With more and more Indian businesses exploring the World Wide Web for business opportunities, there is one cloud-based operating system right here in India that has some rather large dreams and goals.
Having been founded in 1996, the company has focused on the US market till now. But on Wednesday, it launched Zoho.in, where Indian companies can access its suite of applications to run their businesses; a move which is unlike the biggies – who are now venturing out of their comfort zones and going more local with data centres for higher acceptance and increased penetration.
Like some of the large global companies such as Microsoft, IBM, Oracle and Google, Zoho offers email hosting, document management, office suits, product management, and customer relationship management for companies. The company currently has a little over 10 million users globally.
The founder and CEO of Zoho, Sridhar Vembu, is hell bent on disrupting the ecosystem here in India, but in a good manner, by introducing his rather unique and innovative services to change the perceptions of local businesses about younger operating systems than the likes of Microsoft.
To attract users in the Indian market, which currently accounts for less than five per cent of Zoho’s total users, the company is offering free business-class email accounts and free access to document management application for up to 25 users in a company. Typically, a company spends around $50 (Rs 3,000) per year per user on getting the offerings that Zoho is offering for free from Microsoft, while for Google the cost could be in the range of $50 to $70. Now that’s a rather smart way to gain some traction.
The aim is to bring on board small and medium sized companies that would help the company in its “ladder strategy” of starting with small and then going to bigger clients. In the US, Zoho gets close to 80 per cent of its revenue from small companies, while the remaining comes from large ones.
Zoho will also allow users to get domain names and build websites for their businesses free of cost, as part of its launch offer. Getting a domain name for a website generally costs Rs 200-600, while development cost would depend on the design specifics.
Zoho is a bootstrapped software product start-up that started operations when India was known only for its information technology (IT) services capabilities and the start-up trend had not reached local shores. So far the company stayed away from India as a market due to low penetration of internet bandwidth, that is mandatory for using its cloud-based offering.
As it looks to expand its user base in India, Zoho will also be setting up a local data center in Chennai by March 2015. The company currently has two data centers in the US and is in the process of setting one up in China.
Besides setting up a local data center, which will cost Zoho “a few million dollars”, the company is in the process of moving its office to a 28-acre campus in Chennai.
