Zoho Takes on Current Low-Code Market Gaps with New Creator Platform

Zoho Corporation, a leading global technology company, announced the latest version of its low-code offering, Zoho Creator Platform. The all-in-one solution is easy-to-use, irrespective of coding level or technical know-how. It enables both business users and IT teams to work in tandem to create and deploy apps that are highly customised, while minimising common interoperability, permissions, and governance challenges.

Existing low-code platforms are either too complicated for business users or too simplistic in their output, meaning they only facilitate basic app building, and lack the sophistication needed to develop scalable, enterprise-ready end-to-end tools. The Zoho Creator Platform, however, supports all levels to build, manage, integrate and analyse for a complete low-code experience, enabling 10x faster deployment than any other solution on the market.

With the Zoho Creator Platform, business users can now easily build scalable low-code solutions which include apps, integrations, analytics, and process automation without heavy dependency on IT teams or training. For IT stakeholders, the Platform now provides deeper controls around governance and management, without compromising automation, data-driven insights, customisation, and the ability to affect revenue and growth.

Together, business users and IT can quickly deploy secure, dynamic solutions built to auto-scale, so that organisations can focus on solving business problems and pursue new opportunities.

Sridhar Iyengar, Managing Director, Zoho Europe commented:

“Outside of Zoho’s Creator Platform, few if any low-code solutions on the market allow business users or IT to engineer tools while simultaneously enabling IT teams to manage ongoing challenges of security, compliance, integration, and governance. The marriage of these two disciplines and user profiles is where we see the unique value of the Creator Platform.”

Key areas of innovation in the new Creator Platform include:

Expand App Building to Solution Building

• Unified Solution Builder – Create, integrate, analyse, and manage custom business solutions at scale from a single dashboard. Seamlessly switch between different elements, with deep interoperability between capabilities, and in-built guardrails for IT teams to drive enterprise-wide citizen development programmes.
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) – Zoho’s intelligent AI assistant (Zia) now enables developers to import data from anywhere, cleanse and transform with one click, build data models, and automatically detect data relationships via Smart Import. AI tasks such as predictive analytics, keyword extraction, sentiment analysis, OCR, and object detection are built into the drag-and-drop user interface for easy deployment.
• Process Blueprinting – This intuitive drag-and-drop builder graphically constructs an online replica of a business process by specifying each step, assigning responsibilities across stakeholders, and automating actions based on pre-set conditions. Users can now identify bottlenecks and have clarity to facilitate scalability for evolving business needs.
• Enhanced Serverless Functions – Developers can now write, store, and execute reusable code blocks in Zoho Creator Platform using Deluge (Zoho’s proprietary scripting language), Java, or Node.js. These functions encourage IT and business teams to work together to build scalable and easily maintainable enterprise-ready apps faster.

Build a Connected Ecosystem of Solutions for a Seamless Experience

• Unified Data Modeling (UDM) – Unchecked data points, varied data formats, and evolving app landscapes add layers of difficult-to-solve complexities to data integration, resulting in sub-optimal business results. Universal cloud modeling is now included to help developers establish secure data transfer by automating data integration protocols with unified data architecture and over 650 plug-and-play connectors to make data integration easier for users.
• Integration Status Dashboard – Users have complete visibility on how well each integration operates with the new Integration Status Dashboard. Status Dashboard provides key findings on recent executions, success and failure stats, and top connections facilitating early error detection and resolution to enable organisations to discover errors and resolve them quicker.
• Embedded BI and Analytics Engine – An industry-first, full-fledged business intelligence and analytics engine is now included in the Zoho Creator Platform, enabling users to derive business insights from the data residing in their applications without worrying about bringing another subscription into the fold. High-end BI functionalities like predictive analytics, data alerts, what-if analysis, data blending, and conversational analytics are all now supported on the low-code platform.

Increased Control for IT with End-to-End ADLM

• Environments – Developers can now launch solutions in different environments of choice—development, staging (testing), or production—with a single click based on the readiness of the solution. This allows users to add features continuously or make changes without disturbing the existing app in production. The environments also support role-based access to help business developers simulate user-specific experience validation.
• Centralised Governance – To help IT manage low-code development, features such as granular role-based access controls, comprehensive audit trails and backup options, application IDE, dashboards to view and manage users, billing dashboard, personalisation options such as localisation, branding customisation, and more, are now available in the low-code platform.
• Integrated Communication and Collaboration Aid – Often, business developers get stuck in the build phase with minor obstacles, especially when new to the platform. In order to enhance communication and collaboration, integrated communication enables messaging, sending files, sharing screens, and the ability to make audio and video calls.

Zoho Creator Platform Pricing

Pricing starts at £20 per employee/month billed annually. For comprehensive pricing information, please visit: https://www.zoho.com/creator/pricing.html

About Zoho

With 50+ apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer support, accounting and back office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho Corporation is one of the world’s most prolific software companies.

Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 10,000 employees. Zoho is headquartered in Chennai, India with European headquarters in Utrecht, The Netherlands. Additional offices are in the United States, India, Japan, China, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, and the United Arab Emirates.

Zoho respects user privacy and does not have an ad-revenue model in any part of its business, including its free products. Read more about Zoho’s privacy commitment here: https://www.zoho.com/privacy.html. Zoho operates its own datacenters across the world, including two in Europe. More than 75 million users around the world, across hundreds of thousands of companies, rely on Zoho everyday to run their businesses, including Zoho itself. For more information, please visit www.zoho.com.