Zoho hits $1 billion revenue milestone to becomes first billion dollar company in India

Vembu, speaking on the sidelines of Zoholics India, the company's annual user conference, urged programmers to be more humble.

At a time when enterprises, both start-ups and huge software behemoths, are struggling financially, Chennai-based Software as a Service (SaaS) provider Zoho has achieved a significant milestone in the company's history: reaching $1 billion in yearly sales.

"We have also reached a significant milestone of $1 billion in yearly sales," said Sridhar Vembu, CEO and co-founder of Zoho Corp. "While growth has slowed quite a bit in 2022 over 2021, our varied product line and the fact that we save money for clients has helped us thus far."

Annual revenue from India, the company's largest market, is expected to increase by 77% in 2021. In India, the top five offerings are Zoho One, a business operating system; CRM Plus, a customer experience platform; EX, which includes Zoho People, its human resource management platform, and Zoho Workplace, an enterprise collaboration platform; and the finance suite, which includes Zoho Books, an online accounting software.

Zoho was founded in 1996 and is privately held and profitable, with over 11,000 workers with offices in India, the United States, Japan, China, Singapore, Mexico, Australia, the Netherlands, and the United Arab Emirates.

Vembu, who received India's fourth-highest civilian prize, the Padma Shri, last year, works out of Tenkasi, a town in southern Tamil Nadu where the firm launched its first rural office in 2011.

Vembu, speaking on the sidelines of Zoholics India, the company's annual user conference, urged programmers to be more humble. "After all, we can't code more food or generate more energy," he added. "Unfortunately, recent events in our business against the background of a rapidly deteriorating global economic picture are a sobering reminder of our own constraints as engineers."

In order to give consumers with a quicker network, the business announced intentions to open 100 network PoPs (points of presence) throughout the world over the next five years. Zoho, which spends three times its marketing budget on R&D, announced plans to quadruple its investment in blockchain and artificial intelligence technology.

Zoho owns and operates its own data centres. It presently has 12 such centres across the world, two of them are in India. It has 14 network points of presence (PoPs) that operate its proprietary software. Zoho also includes over 150 monitoring stations where users may check the status of their websites.

"In the future years, our R&D goal will be to further integrate our technological stack so that we can enhance the user experience." We will install 100 additional PoPs throughout the world over the next five years to boost network access. "We're also working on adding support for Indian languages for our AI and blockchain technologies for worldwide certification," Vembu stated.