Latest news with #GibuMathew
The Sun
06-08-2025
- Business
- The Sun
Zoho Launches Zoho Books Singapore edition
SINGAPORE - Media OutReach Newswire - 6 August 2025 - Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, today launched the Singapore edition of Zoho Books, cloud-based accounting software to help businesses simplify GST and e-invoicing compliance. This launch includes the Singapore edition of other solutions in Zoho's finance and operations suite of applications, offering businesses a better way to manage their financial and operational processes while staying compliant with the country's regulations. 'The launch of the Singapore edition of Zoho Books represents a significant step forward in enabling businesses and accountants to embrace digital transformation in financial compliance. With built-in AI capabilities and automation, Zoho Books simplifies GST calculations, ensures adherence to IRAS regulations, and helps mitigate compliance risks. As part of our 16+ country-specific editions, this launch empowers organisations to improve accuracy, reduce manual effort, and navigate an increasingly complex regulatory environment,' says Gibu Mathew, VP and GM, Zoho APAC According to a recent survey by Zoho, a majority of businesses in Singapore report managing GST compliance efficiently, with 82% finding IRAS guidance easy to follow. However, challenges remain, 32% of businesses still file manually through the IRAS portal, and 71% spend up to five days preparing GST returns. The most common difficulties cited were: staying updated with regulatory changes, accurately calculating input/output tax, and ensuring timely filing. These insights point to a growing need for automation in tax compliance. Zoho Books addresses this by providing real-time updates on GST regulations, automating tax calculations, and generating IRAS-ready F5 returns. By reducing manual processes, the solution helps businesses improve accuracy, save time, and minimise compliance risks. This is particularly relevant in light of recent enforcement trends. In FY23/24, the Inland Revenue Authority of Singapore (IRAS) recovered $162 million, including penalties, through over 2,500 audits across industries. A significant portion of these penalties stemmed from compliance lapses, highlighting the importance of adopting reliable, audit-ready systems like Zoho Books. Zoho Books offers e-invoicing compliance which provides B2B businesses the ability to send invoices electronically directly into their accounting systems according to the PEPPOL standards. Zoho Books will soon offer integration with InvoiceNow to push invoices to the IRAS. With this accounting solution, businesses can also manage their finance end-to-end, perform core accounting functions, track stocks, reconcile bank accounts, and manage projects. The software offers PayNow payment method to streamline payment collections. With AI-driven receipt capture, businesses can automatically record expenses and bills within the application. Zoho Books also comes with other advanced capabilities like audit trail, order management, budgeting and workflow automation. With the application's built-in Zoho Analytics integration, businesses can leverage Zia, Zoho's AI-based analytics assistant to track financial trends with smart visualizations, perform predictive analysis and make data-driven decisions. The Singapore edition of other solutions in Zoho's finance and operations suite offers the following capabilities: --> Zoho Inventory, a comprehensive solution to manage inventory, track stock levels, and generate GST and e-invoicing compliant invoices, ensuring seamless integration with shipping carriers and aggregators like Singapore Post, and Easyship for efficient order fulfilment. The solution offers advanced warehouse management capabilities and provides faster order processing. Businesses can leverage location tracking and labelling, stock counting, stock out alerts, and role-based access to the warehouse operations for better inventory control. --> Zoho Billing is a versatile billing platform, offering one-time billing, subscription management, with GST and e-invoicing compliance, along with AR automation capabilities. The solution offers project billing, Quote-to-Cash (Q2C) and revenue reporting functionalities. Additionally, Zoho Billing offers subscription management capabilities like trial management, prorated billing, usage billing, customer lifecycle management, and retention. --> Zoho Invoice is a free invoicing solution built for small businesses that helps manage receivables. Businesses can send quotes and create customised, GST compliant invoices. --> Zoho Expense, end-to-end travel and expense (T&E) management software, that provides businesses with capabilities to manage all stages of employee travel, and automate expense reporting. With self-booking capabilities, employees can book flights, hotels, taxis, and trains according to company policy, reducing administration. Per diem rates and rules can be auto-imported, compliant with government regulations, automating business travel allowances. --> Zoho Commerce, a complete e-commerce platform that helps businesses create and manage