Six trends for 2021: Zoho

2020 was a very good year for cloud computing, with the COVID-19 pandemic kickstarting a move to the cloud for many businesses, and a wider adoption of cloud services for many others, said Gibu Mathew, VP and GM of Zoho for Asia Pacific.

“2020 was not a normal year,” he said. “Everyone was scrambling to look as if it were normal.”

According to Mathew, different companies took different approaches to the lockdowns. He cited industry surveys which found that SMBs in the APAC region had accelerated digitalisation due to COVID-19 and that companies prioritised cloud drivers such as innovation, risk reduction in the past year.

“Unless you as a business have a strong digital portfolio it's very difficult to survive,” he said.

“A huge number of businesses or Asia Pacific executives looked at innovation or risk reduction as an important driver for cloud adoption.”

Risk reduction as a driver reflects a change in mindset, he said, and will be a big driver for businesses going forward.

Zoho has identified six trends for 2021:

The cloud revolution and leapfrogging of technology

Cloud services have become more sophisticated. People have gone from embracing e-commerce and digital payment to becoming familiar with online meetings and self-service B2B technology, said Mathew.

"Public cloud made these things so easy," Mathew commented. "Public cloud hides a lot of complexity, makes everything seamless and makes it appear like it's from one vendor."

In reality, there is a lot going on behind the scenes, he explained, including infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solutions, platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solutions and software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, working with on-premise apps, data, runtime environments, middleware, and operating systems.

Cloud services will consolidate

Mathew used the growing number of marketing apps to make an analogy for cloud services. "When a lot of technology has been made simpler with public cloud what happens is you'll see a lot of services out there," he said.

The marketing technology (martech) landscape is complex and huge, with thousands of brands in the space. According to Mathew, the market is ripe for consolidation, with individual brands and apps merging into suites. "We strongly believe that consolidation is going to happen in the cloud space," he said.

The new hybrid employee experience supports how employees now work from home, said Mathew during an online briefing.

"There are so many different companies solving a small set of problems," Mathew noted. "From a business perspective, if you have a buffet with 8,000 dishes, you don't even have the time to try all these dishes. Features typically tend to masquerade as products and products tend to masquerade as companies."

The challenges for businesses stem from the number of choices available, as products lack interoperability and customers have to manage multiple learning curves including the need to become familiar with different interfaces. Silos are easily created. In the marketing landscape alone, the sales line of business might not talk to marketing, with the back office and customer support being independent functions. This leads to a total lack of context for decision-making, Mathew said.

Zoho has gone for breadth and consolidation to mitigate this challenge. The company offers some 45 apps, with the option of access to all of them under a suite, Zoho One, Mathew noted.

More attention on security

"Security is an important part of the conversation whether going with legacy software or cloud solutions," Mathew said, citing recent sophisticated cyberattacks that have affected large organisations and governments.

The nature of protection is such that all checks and balances have to be in place all the time, with new ones added on but none taken away. "All the 1,000 checks that you did five years back, you need to check every single thing every single day," he said.

The new weapon is a Zero Trust network. "Every step of the conversation you must have high security and you must assume that you cannot trust the network," he elaborated. "We must slowly move to a Zero Trust network, and that's what we see from our customers and what we see from the industry."

Adjunct surveillance

Privacy is going to be an important conversation as well, he added, pointing out that services we use are monitoring behaviour and passing information on us to advertisers for retargeted marketing. "We are leaking information," he said. "It'll be an important discussion sooner or later."

According to Forrester, up to one in three Asia-Pacific customers make values-driven purchase decisions. "Values-focused firms will deliver higher profits than other firms. Privacy is going to be a focus for businesses out there when they choose their vendors," Mathew predicted.

A new hybrid employee experience

Home offices are very different from formal workplaces, requiring businesses to give employees the tools to support a better experience when they work from home, Mathew said. 

Many functions are now conducted online or remotely, and these new scenarios should be supported.

"The employee user experience going to define..what the customer experience is going to be in the future," he said.

A new customer experience

Today's version of a good customer experience will work from anywhere, support self-service options, contactless activities, and offer multiple ways to reach vendors. The insights from artificial intelligence will allow better decisions to be made, as well as better user experiences, Mathew said. 

2021 will be a stronger iteration of the lessons learned in 2020, Mathew concluded. He said, "It's going to have more businesses focus on how they can transform themselves...A lot of businesses are going to know what they are going to do in 2021 because they have had a lot of time to think about it. They definitely have to transform and change, or they will be left behind."

Zoho has 60+ million business users in 180+ countries.