Zoho Corporation bets big on India

Within two months of launching a suite of business apps on the cloud for Indian small and medium enterprises, Zoho Corporation Pvt Ltd has garnered nearly 100,000 domain registrations from SMEs across the country.

The company is building a 10,000 sq ft, multi-million-dollar data centre in Chennai, dedicated to its Indian customers, which is due to open before April.

Since its inception in 1996, Zoho, a software product company, has notched up 12 million users, largely in the US, followed by Europe, West Asia and Japan. The company is now training its sights on India, identifying it as the next big growth market, and is on track to add 400-500 people this year to its 2,800-strong employee base.

“India is a multi-billion-dollar market where the ‘cloud’ is a big opportunity for us. There are 100 million Internet users in India and our goal is to reach as many of them as we can,” Sridhar Vembu, founder and CEO, Zoho Corporation, told BusinessLine .

“To do this, we have been aggressive in outreach, with our 30-second TV commercial with the message ‘Made in India, Made for the World’ aired on prime-time through November-December. The response has been phenomenal, with over 1.4 million views of our ad on YouTube,” he added.

Zoho’s suite of business apps on the cloud can be accessed on Zoho.in, and includes Zoho Sites, which allows companies to create 100 per cent, advertisement-free websites; Zoho Docs, wherein companies can create documents, spreadsheets and presentations online; and Zoho Mail, where companies can get hosted email services. All this is free for SMEs with up to 25 users. Free domain names (.in & .co.in), which would otherwise cost ₹400, are also on offer. A similar offering from Microsoft comes for ₹300 per user, per month, for an annual commitment.

Zoho will have to take on giants such as Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com for its suite of business apps to SMEs.

“We primarily compete with Microsoft, as its business apps are very popular in India, and to a limited extent with Google. We compete with Salesforce.com in a specific domain only — CRM,” said Vembu. “Although India contributes under 5 per cent to our revenue today, it’s growing at a fast pace and I am confident of winning a much larger market share in India.”

The US, where the company already has two data centres, contributes 55 per cent of its revenue, followed by Europe, where the company has a data centre.

Asked if he plans to raise funds for its expansion in India, Vembu said: “We are profitable since inception and have never raised any money to date. We started small and made profits that we reinvested to build more products, and kept reinvesting profits into the business. Once you raise money, you are flush with funds and may not make the right business decision.”

Zoho hosted its user conference, Zoholics, in India for the first time last November and plans to host a bigger user conference in India this year. The company has offices in the US, London, Tokyo and Beijing.

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