Interview With Raju Vegesna: Zoho From A to Z

By John Conroy Jan 25, 2008

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They know their onions at the Crunchies, alright. From 2007's plentiful harvest of genuinely inspiring startups, Zoho was picked as the 'Best Enterprise Startup' of the year. If you're already a user, this is not likely to surprise you at all.

We at CMSWire had the chance to speak with Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna and he gave us the full organizational down-low: vision, growth, customers, future, past and present. And, of course, Google.

Our conversation was long and wide-ranging; a verbatim transcript would take you, dear reader, all morning to read. So it's been distilled so that you can get a feel for Zoho from top to bottom without having to take a half-day.

Zoho Fundamentals

Zoho is a branch of parent corporation Adventnet. Adventnet, around since 1996, is a private company with over 700 engineers and has been profitable from year one. Adventnet has never raised any venture capital and is self-funded, primarily through product sales.

Adventnet has several business units, and Zoho is one such.

Zoho focuses on online applications, primarily online productivity applications. The first application, Zoho Writer, was released in September 2005, a period when online applications were moving towards the business space. Prior to this, says Raju, online applications had mostly focused on the consumer space (i.e.Del.icio.us and Flickr). The team gradually added more applications, making a complete suite.

The Zoho focus then, as indeed it is now, is summed up by Raju: “We want to be the IT department for Small and Medium businesses which really cannot afford to have an IT person on board.” Offering these applications as online services to businesses provides benefits such as lower implementation and maintenance costs.

Customer Profiles

Initially the Zoho team thought that very small businesses were going to comprise their core customer base. This is why the project was called Zoho - the name originally came from Small Office/Home Office. But such are the wonderful vagaries of business, things didn't pan out quite as expected.

As time wore on it became clear that numerous individual users were signing up to use Zoho services, and the individual consumer quickly became the primary market.

Then another unexpected and welcome trend: as well as soccer moms and Prius-driving Dads, it turned out that their children, teens and young adults, absolutely loved the Zoho suite. “Students live online.” explains Raju. “All their work is online, and Zoho is the perfect match for the way they work.”

Sure enough, teachers began picking up the habit from their charges. All of a sudden Zoho had a strong foothold in schools, colleges and Universities from Albequerque to Milan. Raju estimates that no fewer than 30% of current Zoho users are students of one kind or another.

This was all very encouraging. What made things even better was the next customer trend to emerge: departments in larger organizations began to adopt Zoho apps. But why? Why would organizations with IT departments and big budgets be logging on to the Zoho suite, which is designed for small ventures and for convenience and simplicity?

The answer is simplicity. “It's easier to set up, say, a project management system online than to arrange things internally with an IT department, source the project management software for that division and maybe arrange things internationally. Why do all that when you can sign up with an online service and get started right away, taking advantage of other inherent benefits, like being able to access the system from anywhere etc.”

The upshot of all this has been yet another surprise: some Battleship-class enterprises employing thousands of people have noticed this latter trend themselves. They now wish to deploy Zoho behind the firewall (mainly for collaborative projects), taking the original product concept about as far away from its SO/HO roots as is imaginable.