online stores, accept orders, send GST-compliant invoices, process payments, manage shipping and track inventory. With Zoho Commerce, businesses can easily set up an online presence without needing any coding expertise. --> Zoho Practice is built for accounting professionals, helping them deliver client services efficiently. Workpapers simplifies audit and compliance workflows by automatically fetching client financial statements from Zoho Books, enabling easy comparison, adjustments, document management, and collaboration for seamless review and approval. The self-service portal enables accountants to collaborate with clients that use third-party services, facilitating document requests, digital signatures, and communication. Powerful Platform Zoho's finance suite of applications is built on the same platform, enabling instant interoperability and contextual data flow between applications, resulting in improved data accuracy and saved productive hours in manually re-entering data. Bringing 15+ years of experience and innovation, the finance and operations suite provides 16 country-specific editions tailored for local tax and compliance needs, including Singapore, UK, India, and the UAE. The platform offers advanced capabilities, using which businesses can easily customize, scale, and extend the applications according to their requirements. This significantly reduces the need to invest in IT resources and quickly go to market with any change. Pricing and Availability All products are available for immediate use. The pricing of Zoho Books starts at S$18 per month, per organization. The application also offers a free plan.
Zawya
28-07-2025
- Business
- Zawya
Zoho Launches Zia LLM and Deepens AI Portfolio with Prebuilt Agents, Custom Agent Builder, MCP, and Marketplace
Homegrown, Business-Optimized Technology Addresses Needs for Developers and End Users While Enhancing Platform Capabilities SINGAPORE - Media OutReach Newswire - 28 July 2025 - Zoho Corporation, a global technology company, announced additional investments and offerings in AI, including Zia LLM, a proprietary large language model; Zia Agents, with 25+ ready-to-deploy AI-powered agents available in Agent Marketplace; Zia Agent Studio, a no-code agent builder; and a model context protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho's vast library of actions to third-party agents. These capabilities and investments are designed to help organizations fully realize and maximize the value of contextual, assistive and agentic AI technology. Immediately impacting daily workflows for diverse roles and use cases, Zoho's latest AI developments deliver operational and financial efficiencies across entire organizations. "Zia LLM is a unique Enterprise LLM, this investment furthers Zoho's longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities, and value," says Gibu Mathew, VP and GM of Zoho APAC. "Because Zoho's AI initiatives are developed internally, we are able to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organizational flexibility, democratizing the latest technology on a global scale. For businesses, AI needs data integration at a DNA level, the Zoho platform is built with exactly that future and vision." Zia LLM, Built from the Ground Up and Optimized for Business Zoho has launched its own large language model, Zia LLM, built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform. Trained with Zoho product use cases in mind—ranging from structured data extraction, summarization, RAG, and code generation—Zia LLM is comprised of three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimized for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for Zoho. In addition to Zia LLM, Zoho is announcing two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for both English and Hindi. Optimized to perform on a low computer load without compromising on accuracy, the models benchmark up to 75% better than comparable models across standard tests. Language support for additional languages will be coming in the future. While Zoho supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM continues Zoho's commitment to data privacy by allowing customers to keep their data on Zoho servers, leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending their data to AI cloud providers. Zia LLM will be deployed across Zoho's data centers in the US, India, and Europe. The model is currently testing for internal use cases across Zoho's broad app portfolio, and will be available for customer use in coming months. Effective Native AI Agents Ready for Use To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on real-life organizational roles (including sales development, customer support, and account management). Agents available today include: New Version of Ask Zia: The latest version of Zoho's platform-wide conversational AI assistant, Ask Zia 's new BI skills are tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, yet supports any user within an organization. Ask Zia is now equipped with capabilities that directly address the unique pain points faced by each persona, whether it's building end-to-end data pipelines for engineers, analyzing data, creating reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode for analysts, or helping to jump start building ML models for data scientists. Customer Service Agent: With the ability to process incoming customer requests, understand the context behind them, and either answer them directly or triage them to a human rep, the Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk provides an efficient yet reliable first line of assistance, paving the way for quicker responses and resolutions. AI Agent Studio and Marketplace First announced earlier in 2025, Zoho has further simplified the Zia Agent Studio experience to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and include ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho's products. