Zoho: Fighting inequality through technology

Zoho, a global technology company, could train 500 students tomorrow, and it still wouldn’t have enough graduates – such is the worldwide demand for coding and related skills, says the company’s regional head for Africa.

Zoho recently announced plans to upskill South African youth for employment and freelancing by teaming up with BabesGotBytes and CodeTelligence.

The Zoho boss in Africa, Andrew Bourne, 38, has kept an eye on the progress of coders and developers over the past 10 years and says demand exceeds supply.

“We have a guy here in Cape Town and we can’t get him to work on local projects anymore because he’s so in demand globally. We saw the opportunity 10 years ago. I look at all the youth now, even people we hired who took the initiative and upskilled themselves on Zoho, but there’s not enough. We could train 500 people tomorrow and there still wouldn’t be enough.

“If you look at jobs, we’re passionate about helping people. Upskilling and helping to fight inequality through technology is something I am passionate about. Seven out of 10 jobs come from SMEs [small and medium-sized enterprises], so we should be teaching people about the technology SMEs are using.

“Teaching on this toolset empowers students to start their own businesses. Since Zoho is growing so rapidly and there’s such high demand, there’s a massive gap in the market for freelancers both locally and globally,” he adds.

On Zoho’s new partnership with CodeTelligence, Bourne says young graduates from underprivileged backgrounds are being trained. “CodeTelligence is a coding academy in Khayelitsha. We flew in staff to ‘train the trainer’. We train the lecturers to teach students to code on top of Zoho’s low-code platform,” he explains.

Bourne says Zoho is working with coding academies that get funding from The Jobs Fund, from the government and big business. There’s an application process where some top candidates are selected. No bachelor’s degree is needed. Applicants go through aptitude tests and, if approved, they will be taught to code.

“Let’s say a big bank pays for students to go through the academy and gives them a stipend of roughly R6 500 per month. At the end of it, if they don’t get a job, what do they do? We have hired someone like that. We now have a list of customers who have said they will hire, as a paid internship, someone who received the training but couldn’t get a job.

“I’d love to work on a national scale. We’re talking to government departments like Digital Skills Literacy and the Entrepreneurial Planning Institute,” Bourne says.

“I would like to see a shift in mindset. I go to India once a year, and I have seen a culture of ‘let me acquire skills’. Not ‘let me get a job’, ‘let me market my skills globally on fiverr and all these online platforms and let me find someone somewhere anywhere in the world that needs my skill. Whether I am a designer, developer or whatever…’ They get taught by their friends how to invoice globally and collect funds globally. We don’t have that mindset in South Africa.

“I really want to change that. The only we can do this is to go through the coding academies and institutions that have access to the database so they can manage the database. We will provide the software and bring in trainers to train the trainer. We want to help change the mindset. I have spoken with a few ministers about it,” Bourne says.

Enthusiasm

On the culture at Zoho, Bourne says enthusiasm, ability and talent is more important than university degrees.

“When we hire, we look not only at qualifications. We look at passion, experience and skill set. We don’t care whether you did a business science degree or a small tertiary course. This approach has proved very successful for us because it’s clear how hungry and passionate our staff are and how hard they work,” he says.

Bourne makes the bold claim that Zoho’s toolset is the best for SMEs and startups.

“We track all the competitors out there. Having come from running my own businesses, when I joined Zoho, the first thing we tackled was currency. I asked that we fix the price in rands, as the hardest thing every month is worrying where the currency is going to go because you’re being charged in dollars. Eventually we agreed, yes, which is a huge benefit.”

He says customer focus and financial independence set Zoho apart from many of its rivals.

“We want customers and put customers first, no matter what. Also, we have financial prudence. We’re a privately owned company. We decide where the money gets put. We put a lot of money into research and development rather than marketing. We don’t have shareholders breathing down our necks to create massive profits. We have now started building this massive portfolio of apps and we can do it at a lower cost because we built them from scratch.

“Some other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies buy other tech companies for ridiculous amounts of money. They bring it into their tech echo system and eventually the customer will pay.

We also maintain the whole stack. From the data centres, all the way through servers, networks, code, everything. It’s the most competitively priced world-class software – and we’re in it for the long game. We keep building new applications that customers need. We have more than 18 000 staff now worldwide.”

Next level

Bourne, a Durbanville resident, says that in some instances Zoho’s products are four times cheaper than those of competitors, and equal or better than those of the global competitors.

“All these apps have native integration. They plug into each other like pieces of a puzzle. The data can easily go between them. You can have Zoho CRM [Customer Relationship Management] and in one view of your customer you can see their financials, how much revenue they generate for your business… You can see how many emails you have sent to them; all the support tickets generated for them in Zoho Desk; you can see all the surveys they have replied to. You can see all the meetings they have had in Zoho Meeting. This is what we call a customer-centric technology system and that is very powerful because research shows customer experience will be the biggest differentiating factor for businesses going into the future,” he says. “We also have a business intelligence app called Zoho Analytics where you can pull all the dashboards and data that you have.”

When it comes to privacy and security, Bourne says Zoho has not had many problems or breaches.

“We are next level. I think we have beaten listed companies in external audits done by banks in America. Purely because we have no trackers on our website, no advertising, which means we share nothing with third parties. We have all military-grade encryption.

“We have a red team of hackers who get paid to poke holes, and a blue team to maintain our security. We have been very lucky that we haven’t had any serious breaches. We built our own authentication app which is eventually password-less; and Zoho Mail, which has built-in virus detection. It’s a powerhouse.”

Going local

Bourne says the road ahead for Zoho is localisation.

“Globally, we’re building these products to be the best. From a South African point of view, we will make them work for local businesses. We’re going for local integration. We already have Paystack and PayGate with Payfast nearly done, and Netcash building fast. We’ll have four of the top payment gateways integrated into Zoho.

“We’re bringing out a South African version of Zoho Books, which will have SA Revenue Service integration so you can push your VAT returns into SARS. It’s going to work for a local business. We’re making it easier for the customer.”

Zoho has been in South Africa for 10 years and been around for 27 years altogether.

Bourne adds that the company’s support staff gives it an advantage. “We have a local office with guys speaking native languages: Xhosa, Zulu, English and Afrikaans. It always helps when you can speak with someone who understands your local business environment.

By Allister Arendse

Editor: African Business Quarterly