We continue our series of interviews with leading players in the cloud computing and Web 2.0 sector with Raju Vegesna from Zoho.
What was the initial inspiration for Zoho and how long has it been established?
Zoho.com was launched in 2005 as a division of AdventNet Inc. Given the popularity of Zoho, we renamed the entire company to Zoho Corporation. As a company, we were established in 1996 as AdventNet and for the past 13 years we never took any outside capital and have been profitable since then. With Zoho.com we want to be the IT departments for SMBs. This obviously means we need to offer a broad range of apps for businesses.
How many people work for Zoho and how did they come to the company?
Zoho.com division has around 350 employees while the entire company (Zoho Corp) has over 1000 employees. Most of our employees work out of our development centre in Chennai, India. We hire directly out of colleges and we also train employees internally.
What has been the biggest challenge so far?
When we started, the challenges were on the engineering side as we transformed from a product company to SaaS company. As we move forward, our challenge was gaining visibility. Trying to stand out in the market against the bigger players has been the biggest challenge so far.
And what challenges do you see for the future?
Now that we have a good product portfolio, our challenge is going to be on the visibility side. Trying to compete with bigger vendors to gain market share and convince users about our offerings is certainly a challenge as we move forward.
Do you have any plans for other services?
We do have areas we can improve on with additional offerings. We will be launching additional services as we move forward. But the pace of new application releases will definitely come down as the focus moves more towards integration between our existing applications. If you notice, we didn’t release any new apps this year. But we rolled out lots of integrations between our apps.
What do you think are the major obstacles to getting people and businesses to use web based services?
‘Change’ is the biggest barrier. People don’t like change. Convincing businesses that this is a better option and educating users on the advantages of online applications is certainly a challenge. Features like offline capability in our apps help ease the migration.
The good news is, we are not alone in educating users about online apps. Google is evangelizing the advantages of online apps and now with Microsoft entering the arena, we have two big players educating the market. They have a great reach and as a smaller vendor, it helps us.
This transition to online apps will happen. It is like the transition from land phones to mobile phones. It might take some time, but that is the future.
What is the biggest incentive to get them to switch to cloud based systems?
Online Apps make users productive compared to offline counterparts. Collaboration comes naturally to online apps. As a vendor, we are able to deliver the applications much effectively to a broad range of users which essentially reduce our costs which we can pass on to our customers. Financially, Cloud Apps can save $$$$.
How do you see web based services in five years time?
We see browsers maturing with renewed competition in that space and each browser vendor raising the bar on what can be done on a browser. This is great news for online application vendors like Zoho. Web Apps like Zoho will get more powerful and the migration from desktop apps to web apps will accelerate. As standards emerge, we will see more powerful and compatible apps on the web running across multiple devices and form factors all served from the web.
What happens when someone puts a digger through the cable?
The good news is, there is no single point of failure for the internet. When a data centre goes down for example, web apps are designed to serve from a different data centre. A single data centre going down cannot take down the entire service.
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