With the emergence of the concept of cloud computing, India has been fast evolving as a hot bed of companies centered around the technology, kick-started by visionary Indian entrepreneurs who are driven by the grit to challenge big players in the space, such as Salesforce.com, Google and Microsoft. In the last 10 years, though many Indian entrepreneurs have stepped forward and established interesting cloud computing companies, only a few of them have actually evolved themselves dynamically and fast enough to reach a scale that is enviable to even the established cloud computing vendors. Two such Indian cloud computing companies that have become established players in their own space in the global market are Zoho and Freshdesk. When we spoke to the founders of these companies, we found that their brilliance in creating just the right product that was aimed at resolving specific business challenges within the SMB community, clubbed with their unique business strategies and sales model contributed significantly to their consistent success. InformationWeek takes a closer look at their success stories and the factors that catalyzed their rapid growth in the global market. Zoho: A firm that believes in the bottom-up approach Way back in 1996 when Indian technology entrepreneurship was almost unheard of, Sridhar Vembu an IIT Madras alumni armed with a PhD from Princeton University kick-started a tech company called AdventNet that offered Web Network Management System (WebNMS) to the telecom OEMs like Cisco, Nortel and Motorola. AdventNet’s business was going good, till the year 2000 when the dotcom burst happened and as a result most fibre optic companies that were WebNMS’ customers went out of business. Observing that the company’s client numbers were dwindling, Sridhar decided to diversify AdventNet and launched ManageEngine, a suite of products built for IT admins/teams. Journey from AdventNet to Zoho During 2005 Sridhar realized that many startups and SMBs were emerging in the Indian and the global market that were aiming at turning their focus completely on running their business and not their IT. Also, such companies didn’t have heavy capital that they could invest on internal IT. Sridhar figured that a bundle of essential business productivity and collaboration apps delivered on a subscription-based SaaS model could be the answer to the problems of emerging businesses. This model would call for a much lesser investment and would also lessen the burden of hosting, managing, maintaining and supporting apps, thus allowing them to focus on what they do best. So in 2005 Sridhar took the big leap and launched the company’s first SaaS offering, an online word processor. This was followed by other SaaS services that include CRM, mail, creator, projects, support, sites, campaigns, reports, etc.
An interesting thing to note here is that the company entered the market way before Google launched its Google Apps for businesses, which included similar web-based productivity software for organizations. In 2009, the name of the company was changed from AdventNet to Zoho Corporation. “Today, Zoho Corp, headquartered in Pleasanton, CA, has three divisions, each focusing on different market segments. While Zoho.com is focused on online business productivity and collaboration apps; ManageEngine is focused on enterprise IT management ; and WebNMS is focused on the needs of OEMs,” says Sridhar. Though currently Zoho is targeting the SMBs in the global and the Indian market, the company aims at expanding into the large enterprises as well. Elaborating on this, Sridhar says, “At Zoho, we believe in the bottom-up approach. We serve small businesses first and eventually bubble up servicing larger companies. We like the SMB market better as there are more SMBs than larger companies in the world. While it has its own set of challenges — like reaching these SMBs is tough — the volume makes this interesting.” Acquiring 10 million customers It has been roughly 9 years since Zoho.com was kick-started and within this short time span the company has scaled up from zero customers to 10 million customers, with the company adding about 250,000 users every month. In addition, though the company is established by Indian entrepreneurs, the offerings are extremely popular across the globe with the company having maximum customer base in the U.S., Canada and U.K. Zoho has undoubtedly grown by leaps and bounds since its inception. “Today, Zoho has about 1,000 employees spread across in offices located in California, Austin, New Jersey, Singapore, Tokyo and Beijing, apart from Chennai. Our support and sales teams are based out of India and cater to customer’s needs, across the globe. We are expanding on sales and marketing along with strategic partnerships that will help us reach a wider audience
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