Sridhar Vembu, a native of Tamil Nadu, who wandered through the hinterlands of India in search of the country’s soul, is writing a new chapter in the entrepreneurship saga through the rural people.
The founder and CEO of Chennai-based Zoho Corporation, he was the only technocrat to receive this year’s Padma awards. Zoho, a strong player in the Office productivity tools sector, is competing with global giants Salesforce and Microsoft. The Padma Shri award is a recognition of his hard work towards developing a true Indian brand in this highly competitive sector, over the past two and a half decades.
After working in the United States for a while, Vembu and his two brothers started their software company ‘AdventNet’ in 1996. The family business was renamed Zoho in 2009 and focused on the growing SaaS or Software as a Service business.
In 2017, all services were merged into a broader platform called ZohoOne. At Zoho’s Chennai headquarters, Vembu created a development team of 3,000 people. School and college students from Tamil Nadu were recruited after being trained at the Zoho University.
Vembu, who realised that talent is not limited to metro cities, started a development centre in the village of Silaraipuravu on the outskirts of Tenkasi in Tamil Nadu and employed 150 young people. They quickly acquired skills and took the reigns of building the Next Big Thing software suite for running the customer help desk ZohoDesk. Vembu could give due recognition to the talents from the backward areas as well. In Tenkasi, he will be seen dressed in shirt and mundu, riding a bicycle.
Following the success of the Tenkashi initiative, Vembu started a second village centre in Renigunta, Andhra Pradesh. All these ‘rural centres’ were Zoho’s backbone during the Locktown. They made a huge profit for Zoho.
Vembu is reluctant to enter India’s IT cities of Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Gurugram. “Zoho has a responsibility; it has a responsibility to develop small centres,” he says.
He adds that “If you are talented and tired of the rat race in your workplace, shifting to a quaint rural environment will provide you with the much-needed relief. Then you will forget about the elements such as clothing, shoes, phones and cars that currently define one’s dignity. What freedom it is !”
Vembu is now hoping that ‘Arattai’, Zoho’s messaging app, will be made available soon.
