Zoho Corporation announced the latest version of its low-code offering, Zoho Creator Platform, an all-in-one solution that bridges the gap between business users and IT teams by providing a low-code solution-building experience regardless of technical know-how.
Organisations currently face soaring demand for new business software, but existing low-code platforms for business users only facilitate basic app building, lacking the sophistication needed to develop scalable, enterprise-ready end-to-end tools.
The existing solutions in the market designed specifically for business users facilitate only basic app building, lacking the complexity needed to develop end-to-end tools, which allow organisations to scale and ensure centralised governance in the process.
Addressing the needs of both business users and IT teams, Zoho Creator Platform 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.
Democratising access to low-code development tools allows IT and business users to work in tandem to create and deploy/use apps that are highly customised, while minimising common interoperability, permissions, and governance challenges in the long run.
“Currently there isn’t a low-code solution on the market that allows both business users and IT to truly build end-to-end solutions,” said Raju Vegesna, Chief Evangelist, Zoho Corporation.
“With this update, Zoho’s Creator Platform combines application development, integration, automation, business intelligence and analytics into one single platform while simultaneously enabling IT teams to effortlessly manage security, compliance, and governance challenges.”
“Now, organisations/companies can leverage a unified strategic solution for all of their low-code needs, and ultimately, extending the ability to innovate to every employee.”
The Zoho Creator Platform integrates digital data and processes to facilitate the creation of truly agile solutions for business users and IT teams alike. Business developers can now easily build scalable low-code solutions which include apps, integrations, analytics, and process automation without heavy dependency on IT teams or time-consuming training.
For IT stakeholders, the Platform provides deeper controls on management, without ruining automation, data-driven insights, customisation, and ability to affect revenue and growth.
Together, business users and IT can quickly deploy secure, dynamic solutions built to auto-scale, so that firms can focus on solving business problems and pursue new opportunities.
“Zoho Creator Platform covers the entire flow of the business, from customer relationship management and supplier management to every internal process on its path,” said Muhammad Majid, Senior ICT Project Manager at Shine Auto Parts WA.
“We decided to use Zoho because everything is accessible online and the risk of losing data is so minimal. Now everything is done in Creator, and it has really helped the business achieve a lot of milestones. Creator has been one of the biggest supports for our growth.”
“By relying on Creator, we’ve seen a 40% increase in productivity and an additional revenue of $1M. I’d absolutely recommend Creator to anyone, regardless of their industry. Any company can use it to automate their business processes and be more efficient.”
“With this version of Creator, Zoho is shifting its low-code emphasis from applications to business solutions,” said Jason Bloomberg, President of Intellyx, an industry research firm.
“Creator helps business stakeholders and IT collaborate to combine applications, business intelligence and analytics, and process automation into end-to-end business solutions.”
“The Zoho Creator Platform is simple enough for nontechnical staff while also powerful enough to address complex workflow scenarios in a secure, scalable environment.”
Key areas of innovation in the new Creator Platform
Expand App Building to Solution Building
Unified Solution Builder: Create, integrate, analyse, and manage custom solutions at scale from a single dashboard. Switch between different elements, with interoperability between capabilities, and in-built guardrails for IT teams to drive citizen development programs.
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 identify bottlenecks and have clarity to facilitate scalability for evolving needs.
Enhanced Serverless Functions: Developers can now write, store, and execute reusable code blocks in Platform using Deluge, Java, or Node.js. These functions encourage IT and business teams to work together to build scalable and maintainable enterprise-ready apps faster.
Build an ecosystem of solutions for a seamless Experience
Unified Data Modelling (UDM): Unchecked data points, varied data formats, and evolving app landscapes add layers of complexities to data integration, resulting in sub-optimal results.
Universal cloud modelling is now included to help developers establish secure data transfer by automating data integration protocols with unified data architecture and over 600 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: A full-fledged business intelligence and analytics engine is now included in the 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 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 in the process. 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 like 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.
About Zoho
With 50+ apps in nearly every major business category, including sales, marketing, customer care, accounting and back-office operations, and an array of productivity and collaboration tools, Zoho Corporation is one of the world’s most prolific technology companies.
Zoho is privately held and profitable with more than 10,000 employees.
Zoho is headquartered in Austin, Texas, with international headquarters in Chennai, India. Additional offices are in the United States, India, Japan, China, Canada, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.
For more information, please visit: www.zoho.com/
