Global tech giant comes to NZ

Global tech giant Zoho Corporation is continuing its international expansion by opening an office in Auckland to better service its growing local customer base.

The company is actively hiring a full go-to-market team to support its push into the Australia and New Zealand region, which is one of its top four performing markets in the world.  

Zoho, which comprises three technology businesses, has a technology stack that is used by over 45 million users across 180+ countries, and more than 300,000 companies around the world, including Tesla, Netflix and Amazon.

The company competes directly with the likes of Salesforce, Google and Microsoft and cites its speed of deployment and pricing structure as its key competitive differentiators, with even the smallest of businesses able to digitise their operations with Zoho for as little as $1 a day.

In New Zealand, customers include major airlines and banks, and Turners and Growers, among other large household names. With tens of thousands of companies across Australia and New Zealand, and continued strong growth across the region in cloud services – and with Gartner predicting a 20% increase in spend in 2018 – Zoho is looking to accelerate its growth in the region with investment in a local team and premises.

“There are two broad goals for us,” says Zoho Founder Sridhar Vembu, “expanding our large enterprise business and widening our geographic footprint. We are seeing the adoption of the Zoho suite in large enterprises and setting up shop in New Zealand is a crucial part of our global expansion.”

The company in this region will be led by Timothy Kasbe (pictured), who is appointed as Managing Director for A/NZ and Global Large Enterprise. An experienced technology leader, Mr. Kasbe has held positions as Chief Information and Digital Officer at several Fortune 50 companies.

“We look forward to building out our teams in both Australia and New Zealand, creating jobs and supporting the growth of the local tech ecosystems through skills transfer and knowledge sharing,” says Kasbe, who moved to New Zealand in 2017.

“Business software has historically conjured up thoughts of applications that were only available to large companies with deep pockets and sophisticated IT teams. Zoho’s affordable and accessible application suite has democratised business software for all,” says Kasbe.

“Our modern cloud-based applications address every functional area of business including sales, marketing, HR, finance, IT and even communication and collaboration applications to increase business productivity. Zoho is truly the software operating system for business. We do this without reading customers’ data or worse, selling it to the highest bidder like other industry titans, as privacy and security are our supreme values. With strong organic growth, Zoho has resonated with Australian and New Zealand-based users – the region is one of our top four performing markets in the world,” said Kasbe.

New Zealand’s Collective Hospitality Group is rolling out Zoho company-wide, and Chief Operating Officer Sarah Balle says Zoho’s full suite of business applications provides the team with a single cloud-based login that facilitates collaboration and believes Zoho can positively transform businesses of any size.

“Zoho has everything that all big businesses invest in, and that small businesses can only dream of having. It’s a powerful set of tools that have seamlessly integrated with all of our systems and processes resulting in a more effective and efficient team and business operation,” she said.

New Zealand tech-powered transport provider Recur Logistics uses Zoho One, and Managing Director Leonardo Law says: “Zoho has enabled Recur to become one of the fastest growing logistics companies in New Zealand by allowing the integration of multiple business operations, resulting in improved team performance, efficiency, transparency and governance.”