印度 Zoho 在南韓客戶數突破 1,000 家

Gibu Mathew, Zoho's Asia-Pacific director, introduces new solutions including Zia Chat and Zia Agent, outlining plans to address Korean enterprises' demand for agentic AI through the new offerings and the integrated Zoho One platform. (Photo: THE ELEC)

Indian software company Zoho said its customer base in South Korea has surpassed 1,000 organizations, including CJ Logistics, after growing 107% this year. The company plans to significantly strengthen its presence in the Korean market with new agentic artificial intelligence (AI) solutions.

At a media roundtable ahead of its Zoholics Korea user conference on Oct. 27, Zoho said, "Our Korean customer base has grown 107% this year, exceeding 1,000 organizations." The company added that dedicated local partners, including KS Solutions and Xponential Digital, handle solution customization and implementation.

Zoho is a major Indian business-to-business (B2B) software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider known for offering multiple cloud services under a single license. It has nearly 1 million paying business customers worldwide.

Zoho attributed its growth in South Korea to its broad product portfolio covering a wide range of business functions. The company expects this breadth to strengthen its position in the agentic AI competition with established enterprise application providers such as Slack, Oracle and Databricks.

Zoho positioned its services as an alternative to South Korea's fragmented IT environments.

"South Korea is accelerating its AI transformation at the national level, and businesses are highly willing to adopt AI, but fragmented IT environments remain an obstacle," said Gibu Mathew, Zoho's director for the Asia-Pacific region.

To address this challenge, Zoho highlighted Zia Chat, which connects multiple business applications through a single conversational interface; Zia Agent, an autonomous agent capable of performing multistep tasks across business systems; and Zoho One, an integrated suite of approximately 50 cloud applications covering customer relationship management (CRM), accounting, human resources and other functions.

Zoho also offers Zoho Workplace, which provides email, document editing, spreadsheets, presentations, messaging and cloud storage.

Zia Chat and Zia Agent are embedded in Zoho applications and can connect to external business systems through Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers.

"For example, when someone asks, 'How much of its sales target has our team achieved?' Zoho can understand contextual information such as the user's team structure, assigned territory and established targets, while ensuring that its response includes only data the user is authorized to access," Mathew said. "This combination of permission controls and organization-wide integration is a unique strength of Zoho's integrated suite."

Zoho's AI capabilities are powered by Zia LLM, its proprietary large language model. Introduced last year, Zia LLM comes in three versions with 1.3 billion, 2.6 billion and 7 billion parameters.

Asked whether Zia Chat and Zia Agent could meet enterprise customers' performance expectations given their reliance on Zia LLM, as the capabilities of AI applications and agents depend on their underlying models, Mathew said the company gives customers a choice.

Customers can use Zia LLM or pay additional fees to access frontier AI models. The aim is to give customers seeking cost optimization greater control over their expenses, he explained.

Zoho therefore offers two AI model options: Zia LLM and Bring Your Own Key (BYOK), which allows customers to connect their own frontier model API keys and use features such as the security capabilities provided by those models. The company also plans to support access to these foundation models through cloud services such as AWS and Microsoft Azure or private deployment models that may be more convenient for customers.

"We will increase the number of events in South Korea where we can demonstrate and educate customers about real-world applications and our technological competitiveness," Mathew said. "We will also continue offering products tailored to Korea and localized capabilities, including integration with Korean software and tools, to demonstrate Zoho's commitment to the market." He added that Zoho would pursue the establishment of a Korean subsidiary as its business in the country grows.