Pankaj Mishra in 'The Economic Times' wrote about Zoho University, our in-house initiative that recruits students who've finished higher secondary school, and trains them to become software engineers. From the article,
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 employees like [Saran] Babu, an open work atmosphere without any investor or stock market pressure means freedom to think bold and execute the ideas. “Zoho taught us how to learn on our own,” he says. Indeed, when Babu joined, he was taught popular programming language called C++, and now, he is busy teaching new recruits and other members of his team how to write applications using Java language. With revenues of nearly $100 million, Zoho has also been able to keep chasing venture capitalists at bay.“We go back to 1996 when nobody was interested in products. Venture Capitalists cannot have a 15-20 year vision. We have managed well, and have a strong balance sheet,” says [Sridhar] Vembu.
Zoho is currently adding 1,00,000 users every month, and the company expects to add users at double the pace over next few months. Most of this growth is coming from smaller firms in the US and other markets who are trying to avoid similar pricey solutions from established software giants. Zoho’s office suite, which includes word processing costs around $50 a year.
Thanks to Pankaj & 'The Economic Times'.
Great article that recognises a unique way of doing things. To suceed one need not do different things, instead one needs to do things differently !
Great article that recognises a unique way of doing things. To suceed one need not do different things, instead one needs to do things differently !