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered through button click or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer conversations. At the time of deployment, an agent can also be provisioned as a digital employee. Digital Employees respect defined user access permissions, maintaining the same permissions structures already defined within the organization. Admins are able to perform behavioral audits as well as performance and impact analyses on Digital Employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails. Zoho Marketplace, which supplies over 2500 reliable extensions and integrations for Zoho users, now houses the Agent Marketplace, a dedicated section for AI agents that can be deployed by customers quickly. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will soon be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace, further simplifying the adoption of agentic technology by organizations. Some pre-built agents created with Zia Agent Studio (and available on the Zia Agent Marketplace) are: Revenue Growth Specialist: Uncovers opportunities for upsell and cross-sell across existing customers, recommending the best marketing approach for each customer. Deal Analyzer: Analyze deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions. Candidate Screener: Intelligently identifies and ranks the most suitable candidates for a specific job opening based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other key attributes. Zoho will continue to add more pre-built agents to the Agent Marketplace over time to cover several valuable core and utility use cases across various business functions. The full list of available agents can be found under Additional Documentation. With over 55 applications across one ecosystem, users can build agents to meet their organization's every need, no matter how specific. With Zia Agent Studio, Zoho users have access to the same tools as Zoho's developers, ensuring that any agent a customer dreams of can be created with ease. Interoperability with MCP Zoho has adopted the model context protocol (MCP), offering its own MCP server with a rich action library across several applications, allowing any MCP client to tap into data and actions from various Zoho apps while respecting the customer's defined permission structures. Zoho's MCP server has a library of actions from more than 15 Zoho applications exposed during Early Access. With Zoho Flow, third party tools are also exposed. Additional Zoho applications will be onboarded in the coming months. Furthermore, Zoho Analytics now offers support for a local MCP server. Roadmap In the short term, Zoho will regularly scale Zia LLM's model sizes, starting with the first of several planned parameter increases by the end of 2025. Future planned releases include expanding the available languages used by the speech-to-text model, beginning with languages spoken primarily across Europe and India, as well as the introduction of a reasoning language model (RLM). Additional skills will be added to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams and Customer Support teams, with more skills added in the future. Support for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing for Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms. Additional Documentation Zia Agent Marketplace - Full list of available agents at launch Disclaimer All trademarks, product names, and company names cited herein are the property of their respective owners. Availability and Pricing Zia LLM will be available to Zoho customers in the coming months. Zia Agents, Zia Agent Studio, Agent Marketplace, and Zoho MCP Server are being rolled out to customers who are currently on the early access waiting list. General availability for these offerings is expected towards the end of 2025. Zoho expects to study the usage patterns of these customers across use cases, industries, geographical regions, and sizes during this early access phase. A pricing structure for these offerings can be expected at the time of general availability. Zoho Artificial Intelligence Differentiation Zoho is committed to designing and incorporating artificial intelligence guided by the principles of customer privacy and value. Our generic AI models across contextual, assistive, and agentic AI, are not trained on consumer data and do not retain customer information. Zoho builds AI tools with usefulness in mind, striking a balance between providing AI technology that assists workers while right-sizing models that don't require burdening consumers with additional costs. Hashtag: #zoho The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. About Zoho With 55+ apps in nearly every major business category, Zoho Corporation is one of the world's most prolific technology companies. Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 18,000 employees globally with headquarters in Austin, Texas and international headquarters in Chennai, India. Zoho APAC HQ is located in Singapore. For more information, please visit: Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company owns and operates its data centers, ensuring complete oversight of customer data, privacy, and security. More than 100 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho everyday to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, please visit: Zoho Corporation
Malay Mail
28-07-2025
- Business
- Malay Mail
Zoho Launches Zia LLM and Deepens AI Portfolio with Prebuilt Agents, Custom Agent Builder, MCP, and Marketplace
Homegrown, Business-Optimized Technology Addresses Needs for Developers and End Users While Enhancing Platform Capabilities The Zia Agent studio is now fully prompt-based. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered through button click or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer conversations. SINGAPORE - Media OutReach Newswire - 28 July 2025 - Zoho Corporation , a global technology company, announced additional investments and offerings in AI, includinga proprietary large language model; Zia Agents , with 25+ ready-to-deploy AI-powered agents available in Agent Marketplace Zia Agent Studio , a no-code agent builder; and a model context protocol (MCP) server to open up Zoho's vast library of actions to third-party agents. These capabilities and investments are designed to help organizations fully realize and maximize the value of contextual, assistive and agentic AI technology. Immediately impacting daily workflows for diverse roles and use cases, Zoho's latest AI developments deliver operational and financial efficiencies across entire organizations."Zia LLM is a unique Enterprise LLM, this investment furthers Zoho's longstanding aim to build foundational technology focused on protection of customer data, breadth and depth of capabilities, and value," says Gibu Mathew, VP and GM of Zoho APAC. "Because Zoho's AI initiatives are developed internally, we are able to provide customers with cutting-edge tool sets without compromising data privacy and organizational flexibility, democratizing the latest technology on a global scale. For businesses, AI needs data integration at a DNA level, the Zoho platform is built with exactly that future and vision."Zoho has launched its own large language model,, built completely in-house by leveraging NVIDIA's AI accelerated computing platform . Trained with Zoho product use cases in mind—ranging from structured data extraction, summarization, RAG, and code generation—Zia LLM is comprised of three models with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters, each separately trained and optimized for contextual applicability that benchmark competitively against comparable open source models in the market. The three models allow Zoho to always optimize the right model for the right user context, striking the proper balance between power and resource management. This focus on right-sizing the model is an ongoing development strategy for addition to Zia LLM, Zoho is announcing two proprietary Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) models for speech-to-text conversion for both English and Hindi. Optimized to perform on a low computer load without compromising on accuracy, the models benchmark up to 75% better than comparable models across standard tests. Language support for additional languages will be coming in the Zoho supports many LLM integrations for users, including ChatGPT, Llama, and DeepSeek, Zia LLM continues Zoho's commitment to data privacy by allowing customers to keep their data on Zoho servers, leveraging the latest AI capabilities without sending their data to AI cloud LLM will be deployed across Zoho's data centers in the US, India, and Europe. The model is currently testing for internal use cases across Zoho's broad app portfolio, and will be available for customer use in coming months. Effective Native AI Agents Ready for Use New Version of Ask Zia: The latest version of Zoho's platform-wide conversational AI assistant, Ask Zia's new BI skills are tailored to data engineers, analysts, and data scientists, yet supports any user within an organization. Ask Zia is now equipped with capabilities that directly address the unique pain points faced by each persona, whether it's building end-to-end data pipelines for engineers, analyzing data, creating reports and dashboards in an interactive conversation mode for analysts, or helping to jump start building ML models for data scientists. Customer Service Agent: With the ability to process incoming customer requests, understand the context behind them, and either answer them directly or triage them to a human rep, the