integrating numerous capabilities with the RingCentral MVP (Messaging, Voice, Phone) platform to enhance the whole experience for customers. The first example of this broad integration was evident just five months following the RingCentral partnership when Mitel launched its first set of certified devices – the 6900 series phones – which work seamlessly with RingCentral MVP. Customer choice and experience extend into a well-thought-through onboarding process, enhanced by Mitel’s Migration Assist Package, which introduces automation and accuracy while migrating customers 75% faster than industry standards. Customers migrating to less than a hundred seats can take advantage of these free implementation services. The free service is very generous as it includes access to an Implementation Advisor who also schedules discovery and training sessions and unlimited access via toll-free number for follow-up questions and assistance on system setup. Mitel partners or RingCentral provide professional services for customers with more than a hundred seats.

Mitel’s partnership with RingCentral has seen significant momentum, migrating over 100,000 seats in the first six months of the exclusive relationship.

The RingCentral – Mitel partnership is highly differentiated from others in the market, including RingCentral’s relationship with Avaya. From the outset, Mitel has distinguished itself from Avaya and others with superior pricing and purchase flexibility, ease of deployment and migration, professional services, and training. Although Avaya is widely considered to have a composable CPaaS offering, Mitel’s CloudLink technology with APIs and integration capabilities are yet to be fully utilized by developers and partners. Additionally, the compensation received from RingCentral fuels investments in core Mitel unified communications R&D and innovation and potential future merger and acquisition activities.