Hello everyone,
my name is Sridhar Iyengar and I lead
Zoho's operations in Europe.
2020 has been a very strange and
difficult year for all of us
and in this pain that we share it unites
us in our fight against the pandemic and
I hope that we'll come out strong
from it. I hope that all of you are
keeping safe,
your near ones and dear ones. So the
topic that I wanted to talk to you today
was about our expansion in Europe. So
around two years back we
set out on this journey to expand our
presence worldwide which included
Canada, Latin America, Middle East
and Europe, so with that in mind we
basically had this initiative taken up
by
some of our senior people who've been
with the company for a long time,
they understand the company culture, the
way we build
our products, the philosophy, and
basically the way we do things.
This cultural connectivity was very
important
for us to continue our expansion in
these different geographies.
So, with that in mind we set up an office
in The Netherlands
and have been expanding to other cities
and countries
in Europe. I myself moved to The
Netherlands around two years back as
part of this initiative.
The idea was to be close to our
customers, markets,
partners, so that we understand them, and
we can serve them better.
So while we expanded we wanted to do it
in a, what we call a Zoho way,
that means close keeping certain philosophies
and ideals,
very close to our heart, and the way we
operate things. Let me explain what that
means.
The first core philosophy I'll talk
about is the focus on long-term R&D and
technology,
enabled by a bootstrapped business model.
It was a vision of the founders to build
an adaptable technology company
that was based on sound economic
principles. We are one of the very few
SaaS providers
who own and run our own data centers. In
fact today we have around
10 data centers across the world, and
growing.
We own the entire technology stack, from
the database layer all the way to the
application
and AI layer, and everything in between.
So this kind of end-to-end
understanding of the stack allows us to
build
great integrated products that allows
user to do their work the day-to-day
work in a very seamless and frictionless
way.
The next thing I'll talk about is people
and community.
I think you'll all agree that the main
pillar for any sustainable business
are its people and the community around
it. This goes
right into the way how we've hired
people right from the early days.
We've always hired for the right
attitude, not looking at academic
credentials of the background
and that's because we believe that
learning is always very contextual,
and with the right attitude you can
learn any skill that you want and apply
it on your job.
This was the philosophy behind Zoho
University
that we set up around 15 years back and
is a great example of it.
Next I'll talk about the community
around us.
The longer term vision is to base
ourselves in smaller cities
or towns and rural areas, and the reason
for doing that
is twofold. One is, it avoids the topsoil
erosion of talent
that is basically people leaving these
small towns going to larger cities for
job opportunities, it avoids that. So
we can retain the talent in these
economies and secondly, by doing so,
it sets up a vibrant community in that
region in that rural area and that keeps
the local economy local community
very active and prosperous. So these are
the two reasons
we'd like to base ourselves in these
smaller towns and rural areas.
The last core philosophy I'll talk about
is our stance on privacy,
which is at the heart of our business
model. We've always believed that
customers own their data,
we've never used our products to
monetise customer data, and never plan to
do so.
That's been a promise from us and we've
held true to that for the last 24 years
and we continue to do that.
And the reason why we are so fanatical
about this
is that we wanted to build a business
that you can trust your data with,
and that's very important for us.
So if you put all of the things that I
talked together,
you can see that we have a holistic
vision of what's required to grow in
Europe and the way we want to do it.
A vision that includes employees,
customers,
partners, and the community around us,
and that is what we call as the Zoho way.
Please stay safe and these times we wish
you all the best.