Starting off as a business software for small businesses, SaaS firm Zoho is now keen to strengthen its share in large enterprises segment. As the new CEO of Zoho.com, Mani Vembu is charting out a “platform-led” strategy to grow market share in the upmarket space and eyeing global expansion across Middle East, LATAM, Asia Pacific and more.
With large enterprises, we are adopting a ‘land and expand’ strategy; we will get them to use domain-specific platforms such as finance, customer experience, and others, and create value to get them to adopt other domains, he tells businessline in this exclusive chat
As you go from COO to CEO, what is going to be your key focus at Zoho now?
Zoho has around 900,000 unique customers which is one of the largest in the industry. We already have a very good presence in SMBs. My focus is going to be on winning over large enterprises across regions. This is something we have achieved in India and we will now try to replicate it globally. For large enterprises, we are looking to land with one domain-specific platform and as they see more use cases getting automated in Zoho, they adopt more domains. We have a pretty good success rate with this strategy.
How far is Zoho from launching and seeing results of Agentic AI?
At present in Zoho, we are building out and seeing some proof of concepts. At an overall industry level, we have to identify valid use cases where Agents can help automate. It looks promising but the pace of adoption will depend on accuracy. We will start doing this with existing customers by developing agents within our product offerings.
How is the business model of SaaS going to change with Agentic AI?
As the first step, we want to offer AI capabilities to all customers without charging separately for it. AI is not a way for us to increase cost for customers but an integral part of our offerings. At least in the short to medium term, we are not looking at adding cost to the AI. In the long term, it could evolve into various models. Usage-based pricing could be on. But one thing is that we should not need consultants to come and decide this for us.
Is SaaS still in slowdown?
I won’t say it (slowdown) is over; it is there overall in the market. It may continue for some more time before we bounce back. We are seeing growth and are keenly watching the developing AI trends and changing ourselves to align with the market.
What is your hiring strategy in the age of AI?
We believe in empowering talent and identifying new leaders. We don’t have any major hiring plans right now. It is more need-based and in areas of R&D. We are focusing on increasing productivity of existing workforce with AI.
Your strategies when it comes to R&D spends
We already invest quite heavily on R&D and that will continue. We have no plans to reduce it. As a private company, we don’t have to measure our growth quarterly and report to Wall Street so we have the freedom.
Build or Buy in the age of AI: what will be your choice of growth?
If you look at buying, it typically happens to either bridge a technology gap or to do some financial engineering to show growth for quarterly pressures. We neither have technology gaps nor the pressure to show growth to our investors or to the Wall Street. In that sense, we will continue to be heavy on building than buying.
In what ways will you be different/similar from Sridhar Vembu as a CEO?
Sridhar and I believe in the same philosophy; we want the organisation to continue to be distributed and undertake more experimentation. We both don’t monitor everything, and don’t insist on measuring and reporting every metric. However, in terms of differences, my focus is going to be more on large/upmarket customers and regional expansion.
The author was in Bengaluru at the invitation of Zoho.com