Phil Anderson interviews Ian Wenig

Phil Anderson of Business News Americas recently interviewed Ian Wenig, our Senior Director of Business Development about Zoho's business model, our foray into the Latin American market etc. Excerpts from the interview,

BNamericas: Several Latin American governments are actively supporting open source and free software. Are governments the core of your game plan in the region then?

Wenig: Our understanding is that in South America most of the users will be in organizations of 500 people or more - that's where most IT spending is. So we're not specifically targeting governments... it doesn't really depend on the size of the organization, it depends more on the hearts and minds of the individuals - some people really get it [web-based, working online etc] and some larger organizations really don't get it.

The few partners we have are evangelizing it. Our partner in Colombia has deep connections with telcos, and one of the telcos did a small survey which showed that CRM was of interest, but not so much the office applications (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool) - but we don't know how big of a pool of respondents they had.

My feeling is that the top five countries in Latin America - Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile and Argentina - will probably prove more important than Europe without including the UK during 2008-09. There are a variety of factors why non-UK Europe is more conservative - a combination of people's comfort, philosophy and orientation. People are more worried about privacy and their data. There are also a lot of regulations, such as requirements that applications must be hosted in datacenters that are physically in Europe.

BNamericas: You're also up against Google's range of online applications, and maybe you even missed the boat with respect to possibly being bought out by Google?

Wenig: No, we're capitalizing on "the larger boat" that Google is helping to build. Google gives credibility to the whole [web-based services] industry on one level. More and more people are using it as a result.

But if you compare Zoho with Google's office suite and see the depth of our apps, that's where [the similarity] ends. Anyone will tell you that we are about 30% more advanced in terms of the features, if you look at Google's Office Suite. For instance in our spreadsheet application we recently launched macros and pivot tables. The 30% difference also goes for Zoho Business compared to Google's equivalent, Google Docs. And there are several other business applications that Google doesn't even have - like project management, CRM or our Creator database application.

So people view Google as being more orientated to the consumer side and they see Zoho more for business. But we can take advantage of Google's marketing reach and ride with it. In fact as of last month Google and Yahoo users are able to sign into Zoho instantly, using their Google or Yahoo password. So we're also penetrating into the consumer space.

We actually have a very good relationship with Google - Zoho Writer is one of the applications chosen by Google to use its Google Gears system for offline support [so Zoho users can use the application offline]. We view them as a good ecosystem partner.

Thanks to Phil & BNAmericas.com!