Zoho Corporation
 | |
| Private | |
| Founded | 1996 |
| Founder | Sridhar Vembu |
Area served | Worldwide |
Key people |
Sridhar Vembu (CEO) |
| Slogan | Work online. |
| Website |
www |
Zoho Corporation (formerly AdventNet[1]) founded in 1996, is located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. The company was founded and headed by Sridhar Vembu.[2] who earlier worked in Qualcomm USA. In the beginning, the company was named as AdventNet Inc. and during 2009, the company was renamed as Zoho Corporation based on their online office suite, Zoho Office Suite. The company is headquartered in Pleasanton, California, USA with offices situated globally in major countries. The software development, sales and support operations are carried out from their Chennai office. Among the estimated global workforce of more than 2000 employees, 90% of employees are working in their Chennai office.
Brands
- ManageEngine
- WebNMS
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 [3] 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.
Open source products
For a brief time, the company ventured into open source products. In December 2004, vtiger CRM project was started by forking SugarCRM. The company launched vtiger CRM 5.0 which was well received by the community. Though the release was success and earned a loyal community, the commercial service model was not successful. Later, the entire project was spun off and handed over to a different group which is heading the vtiger CRM project now. After vtiger CRM, the company did not venture into open source products further.
Zoho Office Suite
During the Web 2.0 and SaaS boom in 2005, it 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.[2] In 2008 Salesforce attempted to acquire Zoho's product suite, but failed due to various reasons. 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 apps and business productivity apps which relies 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. The company has not taken any VC funding or loans. It also does not disclose its revenue publicly.[4]
References
- ↑ Vegesna, Raju (2009-05-27). "AdventNet Inc is now ZOHO Corporation". Zoho Blogs. Retrieved 2011-07-19.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lohr, Steve (2009-08-29). "Zoho: Thriving Amid the Giants". Bits. New York Times. Retrieved 2011-07-19.
- ↑ Vembu, Sridhar (2007-07-10). Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu (Part 1). Interview with Sramana Mitra. sramanamitra.com.
- ↑ Milian, Mark (2012-11-29). "No VC: Zoho CEO ‘Couldn’t Care Less for Wall Street’". go.bloomberg.com. Retrieved 2015-03-28.