Customer Service Agent for Zoho Desk provides an efficient yet reliable first line of assistance, paving the way for quicker responses and resolutions. To enable immediate adoption of agentic technology, Zoho has developed a roster of AI agents contextually baked right into its products. These agents can be used across various business activities, handling relevant actions based on real-life organizational roles (including sales development, customer support, and account management).Agents available today include: AI Agent Studio and Marketplace Revenue Growth Specialist: Uncovers opportunities for upsell and cross-sell across existing customers, recommending the best marketing approach for each customer. Deal Analyzer: Analyze deals and provide insights such as win probability, next best action, and follow-up suggestions. Candidate Screener: Intelligently identifies and ranks the most suitable candidates for a specific job opening based on role requirements, skills, experience, and other key attributes. First announced earlier in 2025, Zoho has further simplified the Zia Agent Studio experience to be fully prompt-based (with the option to use low-code) and include ready-made access to over 700 actions across Zoho's products. Agents built by users can be deployed autonomously, triggered through button click or rule-based automation, or summoned within customer the time of deployment, an agent can also be provisioned as a digital employee. Digital Employees respect defined user access permissions, maintaining the same permissions structures already defined within the organization. Admins are able to perform behavioral audits as well as performance and impact analyses on Digital Employees, ensuring that every agent is working as effectively as possible and within clear guardrails. Zoho Marketplace, which supplies over 2500 reliable extensions and integrations for Zoho users, now houses the, a dedicated section for AI agents that can be deployed by customers quickly. Ecosystem partners, ISVs, and individual developers will soon be able to create agents and host them on the Zia Agents Marketplace, further simplifying the adoption of agentic technology by pre-built agents created with Zia Agent Studio (and available on the Zia Agent Marketplace) are:Zoho will continue to add more pre-built agents to the Agent Marketplace over time to cover several valuable core and utility use cases across various business functions. The full list of available agents can be found under Additional over 55 applications across one ecosystem, users can build agents to meet their organization's every need, no matter how specific. With Zia Agent Studio, Zoho users have access to the same tools as Zoho's developers, ensuring that any agent a customer dreams of can be created with ease. Interoperability with MCP Zoho has adopted, offering its own MCP server with a rich action library across several applications, allowing any MCP client to tap into data and actions from various Zoho apps while respecting the customer's defined permission MCP server has a library of actions from more than 15 Zoho applications exposed during Early Access. With Zoho Flow, third party tools are also exposed. Additional Zoho applications will be onboarded in the coming months. Furthermore, Zoho Analytics now offers support for a local MCP server. Roadmap In the short term, Zoho will regularly scale Zia LLM's model sizes, starting with the first of several planned parameter increases by the end of 2025. Future planned releases include expanding the available languages used by the speech-to-text model, beginning with languages spoken primarily across Europe and India, as well as the introduction of a reasoning language model (RLM).Additional skills will be added to Ask Zia, allowing it to act as an assistant to Finance teams and Customer Support teams, with more skills added in the for the Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol will be implemented, allowing for Zia Agents to interact and collaborate with each other, as well as collaborate with agents on other platforms. Additional Documentation Disclaimer All trademarks, product names, and company names cited herein are the property of their respective owners. Availability and Pricing Zia LLM will be available to Zoho customers in the coming months. Zia Agents, Zia Agent Studio, Agent Marketplace, and Zoho MCP Server are being rolled out to customers who are currently on the early access waiting list. General availability for these offerings is expected towards the end of 2025. Zoho expects to study the usage patterns of these customers across use cases, industries, geographical regions, and sizes during this early access phase. A pricing structure for these offerings can be expected at the time of general availability. Zoho Artificial Intelligence Differentiation Zoho is committed to designing and incorporating artificial intelligence guided by the principles of customer privacy and value. Our generic AI models across contextual, assistive, and agentic AI, are not trained on consumer data and do not retain customer information. Zoho builds AI tools with usefulness in mind, striking a balance between providing AI technology that assists workers while right-sizing models that don't require burdening consumers with additional #zoho The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. About Zoho
