Zoho's students can teach Microsoft a lesson or two

CHENNAI: When 17-year-old Saran Babu was looking to help his father cope with rising family expenses, a call centre job or a part-time sales assignment was the most he could look forward to in his hometown Chennai. 


That was until April 2005 when Zoho founder Sridhar Vembu decided to challenge software giants Google and Microsoft with products designed and supported by undergraduates hired from neighbourhood schools in Tamil Nadu. 


Five years on, Babu is busy helping a team of engineers at Zoho design applications — from word processing and worksheet to making presentations — that rival similar solutions from Microsoft, Google and Salesforce.com and are subscribed by over 3.5 million users worldwide, nearly half of whom are based in the US. 


Babu's father was about to retire from a local label printing unit and the family needed to ensure an alternate income stream. "I was planning to take up a part time job, but Zoho changed it all," says Babu. He was among the first batch of six students at Chennai's Guindy Corporation School to be picked up by Zoho to undergo an eighteen-month training programme. Later, all of them were hired by the company, with Babu now playing an important role in Zoho's online database creation tool. 


When Zoho visited Babu's institute, around 50 students applied, some 30 were shortlisted and finally only six joined. The attraction was the Rs 3,000-4,000 monthly stipend that Zoho promised to pay, apart from potentially getting absorbed in the company. However, "not all were ready to take that leap of faith, and looking back, I am glad I trusted Zoho," says Babu. 


For Vembu and his team hand-picking students like Babu, to go through a programme at the Zoho University, means more than just doing philanthropy. Started in April 2005, with a batch of six students, the Zoho University programme has already placed hundred students in the company with another 30 of them set to join over the next few months. "You really do not need to be an IIT or an MIT graduate to develop world-class products," says Vembu, an IIT Madras graduate who did his PhD at Princeton University in 1994. 


Babu is among 120 pre-University students who form 10% of 1,200 professionals Zoho employs. Over the next three to five years, the company wants to have 30-40% of its staff picked up from second and third-rung colleges in non-metro cities. 


Having seen the benefits of 'dropping out' from school, Babu also got his brother Parthivan to join the Zoho program three years ago. "He (Parthivan) is 20 and is already managing a team," says Babu who now earns nearly Rs 40,000 a month. 


In an industry scrambling to hire and retain restless engineers from top engineering and business schools, Zoho offers lessons to other entrepreneurs in terms of looking beyond traditional hiring, apart from demonstrating that India can produce software product for users across the globe. 


For over a decade now, India's low-cost software exports industry has been waiting to have a home-grown, software product to compete with larger rivals at the global stage, and in some ways aimed at a mass user base. It remained a holy grail for what's now over $50 billion industry, until a little-known firm called Zoho arrived on the scene and challenged Microsoft and Google—two of the biggest software companies around. 


"One of our problems here is that we take things too seriously, including building a world-class product from India. We need to have fun while we are at it," he says.


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