Andrew Bourne, Zoho regional manager for Africa.

Indian-based technology firm Zoho is now spreading its wings across the continent, following a 73% growth in revenue in South Africa last year.

According to Zoho, as part of its expansion strategy, it is establishing offices "across various countries in the region."

In addition, it says it is hiring locally for customer-facing roles and will continue to do so over the next few years.

“We recently crossed the milestone of having over a 100 million users, and were the first bootstrapped SaaS business to have achieved this. Africa is one of the fastest growing regions for us,” the company told ITWeb Africa.

Zoho's intentions for expansion come as the business is betting on its new Ulaa web browser to become a dominating player in the future.

Ulaa was launched earlier this year, with Zoho stating that the browser provides a secure browsing experience with ad blockers, end-to-end encryption, and data privacy protections.

The company is also marketing Zoho Workplace, a unified collaboration platform that comprises email, chat, online meetings, webinars, office suite (word processor, spreadsheet and presentation), file storage, and social intranet.

During the recent Zoholics event, the firm showcased Zoho Workplace by releasing their report, the 'State of Enterprise Collaboration and Productivity in South Africa', conducted by World Wide Worx.

"Factors like new-age hybrid work arrangements, changing employee preferences, and macroeconomic conditions in South Africa have influenced technology priorities for businesses and as a result, we're seeing an uptake in adoption of Zoho Workplace," said Hyther Nizam, president, Zoho MEA.

"Digitalisation and adoption of productivity and collaboration tools have immensely helped South African enterprises," said Arthur Goldstuck, CEO, World Wide Worx. "When we take a closer look at the data, we find that there is an obvious need for a unified collaboration platform, especially for mid-market companies and for those adopting a hybrid model. While loadshedding and poor Wi-Fi emerged as top challenges, unsurprisingly, the next biggest challenge was of data silos, which can hold back companies in a demanding market."