Zoho, the Chennai-headquartered global technology major, on Monday announced the introduction of Zoho Rooms, a smart conference room solution. On the sidelines of Zoholics India, the annual user conference here, the company also announced new updates to Zoho Cliq, its communication and collaboration platform.
With the Cliq Rooms app for Android TV, users can schedule interactions for physical conference rooms, connect to the TV audio and video projecting screens, and conduct hybrid meetings, wherein employees from remote locations will be able to join the meeting. It also enables users to connect their A/V input to their phones or laptops.
Addressing a press conference, Sridhar Vembu, the CEO and co-founder of Zoho, said Cliq is the most refined collaborative platform, so much so that if Zoho is the operating system for businesses, Cliq is the operating system for Zoho.
Now, with Cliq, employees will be able to do most of their work from right within the app, be it customer issues or approving expenses, Mr. Vembu said. “This can help organisations, especially the ones in the medium and large segments, improve both employee and customer experience by bringing in the key functions, from front-end and back-end apps, into the Cliq interface,” he said.
Cliq also has a customisable interface with multilingual options such as Kannada, Tamil, and Hindi. Stating that Cliq is one of the most used apps in Zoho One, the company said it has seen a 30% increase in user migration from Slack and MS Teams in 2022. There is also an option for live translations in different Indian and foreign languages.
Stating that India is the fastest-growing market, Mr. Vembu said the company saw a 37% growth in 2022, and he was bullish about the growth potential in the country. “In revenue, we are number three globally. We hope to be number two in three years and number one in 10 years. But it’s all conditional in the backdrop of the evolving international situation.”
R&D in small town
Zoho is taking the ‘One District One Product’ initiative of the Union government a step further with ‘One District One R&D’. It is setting up a small Research and Development team in the town of Kottarakara in Kollam district of Kerala. Mr. Vembu said, “I like going to such places. It will be like a spoke that will be attached to the Tenkasi hub.”
He said that this would be a model that they want to have in Karnataka as well. “In Bengaluru, we have significant investments; we would like to have an R&D team in a rural area in Karnataka,” he said.
