Zoho all set to battle Google, Microsoft in India
BENGALURU: Zoho, one of India’s most successful software product companies but which had so far focused on the US and other global markets, on Wednesday launched an aggressive new campaign with the idea of addressing the domestic market.
The Chennai-based company, which competes with Microsoft and Google in the mail and office suite space, is offering Indian companies free domain (.in or .co.in) registration, a free website creation application, and free Zoho Docs (office suite). Zoho mail too will be free, but for only the first 25 users in a business. All these applications will also be available on mobile devices.
By March, the company will also have a data centre in Chennai where it will host all Indian data. Zoho’s applications are all cloud-based, just as Google’s; Microsoft entered the cloud space more recently with Office 365.
Zoho founder & CEO Sridhar Vembu said they were trying to create a market in India for Zoho’s products and hence the attractive package. “We won’t even have ads. But we expect that once companies get used to us, they will want to use our accounting, CRM, HR and other products, and we will charge for that,” he said.
Microsoft remains the enterprise king, but early cloud players like Google and Zoho have a strong presence in the small and mid market. Zoho has over 10 million users. Vembu said when Zoho started early last decade, the adoption was mostly among firms with 10-20 employees, but now, companies with employees numbering between 1,000 and 2,000 formed Zoho’s sweetspot. “About 80% of our revenue comes from small and medium sized companies. In big companies, there are departments that adopt us, but not yet at the corporate level,” he said.
Asked about the late focus on India, Vembu said Zoho products needed good broadband and it was only in recent times that operators in India had begun to offer such connections.
