Zoho unveils Cliq Rooms for hybrid meetings

Zoho on Monday launched Cliq Rooms, a smart conference room solution, that will give the SaaS giant's Zoho Cliq communication platform more muscle to take on international rivals.

Chennai-based Zoho, among the first bootstrapped Indian enterprises to surpass 100 million users, said India is one of its fastest-growing markets and has seen its partner network in the country expand 30% year-on-year.

“Currently, we are gaining traction in India, possibly ranking second position in the next three to four years. Looking ahead a decade, we're starting to witness this potential, especially due to its substantial and growing population," said Sridhar Vembu, CEO and Co-founder of Zoho, in a press conference held on the sidelines of Zoholics India, Zoho's yearly user event, which was held in Bengaluru. 

The company offers a suite of over 55 business applications and sells its products in over 150 countries.

"I'm very bullish about our growth in India, despite a global backdrop that has been challenging due to demographic shifts even before recent events,” he noted. 

The primary products fueling the growth include Zoho One, Zoho CX suite (comprising CRM and CRM Plus), Zoho Books, Zoho People, and Zoho Workplace. The company is gaining traction in various industries, including IT hardware, manufacturing, education, BFSI, and retail.

He highlighted that there is a shift in global decision-making towards India as companies extend their reach into rural areas. Zoho is also making substantial investments in research and development to construct graphics processing units (GPUs) in an effort to break the dominance of players like NVIDIA.

Expanding platform capabilities

Talking about the features in Cliq, Zoho said it improves business operations by making it easier for different teams to work together and breaking down data barriers. Zoho Cliq is one of the most used apps in Zoho One—its unified operating system for business—and has seen a 30% rise in users transitioning from Slack and MS Teams in 2022, the company claimed. 

The firm stated that Cliq has also seen a 150% growth in revenue in India this year and has grown 4X since 2020.

Zoho further stated that the solution has been entirely developed in India and underlined its research and development endeavours in constructing a unified technology stack.

Cliq aims to enhance accessibility for a distributed workforce by supporting multiple languages like Hindi, Tamil, and Kannada (with more languages in the pipeline). Additionally, live translation is available for various Indian and international languages to facilitate communication between internal and external users from different regions. 

“Zoho Cliq facilitates over 30,000 active consumer participants in a channel, along with 12,000 viewers for live events. Our platform is designed to scale for businesses of all sizes, allowing customisation to meet specific business needs,” said Vembu during the conference.

Introducing Cliq Rooms

Cliq Rooms app can also facilitate meetings on Android TV. It also enables organisations to host virtual events, curate speakers, share content, and engage with the audience. It's compatible with all Android TVs and allows easy audio/video input connections from phones or laptops.

Additionally, the software integrates AI functionalities through Zoho’s AI assistant Zia to generate meeting summaries, create action items in Zoho Projects, set reminders etc.

A Statista report forecasted that the revenue of India's collaboration software market would reach $275.50 million by 2028.

(The copy was updated to add context.)