By Shruti Menon Seeboo
In a move to empower local businesses in Mauritius on their digital transformation journey, leading ICT provider Mauritius Telecom and global technology giant Zoho joined forces in May 2024. This exciting partnership, announced at Zoholics Mauritius (Zoho’s inaugural user conference in the country), signifies Zoho’s official entry into the Mauritian market.
The collaboration offers a significant benefit to Mauritius Telecom’s customers – access to Zoho’s extensive suite of over 55 cloud-based business solutions (SaaS) at a discounted price. Zoho’s comprehensive offerings cater to all aspects of business operations, encompassing CRM (customer relationship management), HR (human resources), enterprise collaboration tools, accounting software, and more.
To delve deeper into the partnership and explore upcoming plans, we spoke with Prem Anand Velumani, Associate Director, Strategic Growth, MEA, at Zoho Corporation. Excerpts:
1. Zoho has seen significant growth (31%) and partner network expansion (50%) in Mauritius. What specific aspects of the Mauritius market are driving this success, and how does the partnership with Mauritius Telecom further solidify Zoho’s presence there?
Several specific aspects of the local market have propelled the success of Zoho in Mauritius. The country’s burgeoning industries, especially IT hardware and related sectors, financial services, real estate, retail, and travel and hospitality, provide a fertile ground for Zoho’s suite of business software solutions.
Secondly, the demand for digital transformation among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in Mauritius drives the adoption of Zoho’s comprehensive offerings, such as Zoho One (the operating system for business that unifies over 50 products on a single platform), Zoho Desk (customer support software), Zoho CRM (customer experience platform), Zoho Books (accounting software), and Zoho Workplace (enterprise collaboration platform). Moreover, Zoho’s commitment to providing local support and customisation resonates well with businesses seeking tailored solutions in the Mauritian market.
By collaborating with a respected telecommunications provider like Mauritius Telecom, Zoho will be able to make its enterprise technology available at a discounted price to a wide network of local businesses. Our aim is to help businesses of all sizes leapfrog in their digital transformation journey.
2. The Mauritius partnership focuses on helping local businesses with digital transformation. Does Zoho plan to replicate this model with other leading telecom providers in Africa or other developing regions? If so, what are the key considerations for such partnerships?
We’re pleased with the success of our partnership in Mauritius, which has significantly contributed to local businesses’ digital transformation efforts. Regarding the replication of this model in other regions, Zoho has already been partnering with government entities and business clusters in Africa and other countries to help remove the access barrier that exists when it comes to adoption of enterprise technology.
Zoho is also looking to partner with other organisations in Mauritius that focus on helping businesses. With our philosophy of transnational localism, wherein we build local roots while staying globally connected, our focus is to work with local communities and organisations and cater to the unique needs of the region.
Cultural understanding, infrastructure compatibility, and the provision of adequate support and training are also crucial factors in ensuring the success of these partnerships. We’re committed to expanding our impact in digital transformation and are open to exploring partnerships that align with our mission and values.
3. Zoho’s discounted SaaS offerings target local businesses in Mauritius. How does Zoho ensure its products and support cater specifically to the needs of small and medium-sized businesses, as opposed to larger enterprises?
Zoho has products that cater to mid-market and enterprises (such as Zoho CRM, Zoho Creator, Zoho Analytics), and also ones that cater to SMEs (such as Bigin, Zoho Commerce). The value that we offer is that our products are easy to use so that smaller companies can easily set these up and start using them, and they are highly customisable so that as the SMEs grow and scale their business, they can continue using the same platform that can meet their needs.
We also have 3:1 ratio of spending on R&D versus marketing, which allows us to keep our pricing reasonable and pass on the benefits to our customers by offering more value and features for the same price. Through partnerships, like with Mauritius Telecom, we are able to further discount our prices and make the technology affordable and accessible to even smaller companies.
4. Zoho emphasises seamless integration between its 55+ cloud applications. With the growing number of cloud solutions available, how does Zoho differentiate itself from competitors in terms of creating a unified business operating system?
