Cloud-based app vendor Zoho has seen success working with partners since it formally set up shop in-country in Canada in 2017, and it’s looking to new types of partners to help keep the company growing.

Chandreshkar LSP, managing director of Zoho Canada, said that the subsidiary has grown at a 22 percent rate over the last five years. More recently, the company has seen strength with bigger customers, as growth in large deals has almost doubled that rate at 39 percent.

“That’s a significant and healthy figure, and it’s going to go up with the investments we’ve made in the region,” LSP said, noting its growth in headcount in Canada and its opening of a Canadian data centre last year.

LSP puts much of the credit for Zoho’s growth in this country on his partner base.

“We established ourselves so recently here, and what took us to the Canadian customer is the partner,” he said. “They’re well-known, they’ve been with the ecosystem for a long time, they’re highly capable, and they were here before we were.”

One of Zoho’s biggest partners in the world is from Quebec. NSI Solutions in Montreal was the company’s second solution provider partner, and their relationship predated Zoho’s setting up shop in Canada.

But it’s been English Canada where partners have been doing the heavy lifting lately, with LSP reporting that the revenue contribution from partners for the English Canada business regularly runs 35 to 38 percent higher than the global average.

The company has come this far with a unique partner base. LSP said many of the company’s partners are exclusively Zoho partners, having been customers first and seeing a vertical-specific opportunity to implement Zoho’s range of business software.

However, to continue growing, LSP foresees taking a new path, reaching out to a broader base of Canadian channel partners with vertical expertise in fields where Zoho sees opportunity. 

He sees Zoho getting closer to industry associations in key verticals to meet the right partners to move the company forward in new fields.

“The idea is to meet people and create that relationship and those connections with people who can map Zoho to the problems in the industry,” LSP said.

He said the company’s initial goal is to find between three and five partners in each of two or three key growth verticals as a starting point, and if the effort bears fruit, expand from there.

Zoho has a very specialist channel and a broad range of offerings, from email and productivity to analytics and CRM. That means it’s already good at fostering partner-to-partner connections to meet customer needs. However, LSP reports that more recently, he’s seen a trend of partners acquiring or building to offer customers a complete look at the range of applications and platforms Zoho offers.

“Zoho One changed the game because it has everything in it,” LSP said. “As a partner, you just can’t say I only know service, or I only know CRM. It’s a much broader deployment.”

Zoho One is the brand for Zoho’s “business operating system,” which combines Zoho modules for sales, marketing, support, accounting, operations, and HR under a single subscription.