When Zoho decided to open a new office in Tenkasi, CEO Sridhar Vembu had big plans on mind

When CEO Sridhar Vembu decided to open Zoho’s new facility in Mathalamparai in Tenkasi, a picturesque village 650 Kms south off Chennai (India), nearly five years ago, many people frowned. They wondered how Zoho, a billion dollar-plus CRM company that have long been acclimatised to the modern infrastructure in metro cities in the US, Japan, etc, would function in a rural area that doesn’t have an ATM, bank or even street lights in the vicinity.

However, Vembu did not have a second thought. Vembu, who hails from a village in Thanjavur, had some big plans on his mind: he wanted to nurture local talent in Tenkasi and equip them to take up big challenges in life.

 

Through its initiative Zoho University, the firm nurtured engineering talent in nearby villages and hired them. Currently, Zoho has around 150 people working from this rural facility.

It was not a mean task to build a team in Tenkasi. But his bet did not go in vain. To his astonishment, the team built Zoho’s latest product Zoho Desk. The product is currently used by thousands of large enterprises across the world including automotive majors Daimler (Germany) and Mahindra (India).

 

“There is a notion among people that only Silicon Valley companies can come up with world-class product. We have proved them wrong,” he told at a media event in Tenkasi last week. “We moved to Tenkasi at a time when companies were looking to move to metro cities from tier 2 and tier 3 cities.”

Zoho is now expanding the Tenkasi facility. The firm has already started working on a bigger office, just a few meters away from the current facility. Through this, Zoho plans to employ more people from nearby villages.

 

Started in 1996, Zoho is one of the leading CRM companies in the world. It is probably the only tech company in India that has conquered the enterprise tech industry without raising a single penny in external investment. Zoho claims that more than 20 millions users across hundreds of thousands of companies use it products.

Zoho is headquartered in California with offices in Chennai, Austin, London, Yokohama, Beijing and Singapore.

Image Credit: Zoho

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