Dr. Sridhar Vembu to do the keynote at the third edition of the NASSCOM EMERGEOUT 2009
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Sridhar Vembu
The NASSCOM EMERGEOUT event to be held in Delhi later this month has plenty of good speakers. One of the sessions I am most looking forward to is Sridhar Vembu’s keynote. Vembu’s company, AdventNet, offers the popular SaaS based office productivity suite under the brand ZoHo. The company has taken the battle to much larger players such as Google Apps and Salesforce – an unusually belligerent and utterly confident position for an Indian upstart to take.
What will help ZoHo succeed? Well, take the price arbitrage model and apply it, not to the services business, but instead to a product-based business model delivered through SaaS – and you have a real differentiator. That’s the logic that Sridhar Vembu countered us with when we asked him about his company’s differentiator in a market that has plenty of players with SaaS offerings for the SoHo segment. (the interview was done for the EMERGE Newsletter June 2008 issue)
To quote his exact words, “….an integrated product suite and bundled pricing… the individual user always gets it free. There is a small marketing cost. Otherwise we have committed that we will not charge for the consumer experience. For the CRM package and the Java projects, there is a price-tag after the first three users. For the Java application we charge after first ten users. It is very reasonably priced”.
Pricing without compromise on features in a clear market disruptor as far as ZoHo is concerned. A professional user licence for the ZoHo CRM will cost $12/month against $65/month from sales force – the features at first glace (without trial) seem similar. Even if there were frills on Salesforce, someone looking for a starter CRM may find ZoHo more attractive.
The other disruptive thing about Vembu and his company is the way the team has been out together. The company has around 600 people in Chennai and only a handful in California – a formula that delivers amazingly well as far as bottom-line is concerned. What’s even more interesting is the kind of people hired to work on the Zoho suite. Hiring only from blur chip engineering colleges is not the formula at Vembu’s company. The team at the company’s development centre in Chennai increasingly includes young people on a work-study programme straight out of Class 12.
What Zoho has done is to take the low cost manufacturing model and replicate it in an IT context. And the reason its been able to do that is because the products – office productivity modules like spreadsheets, CRM etc – have really become standardized. In that sense, ZoHo is really at the fore front of what could happen in mass user software.
In all, I believe that it is going to be a great opportunity to hear the founder of this game changing company at EMERGEOUT.
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