Malay Mail
22-04-2025
- Business
- Malay Mail
Zoho Workplace Study Highlights: APAC Leads in Digital Transformation and Security Maturity
With a maturity score of 66.35, APAC stands as the global leader in workplace digital transformation SINGAPORE - Media OutReach Newswire - 22 April 2025 - Zoho , the global technology company headquartered in Chennai, has released its global survey titled " Workplace Digital Transformation Survey 2025 ". According to the survey, APAC is leading in several key areas, outperforming other regions in cybersecurity adoption, AI-powered workplace tools, and structured collaboration processes. The study, conducted by Zoho Workplace , the company's enterprise email and collaboration suite, was conducted across multiple industries and organization sizes, also revealed that APAC's digital workplace transformation maturity (score of 66.35%) overtakes that of developed nations and also the global average (62.3%). The study further highlights that APAC organizations have the highest adoption rates of multi-factor authentication (40%), cybersecurity awareness training (44%), and secure remote work policies (44%). Additionally, AI-enhanced search and knowledge retrieval has reached 54% adoption in APAC, significantly ahead of the global average of 28%.About 76% of APAC respondents fall into advanced maturity levels (Level 3 and above), indicating widespread adoption of sophisticated tools and processes that drive workplace effectiveness and efficiency. Based on the survey finding, APAC as a region is expected to reach an optimized maturity state in the next 10 years, with continued investment in the digital workplace digital transformation (DX) maturity model was built based on workplace indicators (digital tools and processes) and employee performance indicators (productivity, collaboration, and security preparedness). This model divided progress into four levels: Informal operations (minimal or ad-hoc usage of tools and processes), Standardization (standard of tools and workflows), Structured operations (advanced integration across departments), and Optimization (continuous improvement of tools and processes). Besides these indicators, the survey also measured employee experience, impact of change on the workplace, and adoption of digital tools (AI, analytics, etc)."APAC continues to lead in digital transformation, with businesses rapidly adopting collaboration tools, security protocols, and AI-driven solutions. Our research highlights that organizations in this region are not only embracing modern workplace technologies but also integrating them more effectively to enhance productivity and security. We see this adoption in the strong growth trends in our products as well, with Zoho Workplace customers increasing by more than 15% in the region in 2024. Vietnam leads in growth with more than 40% increase in customers for Zoho Workplace. As businesses evolve, a strong foundation in workplace maturity will be key to driving long-term success," says, Gibu Mathew, VP and GM of Zoho businesses surveyed rank high in the performance indicators for productivity and average for collaboration. Organizations replace Workplace tools to streamline processes and enhance efficiency. Productivity tools are often adopted at a team level, while collaboration and security tools are deployed organization-wide. Some key trend observations from the study:APAC leads in internal request management adoption (56%) and team chat tools for low-volume collaboration (72%). However, 30% report that inefficient request handling affects workplace outpaces global adoption of social intranet tools (27% vs. <20%), reinforcing its focus on centralized communication. Organization-wide email remains the primary announcement channel, with strong adoption in technology (41%) and enterprise (40%) 32% of APAC respondents use structured document collaboration, though 70% agree direct feedback boosts productivity. Large enterprises (54%) favor document-based feedback, while development teams (40%) and leadership (33%) prefer interactive discussions via team leads in security performance and workplace tool adoption, driven by a strong awareness of evolving cybersecurity challenges. The study highlights key trends shaping the region's security landscape:APAC leads in cybersecurity training (44%) and advanced authentication (40%), surpassing the global average (<35%). Secure remote work guidelines see strong adoption (49% in education, 46% in large organizations), but incident reporting remains low at 20%.Less than 10% of APAC workplaces use advanced security alerts for suspicious emails. Government and large enterprises (48%) show the highest adherence to reporting protocols.40% of APAC respondents use password management tools, but 30% still rely on insecure methods like Excel. Role-based access is strongest in government (56%) and large enterprises (49%), reinforcing security is at the forefront of AI adoption, with AI-enhanced search and knowledge