Zoho Corporation
 | |
| Private | |
| Founded | 1995 |
| Founder | Sridhar Vembu |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
Sridhar Vembu (CEO) |
Number of employees | 4000[1] |
| Slogan | Work online. |
| Website |
www |
Zoho Corporation, founded in 1996, is a technology company based in California which provides SAAS services.[2] The company was founded by Sridhar Vembu and Tony Thomas.
History
From 1996 to 2009, the company was known as AdventNet Inc. In 2009, the company was renamed Zoho Corporation after its online office suite of the same name.
Locations
The company is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, USA, with offices in Singapore, Japan, China, India. The bulk of its sales and support operations are carried out from its office in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India and the Philippines.[1] In addition, the company has research and development centres in Singapore, Beijing, China and Tenkasi, Tamil Nadu, India.[3]
Products
Network management framework
The company started as a network management framework provider for telecommunications and network equipment vendors. Initially the company developed other software such as an SNMP API stack, an element management system (EMS). The NMS framework is marketed as WebNMS which competes with similar NMS products from HP, CA and few other enterprises.
IT management products
Until 2003, the company's business focused only on large and enterprise class customers. During the slowdown in 2003, and as a plan to bring in more revenue, the company ventured into SMB market by offering commercial IT management products which were either stripped down versions of their WebNMS framework, or built on top of WebNMS codebase. The company marketed their IT management products under the ManageEngine [4] branding. Their first product released under the ManageEngine brand was a network monitoring software called OpManager 4.0 which competed with WhatsUp Gold and other monitoring products. Following OpManager 4.0's success, a host of other related products were developed and marketed targeting various segments of IT management. The ManageEngine became a commercially successful brand in the following years.
Zoho Office Suite
During the Web 2.0 and SaaS boom in 2005, the company launched Zoho Office Suite with a web-based word processor, and later expanded to offer other applications, including spreadsheets, mail, a calendar, contacts list, and other business-oriented programs such as CRM.[5]
Most of the Zoho Suite products offer a free edition and a host of paid editions. At this time of writing, the Zoho Suite of products offers both personal productivity applications and business productivity apps which rely on the subscription business model for revenue. Some of the notable business competitors include products from Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce.
Revenue
The company bootstrapped itself, and is held privately. It also does not disclose its revenue publicly but as of 2012, it was believed to be a quarter of Salesforce, and Zoho is known to spend the bulk of its revenue on product development, unlike Salesforce which is known to spend more than 50% of its revenue on sales and marketing.[6]
References
- 1 2 D'Monte, Leslie (2014-11-24). "Is Zoho the future of enterprise software?". www.livemint.com. HT Media Ltd. Retrieved 2015-08-05.
Developers at zoho’s office in Ramapuram, Chennai. Zoho has around 2,600 employees, of which about 96% are based in India.
- ↑ D'Monte, Leslie (2014-11-24). "Is Zoho the future of enterprise software?". www.livemint.com. HT Media Ltd. Retrieved 2015-08-05.
It’s an 18-year old Indian software product company not too many people have heard of, and venture capital and private equity investors have wooed unsuccessfully for close to two decades.
- ↑ "Zoho Corporation eyes 100 million users of its products in five years". www.financialexpress.com. The Indian Express [P] Ltd. 2015-08-05. Retrieved 2015-08-05.
Recently, the company had opened an R&D centre comprising 120 people at Thenkasi in Tamil Nadu.
- ↑ Vembu, Sridhar (2007-07-10). Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 1). Interview with Sramana Mitra. sramanamitra.com.
- ↑ Lohr, Steve (2009-08-29). "Zoho: Thriving Amid the Giants". Bits. New York Times. Retrieved 2011-07-19.
- ↑ Milian, Mark (2012-11-29). "No VC: Zoho CEO ‘Couldn’t Care Less for Wall Street’". go.bloomberg.com. Retrieved 2015-03-28.