ZOHO in full gear in Cloud Computing Space

It is not every day that a big idea strikes you and a big business initiative starts therewith. But when there is an aspiration to start up something new and there is potential to back up the idea, undoubtedly the fruits of the efforts made to realize that aspiration are going to be sweet. The success of  the IT company, ZOHO has a similar tale to tell.

The seed of the company can be traced in Vembu systems, the company started by the brothers, Kumar and Sekar Vembu. Sekar then involved his IIT(Madras) friend Shailesh Kumar to join the start-up. In the meantime, their brother in the US, Sridhar Vembu, started garnering business but could not achieve much initially. Later, Sridhar along with Shailesh re-established the business which shaped into ZOHO.  Today, ZOHO's clientele includes companies like Cisco, Coca-Cola, Motorola, Deutsche Bank and Nortel.

Shailesh said that they were well conversant with technology. Combining Java and Cloud Computing in 2006, when cloud was not much heard of, along with their strategy of dealing with end-users demands from close quarters, they launched Zoho Office Suite.

ZOHO provides a wide, integrated portfolio of rich online applications for businesses. The Zoho Office Suite is a Web- based online office suite containing Word Processing, Spreadsheet, presentations, databases, note-taking, Wikis, CRM, project management, invoicing and other applications developed by ZOHO Corporation. And in that space, it competes with Microsoft's and Google's offering. Zoho's cloud-based  applications are an example of Software as a Service (SaaS) or Cloud Computing applications, whereby software utilities are hosted on remote servers rather than on personal computers. The user accesses the utilities through a web browser. 

Though ZOHO has big clients names under its belts, its focus is on SMBs, for whom cloud offering is cheaper.