Analyst(s): Keith Kirkpatrick
Publication Date: February 24, 2026
What is Covered in This Article:
- Zoho’s 30-year journey to one million customers and 150 million users
- Implications for SaaS market structure and competitive responses from Salesforce, Microsoft, and Oracle
- Zoho’s customer-first, bootstrapped, and in-house development model as a potential market disruptor
- Execution risks and the challenge of scaling support, innovation, and ecosystem at this size
- Signals of shifting buyer priorities: value, flexibility, and integrated platforms
The Event — Major Themes & Vendor Moves: On its 30th anniversary, Zoho Corporation announced at ZohoDay 2026 that it has surpassed one million paying customers and now serves more than 150 million users globally across brands including Zoho, ManageEngine, Qntrl, and TrainerCentral. The company reported 32% year-over-year customer growth and 20% revenue growth in 2025, with new enterprise wins across the US, India, Europe, and LATAM.
Zoho’s leadership points to its bootstrapped, private, and fully in-house development model as key to its long-term focus on customer value, while its customer testimonials highlight Zoho’s flexibility, breadth of applications, and ability to scale with evolving business needs, with many citing multi-year, multi-product adoption journeys.
One of the key goals of the event was to position Zoho as a credible alternative to traditional SaaS giants, particularly for mid-market and enterprise buyers seeking integrated platforms without the lock-in or cost structures of more established vendors.
Will Zoho’s Value-Generation Approach Drive More Success With Enterprises?
Analyst Take: Zoho’s million-customer milestone is more than a vanity metric; it’s a structural signal that the SaaS landscape is fragmenting beyond the Salesforce-Microsoft-Oracle axis. The company’s growth, achieved without outside capital or acquisition sprees, raises uncomfortable questions for incumbents about what buyers –from SMB through the mid-market, and even enterprise organizations – now value: integrated functionality, flexibility, and pricing that scales with business realities, rather than just brand or ecosystem.
A Bootstrapped Playbook That Defies SaaS Orthodoxy
Zoho’s path, which eschews venture capital, building solutions in-house, and maintaining private ownership, contrasts sharply with the growth-at-all-costs playbooks of entrenched enterprise SaaS vendors such as Salesforce, Microsoft, and Oracle. This approach has enabled Zoho to prioritize long-term customer value over quarterly Wall Street expectations. The result is a product suite spanning more than 55 applications, a presence in more than 28 countries, and a customer base that includes enterprise names such as Mercedes-Benz India, Union Bank of India, and Editora Globo.
For enterprise buyers, Zoho’s approach illustrates a viable alternative to the consolidation and price escalation that have defined SaaS over the past decade. Most importantly, Zoho’s scale now gives it leverage to negotiate partnerships, influence integration standards, and challenge the assumption that only the largest, most capitalized players can deliver enterprise-grade cloud platforms.
Execution Risk: Can Customer-Centric Scale Outpace Complexity?
Zoho’s narrative is built around deep customer partnership and flexibility, with testimonials describing multi-year, evolving relationships. But as the customer base surpasses one million and the user count reaches 150 million, the risk is operational: can Zoho maintain its high-touch, customer-first ethos at hyperscale?
Salesforce and Microsoft have both struggled with the tradeoff between rapid growth and consistent support, especially as platform complexity increases. Zoho’s ability to deliver continuous innovation—particularly in AI, workflow automation, and integration—will be tested as customer needs diversify and enterprise expectations rise. Maintaining affordability while scaling support, ecosystem, and compliance is a non-trivial challenge. The next 12-24 months will reveal whether Zoho’s model can sustain its differentiators or risk commoditization and customer churn as it enters the upper echelons of SaaS volume.
Is Zoho’s Platform Model the New Default for the Next SaaS Wave?
Conventional wisdom holds that SaaS buyers choose platforms based on ecosystem gravity, third-party integrations, and brand trust, areas in which Salesforce, Microsoft, and Oracle have entrenched moats. But Zoho’s milestone and customer stories suggest a reversal: buyers in the mid-market and emerging enterprise segments are increasingly prioritizing integrated functionality, transparent pricing, and direct vendor engagement over marketplace bloat and punitive renewal terms.
