Log has written
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 26, 2009

Sridhar: Well its, to be fair to my wife she is the one. We have a similar thoughtism and it’s really my wife who has actually put an enormous amount of time and effort to actually getting better and it is getting better but we still have a long way to go so I have to give her credit while its due. But what that has changed for us is that I even more saw like collecting a hundred million dollars today does not motivate me, it will not change what everyday I do, it will not change anything, what we do for our son, nothing will change. So it kind of takes out of your mental moral but I have always been liked even before some turned out to me in this way it is not something that I come from a middle class background and I am happy the way I am so I don’t need to imitate somebody its not that I need to have a private jet just because somebody else has a private jet. So I just look for myself and in a way I am selfish I won’t care what other people do. So that keeps you happy.

Kamla: Not everybody that has used your product is happy, there are quite a few people out there who have said that Zoho is a product that we are not going to use, it does not match with what we have. What are you doing differently to address that market?

Sridhar: Like any company this is going to happen, any product, even the most successful product there are going to be people who are not happy. So that is why you have a market place that is why you have a competition. You have different product visions like Google has a separate product vision, Salesforce has a different product vision, and we have a different product vision. We are going to have fans we are going to have people with all ___. On the whole we should have at least enough and sufficient number of fans to be a viable business which I think we are doing and persuade some of the one’s in the other camp to the extent possible.

Kamla: What is your product vision and what is that number that you talked about that will make you happy since you are a numbers guy?

Sridhar: Our product vision is really addressing the small and medium business and we solved the IT problem for others. It’s very ambitious. Today SMB is not well served. They have to do too many things that are too tedious in terms of IT to get their basic business processes, business systems running, productivity software, CRM, e-mail, all of that it is just today the state of the art is really not friendly to the SMB. So that is you want to be the IT department officer, really the IT department is often very under staffed, they don’t have resources to do and that is our vision. But that does not mean, we do get large enterprises approaching us but our focus is on serving the SMB’s, first and foremost, that is our real focus in the company. In terms of numbers what is a good market share, may be 25-30-40% market share is really good market share in this market. It is going to be fragmented market. This is why I reject these notions that somehow one company, whether its Microsoft or Google is going to be at the top which is not going to happen. I believe it will be a fragmented market and there is going to be room for a lot of players and we want to take our fair share.

Kamla: You mentioned something very interesting. You said you are focusing on the small and medium size businesses and yet some of the fights that you are fighting are in the enterprise space. How much of market share do you want from the enterprise space because there is a fair amount of money that you can make and GE, I don’t know if we can talk or not is currently evaluating your product and if you get GE that will be cool because it is probably the first time a major fortune 500 company is buying a product from a small company. So you are in this space that Microsoft was probably 30 years ago.

1 2 3  4 5 
Tags - Find More Articles On:
READ MORE ARTICLES BY:
 
Anonymous Said:


I like the directness and total honesty of yours Sridhar. That is remarkable. Hats off to that - I am sick and tired of listening to the political, diplomatic and ignorant comments of CEOs in Indian IT (well mostly IT services!), like: Krish G of Infy says - in Dec 2007 - Downturn will not have any impact. Now after 1 year it will be 15% growth! S. Ramadorai of TCS says - We are not bothered about our some financial clients being lost. Now says we are living in unpredictable times! NASSCOM Chief now - S. Mittal - Shall I say something?? The list is distinguished and endless. What hurts me most is that they are playing with many young professionals who come to IT for the lure of money. What is wrong in saying - I do not know actually. How hard is to say that??? Personally I am not surprised as I know the many PM/GM/TM/DM etc in their companies have not written a single piece of code in their entire career. But why these guys keep on ducking the truth??? On the other hand I do not agree with your data and application rebel theory. Application will always be there to control data. If you talking of data neutrality, I am really sorry. This is a long haul. We all know how they are collaborating in language front (IDL came and went, ...then XML is new fashion now) or in market front say OSS/BSS interoperability. Loooooooong battle, no victory or loss in sight yet. Btw, (not important at all) but I guess the number of IITians is perhaps more. You, Tony, Shailesh and Sekar are from IIT (=4). But it is totally meaningless as I have seen in software. IIT/IIM etc do not matter and I respect your candor on that. May be high time GOOG, MSFT, YHOO learn something from here. So also IIT/IIM guys - recently I was talking to one and I was suffocated with the arrongance within minutes.

Posted On 12/18/2008 5:41:15 AM
Vivek Said:


Your interviews are great and I especailly enjoyed your conversation with Sridhar Pembu- here is an original thinker who is very clear in his goals and direct in approach and retains the ability to "reboot" and "reload" as necessary. However, you really need to have these available as podcasts so that they are not owned by the computer and are liberated to be listened to on the move.

Posted On 12/31/2008 4:00:24 AM