Player Profile: Zoho

Posted March 17th @ 9:12 am by Darren

This is another entry to our ongoing series of SaaS company profiles. To view more profiles click on The Players.

Zoho is an online productivity suite owned by AdventNet in India. Founded in 1996, AdventNet built a solid business selling network management tools to the telecomm industry. In 2003, the dot com bust left many engineers idle so AdventNet decided to redirect their efforts. And Zoho was born.

Zoho started as a small project with the goal of creating an online Office Suite. Today, Zoho’s portfolio of On-Demand applications is perhaps the most comprehensive on the web. Besides the standard office 3-pack (word processor, spreadsheets, presentation), Zoho also provides a hosted solution for CRM, Project Management, Wiki, Web Conferencing, HR and Application Creation.

What makes Zoho even more impressive is that they ship products incredibly fast. In the last 5 years they have shipped 16 products whereas other SaaS vendors concentrate on only one application. Zoho is a bootstrapped company and is not funded by venture capitalist or angels. Zoho’s model is to be a fast follower and to be competitive on price. They plan on riding the marketing efforts of larger companies like Salesforce.com (who has brought CRM awareness to many small and mid-market customers). With these savings, they can afford to undercut the price compared to the larger companies. It will still take a couple of years before we’ll know if this model is profitable however, some have already called CEO Sridhar Vembu the Smartest Unknown Indian Entrepreneur.

Here is a complete list of all Zoho products.