Zoho has the most prolific portfolio of products, more than any other SaaS player. Our 55+ products cater to every business need and they have all been built on the same technology stack, which means that they use the same data models, can deeply integrate to ensure seamless and contextual flow of data from one product to another, and offer the value of a unified platform that can give business owners a complete view of their operations across sales, marketing, HR and finance in a single place.
Unlike most competitors who specialise in specific niches, Zoho provides a one-stop-shop solution, eliminating the need for businesses to cobble together disparate systems from multiple vendors, handle as many contracts, deal with data silos and integration hassles.
5. Zoho One has been a key growth driver. What are Zoho’s plans for further development and innovation within the Zoho One platform and its individual applications like Zoho Desk, CRM, and Books?
Zoho One is the operating system for business, as it allows any business to run all its operations in a single place. Zoho One is where our strategy of building our entire tech stack—from data centres and networks to platform and apps—from ground up comes into play. Our tech stack is vertically, horizontally, and contextually integrated, and therefore we have services that we can offer across our the stack such as SSO, AI, single data model, etc. This unified stack greatly improves the user experience. For example, our users can ask Zia Search, our AI powered search engine: ‘find me documents that my team has shared with me’; because it has access to HRMS, the AI will know what “team” means, through access to document management, it will know what “shared document” means, and because there is a common Directory, it will know which documents the user has permissions to view. This is just one example of what a unified stack can do.
This stack is also customisable, extendable, and integrable so it can work with other third-party applications whenever required. We want to offer that flexibility to our users. We are constantly working on making our individual products better in terms of functionality and usability, and these improvements are inherited by Zoho One users at no extra cost. At the same time, we are investing in unifying the products in Zoho One so that the users feel like they are working on just one system and are able to access information they require without any hassle. Zoho itself runs on Zoho One.
6. Cloud adoption can raise data privacy concerns for businesses. How does Zoho address these concerns and ensure data security for its Mauritian and global customers?
Security and privacy are separate, though related concerns. For security, we use robust encryption methods, comply with global security standards, and have bug bounty programmes to ensure we are on our guard all the time. We also comply with various global data protection laws when it comes to privacy. However, for us, privacy is not just a legal matter, but an ethical one. Zoho does not have an ad revenue model in any form; we do not sell our user’s data, and do not have any third-party trackers on our website.
7. Zoho’s significant growth likely requires a strong talent pool. How is Zoho attracting and retaining top talent, especially in emerging markets like Mauritius, to support its global expansion plans?
Our founders attribute a broader perspective to the term ‘capital’ rather than it just being financial in nature. Business capital, according to us, includes people, one of our irreplaceable assets. Our attrition rate is in single digits, one of the lowest in the industry. This is because we invest in our people. We do not look at credentials, instead focussing on hiring candidates who are motivated and have the required skills. We also offer free movement between teams as and when needed, so that employees can find the role that they can truly flourish in. We also believe that talent is everywhere, but the opportunities are not.
Therefore, we try to create opportunities where they are not readily available. We have a programme called Zoho Schools of Learning, wherein we train high school graduates and hire them as employees once they complete their course. Currently, around 10% of our workforce is from ZSL graduates. We have also opened offices in rural areas and small towns to tap into the local talent pool. Furthermore, as part of transnational localism, we also hire locally to serve the needs of the customers in a particular region.
8. The partnership aims to empower Mauritian businesses through digital transformation. Beyond offering Zoho’s suite of products, what specific digital transformation challenges or opportunities does Zoho see in the Mauritian market, and how will the partnership with Mauritius Telecom address these?
Mauritius is becoming a hub in Africa for many verticals, and people who start businesses in Mauritius are looking for a robust software to handle their end-to end operations. These businesses, poised for growth, don’t want to spend their time and effort choosing different software for different departments in their organisations and then dealing with integration hassles. This is the biggest opportunity for Zoho as we have our operating system for business (Zoho One) ready for the Mauritian market, and on top of that, the partnership with Mauritius Telecom strengthens our presence and trust in the local market. This means we are fully ready with software and resources to serve the customers end to end.
