• The company also unveiled significant enhancements to its offerings for professional developers and app development teams.

These include early access to new services within Catalyst, the company’s pro-code full-stack development platform, and the general availability of Zoho Apptics, an application analytics solution that enables developers to track the in-app usage and performance of applications built on iOS, macOS, Android, and other platforms.

“Businesses are looking for unified solutions that help them optimise for value, maximise their competitive advantages, and tap into new market opportunities amid tough economic conditions,” said Kehinde Ogundare, country head, Zoho Nigeria. “At Zoho, we’re focused on continuously deepening our current offerings and expanding others to serve business needs. Zoho CRM for Everyone, for instance, is the first true democratisation of the CRM paradigm and helps unify all customer operations teams onto the CRM to deliver better customer experiences. Likewise, the upgraded Catalyst and the privacy-focused Apptics solution work hand-in-hand to deliver an unmatched developer experience from concept to code, and deployment to analytics.”

Zoho CRM for Everyone – What You Should Know:

Zoho CRM is one of the top selling products in Nigeria. The product recorded a  60% YoY growth in 2023 in the country.

Zoho CRM for Everyone allows sales teams, the primary custodian of customer relationships, to communicate and coordinate with other customer-facing teams from a single place—the CRM application—instead of holding fragmented discussions.

It enables account managers, for example, to pull in a solutions engineer to coordinate a product demonstration for a customer.

• A marketer can perform win-loss analysis for specific deals. A community specialist can manage advocacy engagements like case studies.

They may all use different core applications for deep work but can now converge on the CRM for managing shared responsibilities towards the customer.

Besides opening up CRM access cross-functionally, Zoho CRM for Everyone also empowers every team to manage their own workflows autonomously within the corporate IT framework.

The new capabilities stand to improve visibility for every stakeholder in the customer journey, mitigate gaps in coordination, reduce turnaround time, and improve the quality of the customer experience.

To make CRM for Everyone possible, the following capabilities have come together in Zoho CRM:

• Team Modules and Requesters: Under team modules, business teams can create their own team-level data modules (in addition to organisation-level modules) by themselves while being governed by IT teams. Requesters is a new user profile in Zoho CRM that allows a team member to raise a request for colleagues in different teams and track the request status.
  ● Refreshed User Experience: To enable this fundamental shift in usage, the interface of Zoho CRM has been redesigned for better usability across roles and functions. With this release, Zoho CRM is also making a major stride in accessibility with capabilities covering areas like vision, motor activity, and interactions.

New Custom App Development Capabilities in Catalyst

Building custom solutions out of a disparate mix of tools has consistently been a source of frustration for developers. Catalyst unifies pro-code development efforts and streamlines the entire lifecycle by abstracting away complexities, providing pre-built components, and offering a comprehensive suite of developer tools.

Catalyst’s newest offerings, available under early access, expand on developer logic, design, and delivery:

• Signals: Routes events from sources like Zoho services, third-party sources, or custom applications to handlers (like Catalyst Functions, Circuits, etc.) using topics and subscriptions.
  ●NoSQL Database: Allows users to store structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data while supporting diverse data types and scaling dynamically with high performance.
  ● Slate: A fully managed frontend platform that lets developers easily build highly customised interfaces that leverage frameworks such as React.js, Next.js, Sveltekit, etc.
  ● CI/CD Pipeline: Automates tests and builds for continuous delivery pipelines, streamlining development workflows for faster time-to-market.

Catalyst seamlessly integrates with the Zoho ecosystem and third-party applications, enabling developers to leverage existing infrastructure and data sources. The platform stands out with its transparent and cost-effective pricing model, empowering organisations of all sizes by eliminating hidden fees and offering predictable, scalable pricing.

Privacy-Friendly Application Analytics:

Zoho Apptics delivers an extensive digital analytics platform designed for every stakeholder involved in application development and management.

The solution consolidates analytics across app usage, performance, user engagement, and growth metrics into a centralised console, then synthesises these multifaceted data streams into actionable insights presented visually in dashboards and reports.