retrieval with an average of 54% of respondents reaching adoption—significantly higher than other regions. AI-powered communication tools also see strong uptake (50%), particularly in technology (56%) and retail (56%). Predictive analytics (40%) and workflow automation (43%) are also widely adopted, reinforcing APAC's digital transformation workplace experience is closely tied to digital transformation, with organizations that modernize their tools reporting higher maturity scores and improved employee sentiment. The study explores key trends in workplace maturity, tool upgrades, and their impact on employee experience:The study indicates a strong correlation between workplace tool maturity and employee experience. APAC organizations that have undergone a complete overhaul of workplace tools report a 68.2% maturity score and a 57.8% positive workplace experience—outpacing organizations with no major tool that implemented major tool replacements, such as ERP and CRM, achieved a 67.0% maturity score, with 39.7% of employees reporting a positive experience. However, specialized tool replacements, like project management software, see lower satisfaction rates (34.5%), reflecting challenges in tool migration and workflow continues to lead in digital transformation by integrating collaboration tools, security protocols, and AI solutions to improve workplace efficiency and employee experiences. While challenges remain, particularly in document collaboration and security incident reporting, the region is well on track to reach an optimized digital maturity state in the next 10 years. To reach maturity, organizations have to transition and implement advanced platforms in their workplace and focus on process optimization across all departments within the organization. Such an organic transition can range from USD $500-1000 / year over the next 10 the complete global findings of the study, click here . The detailed methodology can be read here Hashtag: #Zoho The issuer is solely responsible for the content of this announcement. About Zoho Corporation Pte Ltd With 55+ apps in nearly every major business category, Zoho Corporation is one of the world's most prolific technology companies. Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 15,000 employees globally with headquarters in Austin, Texas and international headquarters in Chennai, India. Zoho APAC HQ is located in Singapore. For more information, please visit: Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. The company owns and operates its data centers, ensuring complete oversight of customer data, privacy, and security. More than 100 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho every day to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, please visit:
The Sun
22-04-2025
- Business
- The Sun
Zoho Workplace Study Highlights: APAC Leads in Digital Transformation and Security Maturity
SINGAPORE - Media OutReach Newswire - 22 April 2025 - Zoho, the global technology company headquartered in Chennai, has released its global survey titled ' Workplace Digital Transformation Survey 2025 '. According to the survey, APAC is leading in several key areas, outperforming other regions in cybersecurity adoption, AI-powered workplace tools, and structured collaboration processes. The study, conducted by Zoho Workplace, the company's enterprise email and collaboration suite, was conducted across multiple industries and organization sizes, also revealed that APAC's digital workplace transformation maturity (score of 66.35%) overtakes that of developed nations and also the global average (62.3%). The study further highlights that APAC organizations have the highest adoption rates of multi-factor authentication (40%), cybersecurity awareness training (44%), and secure remote work policies (44%). Additionally, AI-enhanced search and knowledge retrieval has reached 54% adoption in APAC, significantly ahead of the global average of 28%. About 76% of APAC respondents fall into advanced maturity levels (Level 3 and above), indicating widespread adoption of sophisticated tools and processes that drive workplace effectiveness and efficiency. Based on the survey finding, APAC as a region is expected to reach an optimized maturity state in the next 10 years, with continued investment in the digital workplace. The workplace digital transformation (DX) maturity model was built based on workplace indicators (digital tools and processes) and employee performance indicators (productivity, collaboration, and security preparedness). This model divided progress into four levels: Informal operations (minimal or ad-hoc usage of tools and processes), Standardization (standard of tools and workflows), Structured operations (advanced integration across departments), and Optimization (continuous improvement of tools and processes). Besides these indicators, the survey also measured employee experience, impact of change on the workplace, and adoption of digital tools (AI, analytics, etc). 