South Africa is already one of Zoho’s leading markets, with new product upgrades like point of sale and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities set to drive the system’s popularity in the months to come.
Andrew Bourne, regional head: South Africa at Zoho, hopes to consolidate Zoho’s place in the local market with a new data centre to ensure data sovereignty.
He points out the Zoho – a relatively new cloud-based player to the South African market – has seen 9x growth in the last eight years and enjoys a 90% customer retention rate.
Bourne ascribes the system’s popularity to the fact that it is priced in rands and includes most of the tools needed to run a business.
Last year, revenue in South Africa increased 34%, and this year-to-date revenue is already running at 60% over the 2026 year-end.
The organisation yesterday unveiled the latest product in its stack: Zoho POS, a cloud-based solution that lets retailers manage billing, inventory, purchases, payment, customer relationships and loyalty programmes.
Specifically designed for South African conditions, Zoho POS supports local VAT requirements.
“Retailers today need technology that is both powerful and easy to use, enabling them to respond quickly to changing customer expectations, while keeping operations running efficiently,” Bourne says.
Zoho POS is available in Free, Standard, Professional and Premium editions, with billing starting at R120.00 per month per location, billed annually.
Bourne points out that POS is just the latest addition to the Zoho stack, which has been developed from the ground-up, growing organically rather than by acquisition.
Another new offering from the company is MCP (Model Context Protocol), which allows large language models (LLMs) to be used to develop new workflows and solutions in Zoho.
The company already integrates its own AI tool, ZIA, which operates within the Zoho infrastructure to automate search and workflows, and to build agents.
Looking to the future, Bourne believes running its own data centre in-country will drive a new era of growth.
“We see a real need for a local data centre,” he says. “Data sovereignty, especially in government, is important.
“We are already compliant with POPIA (Protection of Personal Information Act) and GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation), so customers can safely host in European data centres. But having a local data centre will also us to handle sensitive information as well.”
Zoho is still in the discovery stage, but it treating its own data centre as a priority.
Bourne is confident that the parent company will continue to grow its investments in South Africa. “We are in the top 15 countries for Zoho globally – last year we were number 12, this year we will be number 10.
This growth has driven rapid localisation of the product stack – indeed, Bourne says the only piece currently missing payroll and this will be available as soon as the relevant integrations can take place.
The company is also busy growing its local staff, particularly customer support and professional services teams.
It has also signed a memorandum of agreement (MoU) with a local education provider to offer Zoho courses and is currently looking to integrate into various university curricula as well.