Cloud Technology Firm Zoho Corp. To Invest $30m

Zoho Corp to encourage technology adoption across its small and medium enterprises.

In a conversation with Arab News, Hyther Nizam, president of the Middle East and African region of Zoho Corp, said, "In 2022, Saudi Arabia will be our fastest-growing global market." "We have been doing extremely well here."

The company has been in the Kingdom for the last five years, and it wants to help Saudi Arabia reach its broad digitalization goals and keep its economy stable.

As part of its investment plans, the technology firm will also open its first office in Riyadh, besides its current office in Jeddah. It also intends to hire more locals and expand in the UAE.

"UAE and Saudi Arabia are Zoho’s top two markets in the Middle East and Africa region, with each presenting equally attractive opportunities for growth and expansion,"  commented Sridhar Vembu, CEO and co-founder of Zoho.

"Zoho’s fundamental vision is led by efforts to make innovative solutions accessible and affordable to businesses of all sizes." "With this at the core, we allocate necessary resources to cater to these rapidly growing markets to empower more people and organizations."

The cloud software vendor has been in business for 25 years and has around 12,000 employees. It has 80 million registered users using its software worldwide from over 50 countries.

According to the report, the company has over 55 applications catering to sales support, marketing, human resources, and finance, to name a few.

"We have more than half a million registered organisations that pay customers using Zoho," he said.

Zoho’s increased collaboration with local government entities has also led to its investment in digital infrastructure through Saudi Arabia’s Personal Data Protection Law.

"Over the next year, we want to continue to lead the way in the MEA and make Saudi Arabia our No. 1 market in the region while allocating the necessary resources to help achieve the goals of Vision 2030 by lowering the technical barriers to entry for the business community," Nizam said.

According to the report, the cloud company also provides solutions in the Arabic language, including Zoho CRM, Zoho Creator, Zoho Desk, and Zoho Bigin.

Furthermore, its e-commerce platform, Zoho Commerce, is among the few vendors in the market to offer natively integrated Arabic language right-to-left capabilities that enable merchants to create e-commerce websites in Arabic, the company added.

"Saudi Arabia is going through one of the biggest transformations in the world today with specific needs that the market has in terms of localization of language, features, compatibility, and compliance with government and financial regulations," stated Ali Shabdar, regional director of MEA, Zoho Corp.