'APAC continues to lead in digital transformation, with businesses rapidly adopting collaboration tools, security protocols, and AI-driven solutions. Our research highlights that organizations in this region are not only embracing modern workplace technologies but also integrating them more effectively to enhance productivity and security. We see this adoption in the strong growth trends in our products as well, with Zoho Workplace customers increasing by more than 15% in the region in 2024. Vietnam leads in growth with more than 40% increase in customers for Zoho Workplace. As businesses evolve, a strong foundation in workplace maturity will be key to driving long-term success,' says, Gibu Mathew, VP and GM of Zoho APAC. Key Trends in Productivity and Collaboration in the APAC Workplace APAC businesses surveyed rank high in the performance indicators for productivity and average for collaboration. Organizations replace Workplace tools to streamline processes and enhance efficiency. Productivity tools are often adopted at a team level, while collaboration and security tools are deployed organization-wide. Some key trend observations from the study: 1. Cross-Team Collaboration & Request Management APAC leads in internal request management adoption (56%) and team chat tools for low-volume collaboration (72%). However, 30% report that inefficient request handling affects workplace efficiency. 2. Channels of Announcements & Social Intranet Adoption APAC outpaces global adoption of social intranet tools (27% vs. <20%), reinforcing its focus on centralized communication. Organization-wide email remains the primary announcement channel, with strong adoption in technology (41%) and enterprise (40%) sectors. 3. Document Collaboration & Feedback Mechanisms Only 32% of APAC respondents use structured document collaboration, though 70% agree direct feedback boosts productivity. Large enterprises (54%) favor document-based feedback, while development teams (40%) and leadership (33%) prefer interactive discussions via team chat. Key Trends in Security Tools & Protocols APAC leads in security performance and workplace tool adoption, driven by a strong awareness of evolving cybersecurity challenges. The study highlights key trends shaping the region's security landscape: 1. Security Adoption & Compliance in APAC APAC leads in cybersecurity training (44%) and advanced authentication (40%), surpassing the global average (<35%). Secure remote work guidelines see strong adoption (49% in education, 46% in large organizations), but incident reporting remains low at 20%. 2. Handling Suspicious Emails & Threat Detection Less than 10% of APAC workplaces use advanced security alerts for suspicious emails. Government and large enterprises (48%) show the highest adherence to reporting protocols. 3. Shared Account & Credential Management 40% of APAC respondents use password management tools, but 30% still rely on insecure methods like Excel. Role-based access is strongest in government (56%) and large enterprises (49%), reinforcing security controls. AI Adoption in the Workplace APAC is at the forefront of AI adoption, with AI-enhanced search and knowledge retrieval with an average of 54% of respondents reaching adoption—significantly higher than other regions. AI-powered communication tools also see strong uptake (50%), particularly in technology (56%) and retail (56%). Predictive analytics (40%) and workflow automation (43%) are also widely adopted, reinforcing APAC's digital transformation leadership. Workplace Experience & Change Management APAC's workplace experience is closely tied to digital transformation, with organizations that modernize their tools reporting higher maturity scores and improved employee sentiment. The study explores key trends in workplace maturity, tool upgrades, and their impact on employee experience: 1. Workplace Maturity & Employee Experience The study indicates a strong correlation between workplace tool maturity and employee experience. APAC organizations that have undergone a complete overhaul of workplace tools report a 68.2% maturity score and a 57.8% positive workplace experience—outpacing organizations with no major tool changes. 2. Tool Upgrades & Digital Transformation Impact Organizations that implemented major tool replacements, such as ERP and CRM, achieved a 67.0% maturity score, with 39.7% of employees reporting a positive experience. However, specialized tool replacements, like project management software, see lower satisfaction rates (34.5%), reflecting challenges in tool migration and workflow disruptions. The way forward for reaching peak workplace DX maturity APAC continues to lead in digital transformation by integrating collaboration tools, security protocols, and AI solutions to improve workplace efficiency and employee experiences. While challenges remain, particularly in document collaboration and security incident reporting, the region is well on track to reach an optimized digital maturity state in the next 10 years. To reach maturity, organizations have to transition and implement advanced platforms in their workplace and focus on process optimization across all departments within the organization. Such an organic transition can range from USD $500-1000 / year over the next 10 years. For the complete global findings of the study, click here. The detailed methodology can be read here.