The rise of Zoho signals a category shift: from best-of-breed stacks to value-driven, all-in-one platforms that don’t force lock-in. Zoho’s latest initiatives around Vertical Studio and App OS are designed partly as partner platforms, enabling partners to build and monetize vertical IP, while Zoho supports GTM and provides the guardrails required to ensure proper data security, privacy, and governance for enterprises.
The key question: will the broader market follow, or will Zoho remain a high-growth outlier? The company’s success will likely be determined by Zoho’s ability to evolve its perception from a low-cost app provider to an enterprise-grade, resilient, and scalable platform that delivers successful business outcomes and value.
Name Recognition, Visibility, and Perception Issues
Zoho’s key challenges in some markets, such as North America, are around name recognition, visibility, and perception. For years, Zoho was perceived as a low-cost provider of business applications for up-and-coming businesses. But over the past several years, Zoho has built its capabilities to provide a comprehensive tech stack and application platform designed to support enterprise organizations at scale, with the requisite data privacy, security, and governance controls. Furthermore, the company has embraced and embedded AI within its platform, demonstrating its commitment to ongoing innovation and support for modern agentic and human/agentic workflows.
I was pleased to hear that Zoho has pivoted from a passive, word-of-mouth approach to generating interest among enterprise clients to an active engagement with CIOs, CEOs, and CFOs over the coming quarters to drive greater awareness of the company’s products and enterprise-ready capabilities. Zoho will also need to focus on highlighting third-party-validated customer ROI studies to further realign perceptions of the company as a value-creating rather than a value-oriented organization that can support enterprise initiatives for top-line expansion and bottom-line margin growth.
What to Watch:
- Ecosystem Expansion (Next 12 Months): Does Zoho successfully attract more third-party developers, ISVs, and systems integrators to its platform, or does it remain primarily a first-party suite?
- Enterprise Penetration: Track the number and size of new enterprise deals in North America and EMEA—can Zoho move upmarket against Salesforce and Microsoft?
- AI and Automation Roadmap: Monitor the pace and depth of AI-powered feature launches, particularly in CRM, analytics, and workflow automation, to gauge innovation velocity.
- Pricing and Renewal Dynamics: Watch for signs of upward pricing pressure or customer churn as Zoho’s customer base scales, and for how the company leans into creating value for enterprise customers.
- Competitive Response: Will Salesforce, Microsoft, or Oracle adjust their pricing, bundling, or customer engagement strategies in response to Zoho’s growth?
You can read the press release highlighting the company’s successes at Zoho’s website.
Disclosure: Futurum is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum as a whole.
Other Insights from Futurum:
Will Zoho’s Embedded AI Enterprise Spend and Billing Solutions Drive Growth?
Will Major SaaS Vendors Continue to Evolve Their Pricing Models?
Will Zoho One Enhancements Drive More Confidence Among Enterprise Customers?
Author Information
Keith Kirkpatrick is VP & Research Director, Enterprise Software & Digital Workflows for The Futurum Group. Keith has over 25 years of experience in research, marketing, and consulting-based fields.
He has authored in-depth reports and market forecast studies covering artificial intelligence, biometrics, data analytics, robotics, high performance computing, and quantum computing, with a specific focus on the use of these technologies within large enterprise organizations and SMBs. He has also established strong working relationships with the international technology vendor community and is a frequent speaker at industry conferences and events.
In his career as a financial and technology journalist he has written for national and trade publications, including BusinessWeek, CNBC.com, Investment Dealers’ Digest, The Red Herring, The Communications of the ACM, and Mobile Computing & Communications, among others.
He is a member of the Association of Independent Information Professionals (AIIP).
Keith holds dual Bachelor of Arts degrees in Magazine Journalism and Sociology from Syracuse University.
