The Story of Zoho : Of its Founder and the Success He is in Life and Business
The premise of our story stands on a commitment of the highest order and has a sense of responsibility unseen in the modern corporate world. It ties the economic, environmental, corporate and societal elements in a perfect balance. The story of Zoho and of its founder defies the plump, profit driven operations on the modern corporate scene, in the place is a tranquil, eco-sustainable, traditional village model and the raw effort to make it into an advanced technological power house. In this blog we shall look deeply into the origins of Zoho, its achievements in India and abroad across different time frames, in the process delving too in the struggles and successes of its CEO and founder Sridhar Vembu for a proper understanding. Company Information and the Origins- Zoho Corporation is an Indian multinational technology company that makes web based business tools and offers services in diverse areas such as Information Technology, Software development, Cloud Computing and other coordinating tools of office management. The Company itself was founded in the year 1996 by Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas though presently and all through the years has remained private, the intention for the future seems to be the same as far as its founder is concerned. More on this later we must now talk about the various companies it offers its services to, and its global networks amid other things.
The data says that 3 out of every 5 Fortune 500 companies employ the services Zoho offers, the big names here include the likes of Apple, HBO, Netflix, Intel, Sony, Mahindra, Loreal, PayPal and numerous other emerging tech startups. In this list includes software companies, media giants, automobile manufacturers and even cosmetics companies, the ‘service width’ is pretty amazing. Its global footprint from instances traces countries like US, India, China, Japan, Singapore, Australia, UK, Germany, Netherlands, France, Sweden and South Africa in a single line. Many others would probably be joining this group sooner or later. Its global headquarters is in Chennai and Corporate headquarters in Del Valle which is just outside of the city of Austin, Texas. The crazy thing about this company is that it has in fact set up full range office workplaces in far-flung village areas and says that it is going to expand the practice in the coming years for debunking the corporate city myth and of its exclusive necessity. The origin in fact speaks of zeal and planning and offers a range of insights for our very own startup model and growth strategies.
The company was founded in 1996 and was known by a different name AdventNet Inc. , it started its operations in the field of network management equipment and other technological software. Various Small and Medium-sized businesses (SMBs) joined in accruing a customer base of a million somewhere in the year 1998. From then on it kept on expanding its empire, in the process attracting talents both of an adventurous and experienced nature in its workforce. The dotcom crash in the year 2001 necessitated a change and a rejig thereof diversified its operations and gave the structure and appearance of Zoho as we know it today. One of the most successful projects of Zoho is Zoho CRM (Customer Relationship Management) which hence gave it the name and trust the company presently boasts of. The next series of applications include Zoho Projects, Creator, Sheet, and Show all of which were launched in 2006. Next Zoho expanded into the Collaboration Space with the release of applications such as Zoho Docs and Zoho Meetings in the year 2007.
The company itself was renamed in 2009, after its online office suite. Serial developments were continual all this while. Zoho One, a comprehensive suite of over 40 applications was launched in 2017 in a major breakthrough resulting in record subscriptions and profits. In October of 2021, Zoho One, a portal consisting of 50 applications, was formed. A more robust timeline of the events and activities can be found on the company’s website itself. Zoho Corp | Home page
Revenue and Users- The company reached an active user count of a whopping 50 million customers in Jan, 2020. In July 2020, it skyrocketed to 80 million users. The revenue in the year 2021 was $690 million or ₹1,917.72 crores. The growth over this year (2021) had been 140% over the last year. For instance Zoho One is supporting a broad base of 50,000 organisations across 160 countries. A massive workforce of close to 10,000 people are employed in the company setup and with operations expanding this number is expected to rise. Another interesting thing is that when companies were undergoing massive layoffs and financial crisis during the Corona epidemic it arranged for assistance for its employees constructing an Organic farm during the process.
Investments and Future Vision- Zoho Corporation in its bid to build what it calls a ‘home grown technology powerhouse’ has invested in various technology startups, for instance it has invested about $2.6 million in Thiruvananthapuram based Robotics company Gen Robotics Innovation (Genrobotics). Also a $5 million investment in Bengaluru based Voxelgrids (Voxelgrids | Magnetic Resonance Imaging) as one would notice is a medical assistance Research and Development setup. Future investment too would be in the deep tech industry.
Sridhar Vembu, the Story of the Entrepreneur- Piyush Goyal during one of the events recently held hailed him as one of the finest entrepreneurs India has ever produced. With a net worth of close to $3.75 billion the founder and CEO of Zoho Corporation is the 55th richest person in India and Padma Shri awardee albeit with no garishness. A lover of village environment and a concern for the rural masses he is also a teacher, farmer and thinker. He launched his professional career working for Qualcomm as a wireless engineer in 1994 or something. A firm believer in rural empowerment, he relocated to Tenkasi, Tamil Nadu and thereby immersed himself in setting up schools and undertaking other societal initiatives. All in all his choice of actually coming back to India to work in the village must be seen as an act of extreme commitment and concern. His profound understanding of the needs of the country helped him develop a set of comprehensive programs to hire high school students and train them across various technological courses in one of the -“Zoho Schools of Learning” in 2004. In the coming days the courses would be expanded further to include mechanical engineering, Machine Learning, Robotics in the curricula of which Sridhar himself is the progenitor of. As a result about (15-20)% of all the engineers employed have descended from these very schools. His mantra for the company as he himself says is slow and steady with the lures of expansion and expense kept at bay. He says that ” We are a state of the art tech company with a very old fashioned approach to company building”. Then in 2020 he announced the development of a “rural school startup” that would focus on providing free primary education. A Research and Development Campus has been opened under his auspices in Estancia IT Park, Chennai. These societal initiatives coupled with modern technology are bound to make an impact in India and abroad in a major way.
Conclusion Part of Our Story- A story of passion, commitment, will and concern, Zoho fulfils all of those promises and much more. Its profound and inclusive vision for India and her villages is a truly daunting one, at the same time is increasingly praise worthy. This desire to work with people, to share their hopes and dreams and to propel them into the reality only if this becomes acute, only then can an entrepreneur too realise his goal of changing the world for the better.