This unified view empowers organisations to make informed decisions, optimise app experiences, drive user engagement, and fuel sustainable growth throughout the application lifecycle.

Apptics provides multi-platform analytics support, covering Android, iOS, macOS, tvOS, watchOS, iPadOS, Windows, React Native, Flutter, and Unity, with web analytics capabilities coming soon.

Apptics stands out by offering a unique capability to prompt Android and iOS users for app ratings and updates directly from the Apptics console. Integrated app store reviews management helps in streamlining the process of analysing user sentiment.

Additionally, Zoho Apptics prioritises data privacy and security, exceeding industry best practices and regulatory compliance standards.

User information is safeguarded behind encryption and access controls, ensuring analytics insights are leveraged responsibly without compromising individual privacy.

Pricing and Availability  

• Starting today, early access to Zoho CRM for Everyone is available upon request for Zoho customers worldwide.
• Zoho will be releasing additional capabilities to CRM for Everyone over several weeks during the early access phase.
• Catalyst offers a generous Free Tier that renews monthly, alongside options for a pay-as-you-go model and subscription-based pricing.
• The new features are now available for early access, and interested users can sign up by visiting Zoho’s Catalyst page. 
• Apptics is globally available now and offers a free plan and a pro plan starting at NGN18600 per month, when billed annually.

New previews for Azure OpenAI Service, AI dashboards in Azure Machine Learning and a web application routing add-in for Azure Kubernetes Service were among the biggest Azure announcements from Microsoft during this year’s Build conference aimed at developers.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also touted the company’s Azure OpenAI service during the company’s latest quarterly earnings call in April, describing how the service helps “companies like CarMax turn customer reviews into customized content for shoppers.”

He said that Azure Machine Learning’s “number of monthly inference requests increased 86 percent year over year with companies like PepsiCo using the service to predict which products are most likely to sell.”

For starters, Microsoft introduced ‘Dev Box’, its new cloud service for developers with ready-to-code workstations that allow coders to focus on work instead of workstation configurations and maintenance.

Since Dev Boxes are hosted in the Microsoft Cloud, they work on all Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS devices, and also on all major web browsers, giving developers an option to not be bound to a physical PC, and rather, “spin up a virtual machine (VM) and provision it automatically in the cloud, reducing limitations and delays,” Nadela said.

Developers using Dev Box can create a developer portal to access specific Dex Boxes for different projects.

The CEO said that Microsoft is offerings Dev Box in a private preview starting Tuesday, with the cloud service going public in the “next few months.”

Moving on, the Washington-based company unveiled its ‘Project Volterra’,  a developer kit powered by an unnamed Snapdragon compute platform that will let developers explore several AI scenarios using Qualcomm’s Neutral Processing SDK for Windows toolkit.

The dev kit comes alongside a mini-desktop PC, though it won’t be available as a retail product.

From what we know so far, the mini-PC will sport three USB ports, a DisplayPort and an Ethernet port. Microsoft didn’t reveal much else about Project Volterra, though it did say that it will share more information about it at a later date.

Nadela added that Microsoft is also revamping Teams by introducing a new Live ‘Share Feature’ that will allow users to work on a shared document together in real-time, making group meetings more collaborative.

He said that developers, on the other hand, will be able to develop new collaborative software and applications inside Microsoft Teams.

Live Share is built on Fluid Framework, Microsoft’s web-based platform for interactive experiences that it debuted at 2019’s Build conference.

Some of Microsoft’s partners, including Accenture, Hexagon and Frame.io have already started building with Live Share, he said.

Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform

Azure Data chief Rohan Kumar also spoke about the Intelligent Data Platform.  Kumar explained the feature promises to “fully integrate databases, analytics and governance.”

The platform is meant to speed up the process of turning data from disparate sources into actionable intelligence.

Microsoft also launched the MySQL Flexible Server ‘Business Critical’ which presupposes that the old “Memory Optimized” tier for the Azure Database for MySQL Flexible Server product is no more.

“As of Build, it’s now called the “Business Critical” tier. New capabilities include “1.5x faster performance than Azure Database for MySQL Single Server deployment,” the company said.