The Success story of Zoho Corporation | Successful Entrepreneur Stories & Startup Journey - Entrepreneurship PDF Download

Nowadays there are various startups not just hitting it big but changing the face of business in the process. However, the harsh truth of startups is that nine out of 10 startups fail sometimes mysteriously and often unnoticed! The remaining startup succeeds because of its innovation and creativity in their process. Zoho is one such firm which got successful starting from a small apartment located in the Chennai suburbs. 

Over the past two decades, Zoho has emerged as a leader in web-based business tools providing a single cloud platform with all important applications to run a business entirely from the cloud. At present Zoho has 4000 employees and its headquarter is in California. It has offices in Singapore, Japan, China and India.

About the founder and CEO 

Sridhar Vembu co-founded ZOHO in 1995 with Tony Thomas. He began his early education in a Tamil medium government-aided school in Chennai till 10th and then did his under-graduation from IIT Madras. Later he did Electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1989 as well. He joined Qualcomm in San Diego after finishing his Ph. D IN 1994.  During this stint of roughly 2 years, being an Electrical Engineer, he used to work on wireless communication including aspects like CDMA, power control and some very detailed issues on wireless communications.

How ZOHO was formed

During his days in the Princeton University, he was keen on Political Science and Economics, which led to his reading of several books to study the market of Japan, Singapore and Taiwan and how they managed to flourish so well. He understood that the main problem of India was socialism and he wanted to eradicate that. So when two years later his brother brought up the thought, he decided to join his brother left his job and came back to his home country to solve the nation’s problem using the technology. They partnered with Tony Thomas who had some network management software and was a veteran in the area. Together in 1996, they formed Vembu software from a small apartment in Chennai which later went on to become Zoho.

Initial Stages of Zoho

The business of Zoho from started from day one with no external investment except for some investment from family and friends. Sridhar’s wife managed the house while he was taking care of the venture. Tony had taken a buyout from his job which was Lucent Technologies, the company that he was working for, gave a lot of money for people to leave.  Initially Tony was the CEO and chairman of the company and Sridhar worked on marketing and promoting the technology company was selling ad began approaching the customers in the Bay area. They did so because a lot of networking companies were getting started in the bay area and in no time they started getting clients. Their first client was Cisco. Slowly their software started selling well. They sold their software to companies in Silicon Valley and also expanded their market in Japan. They had expanded to 115 engineers and 7 people in the US with the business of around 10 million dollars by 2000.

Zoho Brands

Some of the products that Zoho offers is .com, ManageEngine, WebNMS who collectively offer Saas products to companies across the world .com offers with everything you need to boost your business. Some of its products include CRM, Sales IQ, campaigns, Mail, chat etc. Manage engine offers simplified IT management services with inexpensive software that is user-friendly. WebNMS is the Service Provider Software division of Zoho Corporation that specializes in solutions for multi-vendor network management, service orchestration and Internet of Things enterprise applications. Zoho has gained global recognition with its products competing with the likes of Salesforce.com, Microsoft or Google’s cloud and they have managed to do all this by sitting in India that too without even taking any external funding.