Zoho Kenya Signs Partnership With Strathmore’s ISBI

Zoho Corporation has strengthened its footprint in the East African market after officially opening a new office in Nairobi. Bringing in their physical presence in the country, Zoho will also be looking to offer trainings on their solutions to their customers in the region.

While launching the Nairobi office, Zoho also announced a strategic partnership with the Institute for Small Business Initiatives (ISBI), which is part of Strathmore Business School (SBS). ISBI works largely with small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in Kenya, helping entrepreneurs scale their businesses, streamline operations, and build a competitive edge.

Zoho’s partnership with ISBO will aim to digitalise the operations of local SMEs by empowering them with the latest enterprise technology. As part of the partnership, all the SMEs that are or have ever been associated with ISBI will be granted to Zoho One, a unified platform of 50+ business applications, that seamlessly connects diverse business functions including customer relationship management (CRM), finance, human resources, project management, collaboration, marketing sales, and more.

Businesses in Nairobi that avail access to Zoho One will additionally receive tech support and product training to maximize the benefits of this collaboration.

Zoho Corp’s Country Head for Kenya, Veerakumar Natarajan, said that the Nairobi office will now help the company better serve the SMEs in Kenya and steadily improve its maturity and readiness for large organisations.

“Staying true to our roots, we have also partnered with ISBI, in order to help SMEs and startups in Kenya gain access to enterprise technology and gain competitive edge and quickly adapt to the changing market landscape,” he remarked.

On her part, the Director for Programs at ISBI, Maryanne Akoth, said that ISBI’s research-driven approach ensures successful outcomes in capacity building.

“Our results demonstrate significant improvements, including increased revenue, company value growth, and job creation. While manual data recording poses a challenge, we recognize digitization as the solution,” Maryanne said, “Our partnership with Zoho supports SMEs through their diverse product portfolio. I am excited about our collaboration with Zoho and look forward to achieving further growth.”