The Six Five team explores the new low-code tool from Zoho. Qntrl, pronounced Control is a business operating system that could change the game.

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Transcript: 

Patrick Moorhead: Let’s dive into Zoho. Daniel, you and I have talked about Zoho a lot here. They are a full stack enterprise SaaS provider. You think of a SaaS service that’s in the cloud and they have one and it’s fully their code and it’s fully on their hardware platform. Zoho also has different brands which live outside of the Zoho platform. They just did a launch of low-code, a tool called Qntrl.

Daniel Newman: Yeah. It’s Qntrl with a Q, and a Q-N-T-R-L. Very interesting way to approach that. Yeah. Zoho has its business operating system. It’s over 50 apps. I mean, everything, sign, collaboration, of course, CRM and ERP. They have AI tools, all kinds of tools, and really have been focused on that mid-market smaller companies, although it has definitely seen some of its products go up market.

By the way, ManageEngine, WebNMS, if you’ve heard of those, those are Zoho companies. Zoho even has a whole chip architecture development brand. They’re based in India and they’re doing some really interesting things. Qntrl is the company’s answer to workflow automation. You’re hearing a lot about RPA. Some companies like UiPath have announced a plan to go public.

You’re hearing more, Automation Anywhere made a big set of announcements with Google recently. Microsoft Power Automate has taken the world by storm. Even ServiceNow recently bought a company called Intellibot. Zoho is basically getting into the fray here. How do we customize workflows, make them simpler, more efficient, less complex? How do we help the business do better with technology using everything from AI to UI automation? Very competitive space.

You heard me mention a lot of companies, a lot of names that are in this space, but Zoho has always been in very competitive spaces. They’re in CRM, they’re in ERP. What the company I believe has an opportunity to build around though is, one, its huge Zoho ecosystem. Zoho customers need to use automation. We’re going to see more workflow automation and you need technology to do that.

Qntrl has a few key capabilities that it really focused on, but centralizing the requests from process stakeholders, ensuring compliance of processes, adding contextual workflow-centric collaboration with many stakeholders, driving towards KPIs, using automation to drive to KPIs, integrating with existing IT solutions so that companies can use these tools to take multiple stacks of IT solutions and concurrently have them work together. Here’s all the things.

Maybe the only other interesting thing of note … Well, there’s many interesting things, Pat, but the interesting thing to note too is just, it is operating as a separate business unit. That is definitely something worth pointing out, is like I said, Zoho has these different brands, but most people, if you know Zoho, you know Zoho. Overall, I thought it was a really solid launch. They’re in a good space. It’s going to be competitive.

Overall, they don’t tend to report a lot of metrics, Pat, so we’re going to probably have to wait for some analyst briefings to hear about customer adoption, but everything Zoho does seems to be well calculated. They’re in their own little bubble. They’re not overly focused on what everyone else is doing, but they’re focusing on delivering value to the customers they have.

Patrick Moorhead: Yeah. My only add around that, Daniel, is I like that this is a tool to work with other types of environments, whether it’s Box, whether it’s Office, whether it’s APIs into all of these different tools, because as you said, and I said, Zoho is really about its own platform. This gets them outside of their own platform.

Sure. You can use this inside the Zoho platform, but this is for people who might not even be a Zoho customer who are all in on Microsoft, who are all in on Google, who are all in on Box, even into SAP, into Dynamics and things like that. I’m interested to see how that business moves forward.