I have always been a fan of Analyst Summits – a focused gathering of analysts where a vendor can showcase a variety of product, customer, investor and other perspectives. SAP used to take Gartner analysts to HQ at Walldorf in the late 90s. They have opened them up to a broader group of analysts and made them more regional.
If you have read my Deal Architect blog over the last 20 years, you have heard how Workday pioneered the concept for the cloud world in 2010 and has continued to vary the format every year. Plex added customer plant and innovation lab visits around their summits. Others have combined them with Customer Advisory meetings. Zoho hosted us at a ranch in Austin last year.
The creativity of such sessions differentiates the messaging of such vendors from those of vendors who continue to invite analysts to their user conferences. Easier for them, to not customize the content but a bit unfair to their customers for analysts to steal executive access during such events.
Zoho is about to raise the bar for summits even more. They have invited a few analysts to Chennai, India. It’s not just the distance people have traveled. In conversations with Sandy Lo, who runs Analyst Relations, the event logistics have taken extraordinary efforts to put together. Not that her previous events have been plain vanilla.
The content also promises to be very different, as Vijay Sundaram, Chief Strategy Officer provides in a sneak preview
“While you're here, you will meet employees and leaders, see our campuses in Chennai and Tenkasi, and engage with various Zoho entities—our product teams, Zoho Schools of Learning, our medical staff, maybe our organic vegetable store, and some of our in-house architects, artists, and musicians. With so much to see and digest in India in just one week, you may find yourself asking: "What does farming or medicine or architecture or rural renewal have anything to do with running a tech company?"
We are about to find out in the next few days. One angle we are sure to hear about – again from Vijay
“Big Tech is quick to rake in profits when the times are good, and quicker to lay people off when they are not. Nothing about this playbook seems sustainable or regenerative. The heart of the issue is many of these companies are too big to feel, and they've directly or indirectly lowered opportunities for their core constituent—their customers. We've seen the erosion of customer choice, customer privacy, customer flexibility, and many others.
Something is radically off.”
I have been sharing sneak previews of the unique traits of Zoho for over a decade now. Here are a few:
A scientific and spiritual conversation with the CEO, Sridhar Venbu
Zoho One - a unique enterprise suite
Zoho’s focus on emerging global markets
Sure I will have plenty more to share after this week.