‘We will not be listing; we like our freedom’

California-based Zoho Corporation, a software firm with major operations in Chennai, has recently integrated its offerings under ManageEngine, the comprehensive information technology (IT) management software, and

Zoho.com, an operating system for business. RAJ SABHLOK, president of Zoho Corporation, tells Gireesh Babu about the company’s plans. Edited excerpts:

Z oh oh as recently integrated its Manage Engine and some of the productsinZoho.com.

What was the idea behind it?

With technology increasingly intertwined with the business, in the past couple of years, there are more technologies in the form of applications to run various activities. The question is how do you connect these technologies with the legacy systems where there are a lot of data that need to be integrated. Companies require to secure the technology and are trying to secure it quickly. IT is getting pulled back into the picture to help support these business-technology decisions. That is the basis of ManageEngine getting closely knitted with Zoho or any application.

In Zoho.com, our cloud business applications, we want to offer every application functionality a business would require. We have customer relationship management applications to address the sales team, human resource applications for the HR teams and finance applications. We also cover IT, with help desk, mobile device management, monitoring applications, etc. Those are all ManageEngine applications marketed by Zoho. Conversely, ManageEngine has started selling marketing applications. IT requires specific support for the business they are into. We brought business intelligence and analytics tools into ManageEngine. There’s a very synergistic technology sharing going on.

Do you also see a change in your customer profile?

We’ve a lot of small and medium businesses (SMBs) today. Larger companies are figuring out the value proposition behind both ManageEngine as well as Zoho, and we are having more purchases from larger companies. ManageEngine is probably on an adoption curve by larger companies than Zoho. What we call SMBs are around 200-1,000 employees. But at Zoho, the SMB could be a solopreneur, a freelancer or a 10-person company. Five to 10people organisations are their sweet spot. But in the past years, it has gone up to 25-50 people organisations and today, 80 per cent of its business is from this segment. Larger companies with more than 1,000 people have also started to buy from Zoho. ManageEngine today has 65 per cent of the Fortune 500 companies as its client. Zoho is just making its way to address those large companies in the world. We have made this transition to be equally appealing to larger and smaller firms. For ManageEngine, around 50 per cent would be the SMB of the larger scale, and the rest of the 50 per cent would be of large business.

Zoho has never raised any investor money. Would you list the business in future?

We will not be listing, it is not of our interest. We only want to answer to our customers and our employees. We like our freedom. We have four to five different businesses; such as agriculture, medical software, medical device startups within our company, and if we raise funds, we cannot have that freedom. Those are for profit, commercial concerns, with its own management team and support organisation, but part of Zoho.